While serving as a teaching assistant in Chemical Oceanography, Leah Bandstra made an important personal discovery. Teaching was not just a step along the path toward her life’s work - teaching was her life’s work. Last year, she left her PhD program in the College of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences (COAS), and is planning to embark on a graduate program in Math and Science Education.
Leah is the recipient of the 2005 Herbert F. Frolander Award for Outstanding Teaching Assistant. In her four years at OSU, Leah held three teaching assistantships, and with each one, she says, "It just got more and more fun. I realized I was spending more time TAing than I was trying to get my PhD up and running - and I was getting so much more satisfaction from it. Being a TA sort of took over my life, and probably for the better, because I realized teaching was what I was really interested in."
At first, it was tough for Leah’s advisors and fellow graduate students to understand this choice. She’d been very successful in her master’s program, constructing, testing, and applying a novel instrumental method for shipboard determination of total dissolved inorganic carbon in seawater. Her master’s thesis was published in Marine Chemistry, a well-respected oceanographic journal. But the evaluations of her students, the praise of the professors she assisted, and finally, the Frolander award itself, have convinced her many admirers in COAS that her greatest gift is as a teacher.
Leah went well beyond the normal expectations for a GTA. She elected to write all the problem sets that help students understand the concepts conveyed in course lectures. She set up two two-hour help sessions each week, where she would review the concepts students hadn’t understood and help them to work together on the problem sets. Her students’ evaluations speak of Leah’s creative approach to teaching difficult material, her prompt response to email and telephone questions, her good-humored and approachable manner, and her devotion to helping each student succeed.
"She taught in a way that allowed students to be confident in her knowledge and abilities without feeling inferior in theirs," says Erica McQuay, a COAS graduate student. "Leah showed a personal interest in the success of each student who came to her for help."
Getting to know her students is key to her teaching style, Leah says. Her GTA courses served a wide variety of students, from those who hadn’t taken a chemistry class since high school to those who already had chemistry-related degrees. "I think the only way that difficult concepts really stick is if you think about them in terms of what you’re going to do with them," she says. "I’d find out what the students’ interests were, so I could tell them, ’This is important to you because it will fit your project in such and such a way.’"
Leah admits she had it relatively easy, with recitation groups of just 20 or 30 people, but she hopes to maintain this kind of connection with her students when she becomes a lecturer herself some day. "Sometimes when people have been teaching for years and years, they don’t realize that what’s inherently understandable for them may not be getting through to their students," she says. "There were some concepts in these courses that were confusing for me too. Instead of saying, ’This is all simple stuff, here’s how it works,’ I’d get the book out and we’d work through it together."
One thing that made this approach possible on a practical level was holding her two-hour help sessions in a regular classroom, instead of having office hours. Some students would work in groups, reinforcing their own understanding by helping each other. Others would need Leah’s individual help to understand basic chemistry concepts they weren’t comfortable asking about in the lecture. "I went to all the lectures myself, and knowing which students really needed a lot of help, I could watch for that look they’d get on their faces when they totally lost the thread. Then we’d go back to that when they came to my help session."
Leah also tried to teach her students to communicate constructively with their professors. When they complained to her about a test, Leah would help them clarify their issues and direct them to the professor. Dr. Marta Torres was teaching OC450/550 for the first time when she had Leah as her GTA. "It is not an overstatement to say that her involvement was critical to the success of this class," she says. "She functioned in many ways as a peer and in others as a liaison between the students and myself."
Leah’s next teaching assignment may be at the high school level, as an intern in Math and Science Education. She says she learned to love science from her own high school math and science teachers, and she looks forward to passing that excitement along. "I don’t remember exactly what we did in those classes, but I remember thinking, ’This is really cool. I really get this, and somebody cares about whether I get it or not.’" For Leah, that’s where it all begins.
