My teaching philosophy can be embodied in three quotations: "The mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled" (Plutarch); "You cannot teach a man anything; you can only help him to find it within himself" (Galileo); and "Education is what survives when what you have learned is forgotten" (B.F. Skinner). My teaching also reflects my upbringing and interests. I am an experimental physicist, engineer, and physiologist. I love to build and play with gadgets, help people learn to build things, and figure out and explain how things work − vocations I trace to my childhood. My father, an industrial research chemist and master equally of all trades and the Socratic method, started building a 16-inch telescope when I was five. During my 15-year apprenticeship to this and other projects, I learned the how and wherefore of everything from mirror grinding to plumbing. (Our telescope and observatory were featured in Scientific American in April, 1970). My mother, a college mathematics professor, shared with me her love for teaching. When I was in third grade, I explained to one of her classes a binary adding machine I had assembled. In high school I explained things the teachers didn't understand to my algebra and physics classmates. As an undergraduate at the University of Virginia, I had another remarkable mentor in Professor Bascom Deaver, who hired me as a technician to equip his new low temperature physics laboratory, guided me as I taught myself experimental physics, and encouraged me to work with his mentor at Stanford, William Fairbank. My belief in learning by doing and by teaching was deepened when my wife and I taught our children at home for a few years. I observed not only the various ways that humanists and scientists approach the world, but also how different people think and learn. Watching our children explain things to each other and their friends convinced me that students learn by explaining. I can even cite professional pedagogical influences, such as Richard Light's The Harvard Assessment Seminars (which I require my students to read) and Sheila Tobias' They're not Dumb, They're Different.

Teaching at Vanderbilt is marvelously rewarding. My undergraduate repertoire includes Advanced Laboratory in Mechanics and Heat, Medical Physics, Electricity and Magnetic Fields, General Physics, Bioelectricty, Elementary Physics, Biophysical Electrodynamics, Principles of Physics, Practical Physics, Introduction to Applied Physics, and Electricity, Magnetism, and Electrodynamics. I have developed new demonstrations for premed introductory courses, taught medical physics to biomedical engineers and electricity and magnetism to upperclass physics undergraduates and incoming graduate students. I regularly recruit undergraduates to work in my lab. In revising old teaching laboratories or devising new ones, I have enlisted undergraduates to develop many of the course materials.