Office Hours

Fall 2019: Tuesday 12-1:00, Thursday 3-4:00 and by appointment

I am primarily interested in teaching.

After graduating from college I spent some time in small villages of the Philippines and Kenya doing volunteer work concerned with rural development of developing nations. That’s when I got interested in teaching, but not teaching as an act of merely transmitting some information to others but teaching as an act of catalyzing them. In this regard it is rewarding to see my students, by learning a foreign language, get interested in a different culture and learn to see themselves from a different viewpoint. It is also very challenging and you can never be a perfect teacher. I have found teaching to be very similar to childrearing.

I first started teaching Japanese as a TA a month after my first child was born. At that time I did not know much about raising children or teaching Japanese. Everything was trial and error. Everything was a learning experience. When I reflect on some of the things I did to my children or in Japanese class, I still get embarrassed about how bad I was. Time flies very quickly and now my youngest child is in high school. Have I become an expert in childrearing or Japanese pedagogy? The answer is no. I might be a little better than before, but I am still learning and will continue to learn as long as I'm a parent or a teacher.