Teaching
UPDATES ARE COMING!
From the beginning I should say that I love teaching! One of the main reasons I like to stay in academia and be a professor is to be able to teach! I have one principle for teaching: Try your best to keep the students happy and involved in the class while doing your best that students would finish the term being proud that they have learnt a lot and want to use that knowledge someday in future!
Maybe my passion for teaching comes from my experience of having two specifically amazing teachers in the middle school, one in Biology class (Mr. Naghshineh) and the other one in English class (Mr. Tamaddon). Their passion and their knowledge in the subject they were teaching was extraordinary. I learnt so much from them and I am still in touch with them sometimes, even though it is passed almost 16 years. I will always admire them.
I started teaching and tutoring since I was in middle school. I started with tutoring for English course and later for Physics course. Because of my interest in Physics, I was reading most of the course materials for high school even though I was in the middle school. That is why I tutored some high schoolers as well while I was in the middle school.
Later on when I was a Junior and Senior in college, I started teaching Applied Electronics and Digital Circuits in Students’ Research and Entrepreneurship centers in Shiraz University and Shiraz Payam Noor University. They were very hands on courses in which students should learn the basics of electronics and circuits and later on actually implement them. While people who are familiar with Electrical Engineering know such a course can be very difficult to do, especially for all the problems that happens while programming AVR and ARM, I was very happy to see students are happy about their experiences. Actually, I am very proud of couple of students in the class who later on became the lecturer for the same course after a few years.
During the years of my undergraduate and graduate studies I have had the honor of working side by side of many professors as teaching assistant (listed below) and I have learned a lot from them about teaching skills. Most importantly, I have had the pleasure and honor of working side by side of students with different nationalities, beliefs, gender, and sexual orientations as their teaching assistant. It was an honor for me to be their teaching assistant because they have taught me the most important skill in human life and that is how a diverse group of people can respect each other, be kind to each other, support each other, collaborate with each other to reach the group’s goal.
List of the courses I TA’ed for:
- Principles of Human Brain Mapping with fMRI, Dartmouth College, Lecturer: Prof. Wager, Winter 2020
- Laboratory in Psychological Science, Dartmouth College, Lecturer: Prof. Brown, Fall 2019
- Statistics, Dartmouth College, Lecturer: Prof. Soltani, Spring 2019
- Laboratory in Psychological Science, Dartmouth College, Lecturer: Prof. Gobbini, Fall 2018
- Power Systems Analysis and Electrical Machines, University of Notre Dame, Lecturer: Prof. Lemmon, Spring 2016
- Signal and Systems, University of Notre Dame, Lecturer: Prof. Hochwald, Fall 2015
- Operations Research, Shiraz University, Lecturer: Prof. Dehghani, Fall 2013
- Digital control systems, Shiraz University, Lecturer: Prof. KarimAghaei Fall 2013
It was only recently that I thought I should have more formal evaluation (and not necessarily verbal) to know how I am doing in teaching and how I can improve! So, since some universities do not provide an evaluation for all teaching assistants based on students’ opinions, I started to do it myself in an anonymous way. Many graduate students (including myself) may feel overwhelmed when they are both TA for a course and doing research at the same time. However, in the past two courses that I started asking for students’ evaluation, I feel I am the happiest teacher by seeing the comments from them. You can also see these evaluations below.
Evaluation 2020
Evaluation 2019
This card from students means a lot to me!
