Teaching

Now retired, it was a privilege to have made my living teaching undergraduate students.  As an approach, I took advantage of the fact that people have a far better system for episodic memory than for semantic memory.  So my approach was to tie as many lessons as possible to first-hand experiences for the students.  As a consequence, much of my teaching incorporated travel to distant locales.  In all, I spent more than 1,200 days on the road with students, conducting 123 field trips spanning all seven continents.

Such travel expanded the horizons of the students involved, literally of course, but also intellectually and emotionally.  Through firsthand experiences, it involved them personally in the richness of the natural world in ways that otherwise would not have been possible.

I am so grateful to have had the opportunity to touch the lives of so many young people in this way.  That, through them, I may have been involved in curving the arc of mankind’s relationship with nature in a positive direction is more gratifying than I can say.