Teaching Activities
Teaching experience
- Guest lecturer for "The Universe" (AST203)
Princeton University
- Mini-course on Gravitational lensing
(10 hours of lectures and 10 hours of hands-on exercises)
University of Antioquia, Colombia
My teaching principle
Most of the science courses today present the currently prevailing scientific theories as facts and focus on the mathematical framework to work out the implications. The introduction to a new subject/topic is mainly about throwing some light at the prerequisites. For e.g., in a general relativity course, discussing the metric and curved spaces in general becomes the introduction before discussing Einstein equation(s) and some interesting solutions. The history of the development is hardly paid attention to.
One of the key goals of teaching science should be to impart scientific thinking. If a student is never going to take a science course again in his/her life, then the take away from the course must be not the details but the generic principles and its justifications. I believe it is best done by emphasizing on how the theories we have today came about. It is important to highlight how even a systematic approach to a problem can lead to erroneous conclusions, affected by confirmational bias. Thus, while introducing a new theory, I always focus on other simpler, alternative theories that were adopted before the current successful theory and why the scientific community has disregarded the earlier approaches.