Describe your teaching experience.

How do
you feel about teaching? What is your
teaching philosophy?

Teaching is a noble profession. One does not go into teaching for the money but rather for the twinkle in
the eyes of a student when they have understood a concept you taught them or figured out for
themselves how to solve a problem based on your guidance. Teachers are facilitators making things
happen in the class room and outside. The greatest compliment is when a student (whom you may have
taught long ago) approaches you on the bus or in the market place and tells us something like, "You
really helped me learn..."

You ask the following: "Describe your teaching experience. How do you feel about teaching? What is
your teaching philosophy?
Let me start by saying that I believe that teaching is the noblest professor all over the world. Suffice it to
say that only education can save societies and individuals from possible collapse, be it violent or gradual.
Of course, education is costly, but it is far less costly than its alternative, ignorance.
I have been a university professor of developmenal psychology (my area of speacialization) for several
decades and taught at the undergraduate and graduate level
While teaching, I feel good and happy when my students feel also good and happy because they learnt
the key points of my lectures. When my students are not truly satisfied with the content of my teaching,
I tell them that on the next classroom, I will explain to them what I have missed in the current lecture. I
am not afraid of telling my students that there could be some occasions where I don't know. Indeed,
there is always an unknown to be known, and the more we know the more ignorant we are, which they
generally accept.
While teaching, I am more a mentor and organizer of learning experiences and situations, such that my
students actively understand, reinvent and reconstrcut everything they learn, than a simple transmitter
of ready made and established truths imposed on them from outside. In other words, I avoid
indoctrination and brainwashing. This means that I make use of the active methods, not the traditional
or conservative ones, and appeal to due technology when it is appropriate.
While teaching, I tend to be an authoritative, not an authoritarian nor permissive professor.
Authoritative figures are demanding in intellectual terms, but warm in terms of social interaction;
authoritarian figures are demanding in cognitive terms, but cold in terms of social interaction; and
permissive figures are guided, say, by the slogan "laissez faire, laissez passer, laissez aller" (Let it go).
There is accumulated evidence that shows that generally students feel happy with authoritative
teachers/professors, and unhappy with both authoritarian and permissive professors and teachers.
As for my teaching philosophy, I follow to main ideas. First, to teach students such that they become
capable of dispensing with me qua professor in a more or less near future. Second, to teach students
such that they become able to raise what I call "irrititating" questions and doubts. Irritating questions
are those whose answer advances knowledge and leads us to a better knowledge of the unknown. Of
course, irritating questions are also irritating for the satus quo and the mainstream. In other words,
irritating questions, so to peaak, irritate the status quo and the mainstream because such question
challenge what is established and look for a better knowdedge of the unknown (see, for example, the
irritation of Catholic Church because of Newton's challenge of the geocentric theory). As I see it, all great
scientists, minds, and thinkers were able to raise irritating questions and challenge the status quo.
I teach and also perform conceptual and empirical research. If we do not perform research we hardly
have something new to teach. This is mainly applicable at the graduate level.

As once a friend said" Teaching is the process of attending to people’s needs, experiences and feelings,
and intervening so that they learn particular things, and go beyond the given ".