Teaching Philosophy

Teaching allows me to fulfill what I believe to be a fundamental ability of mariners: to

cultivate optimism so they can bear a long monotonous work environment; to understand

diverse cultures so they can work cooperatively; and to forecast dangerous weather in

navigation routine so they can sail safely and comfortably. There are basic meteorological

principles that should be understood by navigation-educated college students. Among these

are a basic understanding of the relation between the elements of the air and weather

changes, the characteristics of the basic weather system, the distribution of marine

climatology, and the explanation of weather charts. I have four objectives as an educator in

addition to teaching these basic principles.

Objective1 : Students should learn how to combine theory and practice.

They should be required to understand the relevance of weather forecasting results to

weather systems. I emphasize relevance by discussing current weather pertinent to

meteorological theory, by asking students to share their observations. For example, I want

students to use clouds as a technique to predict weather. According to local climate, I

suggest the meteorological class as a spring(alternate season) course so students can

experience almost all kinds of weather systems which can improve their sensitivity to why

the weather changes.

Objective2 : Students should foster self-directed learning habits.

They should know where to find weather information when sailing different oceans and

how to evaluate the information based on simple meteorological instruments on ship. I

demonstrate to the students how I collect the weather facsimile websites/channels to get
the latest weather charts(no more than 6 hours worth), and use the instruments to test the

data and forecast. This exercise gives students the opportunity to identify the differences in

forecasting caused by various weather models and to choose the most useful forecasting on

specific oceans. If unable to receive useful forecasts at sea, students need to be able to use

weather forecasting techniques such as their own observations to monitor the weather, or

the passage of weather, to predict the speed and severity of approaching fronts.

Objective 3: Students should be effectively engaged in the learning process.

I have taken some coursework in cooperative and active learning techniques and I

incorporate these techniques into my teaching. For example, I have created a test system to

assess what level of understanding students have and which kinds of knowledge they need

to review. At the beginning of each new section, we spend about ten minutes to take a test

by using Campus App, then praise the students who make a great improvement in class, and

email the students who do not do well on the exams to come and see me during my office

hour, so that I could answer their questions and help them learn better in my class. I find

students learn and retain the material more effectively with these tests. These activities help

them pass the Seafarer's Competency Certificate exam that is given by the China Maritime

Safety Administration. However, I have found that sometimes these activities will fail if

students don't like their major.

Objective 4: Students should be trained to have patience with simple and duplicate

experiments.

I design several simple tasks for student groups, such as measuring temperature, observing

clouds, recording pressure etc., but insist that every group observe the data twice a day for a
semester. So, students must discuss how to share the work and cooperate with each other

and how to keep working as a group for a whole semester. I hope that they will learn to

respect and support a wide diversity of people from the experiments.

In summary, I am very committed to providing a learning environment that is both exciting

and rigorous, one that empowers both student and teacher in pursuing learning.