Possibly.

I’m taking time away from teaching – at least for the Fall Semester –  to pursue new opportunities closer to Kansas City. (to which we recently moved house).

Teaching has been something enjoyable that I always wanted to explore, and when we moved from Philadelphia to Paola, Kansas in 2009, a terrific opportunity presented itself. Over the past several years I’ve taught:

• General Biology
  • My bread and butter course. The more I taught it, the more I liked it and felt good about the story arc I had with it
  • First half of semester: The Cell and its workings
  • Second half: Reproduction, Genetics, and Cancer
• Microbiology
  • I always thought that I disliked this class, but I think I enjoyed it, I just never felt great about pacing and felt like I was doing the helminths a disservice.
  • I approached this class for a molecular angle through the survey of life, then from an immunologist’s perspective to finish off
  • One of my favorite elements of this class was following an epidemiology sketch that put my students in charge of running a good analysis and containment of outbreak. I would love to include more about John Snow and the origins of epidemiology if I could
• Medical Terminology
  • This class was a bust. I used it every day just to crank up for Patho, but it’s hard to generate a narrative about what is essentially a semester long vocabulary list
  • I think I would have liked this if I ever got a good handle on how to make it interesting; I love language, and etymology, but how do you fill an hour and a half with it?
• Population Genetics
  • This was the smallest, most undefined course I’ve taught. We covered a number of topics including:
    • making relationship maps from DNA sequences
    • exploring allelic frequencies
    • looking at survival strategies

    This was a lot of fun and probably the most low-pressure class I’ve ever taught. It was more like a graduate seminar.

• Pathophysiology
  • This is the core class that my nursing students needed.
  • I was leery of teaching it because it is not where my background was strongest, but it is interesting and I found myself spending hours filling in background for myself.I would be willing to bet that after a few more semesters it would be my favorite class to teach.

The big question now is: ‘What next?’

If anyone knows anyone who would hire an Immunologist / Molecular Biologist / Educator  / With interest in developing coding skills, please point them in my direction.