Shubha Sunder Math & Science Faculty Bryn Mawr College, B.A. Interests: Reading, writing, hiking, and experimenting in the kitchen.

The best thing about teaching at CSW is the fluidity of the curriculum and the freedom to integrate several disciplines within a single course. I can choose my own texts, design my own experiments and projects, and in general, explore diverse ways of challenging my students to be active thinkers. There is plenty of opportunity to work one-on-one with students and this can really provide for in-depth teaching. I can also incorporate my personal interests into my teaching life: for example, in addition to teaching Mathematics and Physics, I have also been able to run a Creative Writing course during D-Block.

My favorite courses to teach are Mechanics and Geometry. In Mechanics, we refine our intuitive knowledge about the physical world and try to describe phenomena with mathematics. It is exciting to watch students’ progress through this course as they grapple with concepts such as Newton’s Laws and try to reconcile them with their own personal experience of how the world works. In Geometry too, there is a similar goal of refining one’s intuitive sense of logic and learning to “see” shapes and patterns of logic. Students learn how to reason their way from a hypothesis to a conclusion and by the end of the course many of them find, whether they like it or not, that the process has become second nature!

The best thing about CSW students is that they are ready to explore new ideas. The students will often steer a lesson with their questions and make intriguing connections. CSW students are creative and original. I find myself pausing at least once a week to see or hear a piece of outstanding student work. Students here also work with each other very well and this makes any project or assignment a genuinely collaborative experience.

There are endless examples of creative, impressive student projects. One of my Mechanics students this year came up with an astonishingly elegant solution to this kinematics problem—one that hadn’t occurred to me. Another student, from my Harmonics and Waves class, designed and built a harp-like instrument that produced some beautiful notes. My freshmen in Intro to Physics routinely come up with all sorts of interesting ideas for their final project on Quantum Mechanics. I once had a student design a magazine for teenage electrons. While this may seem like a crazy idea, the project successfully articulated some important ideas in Quantum Mechanics such as wave-particle duality and the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. And I am currently working with two juniors who are independently studying Quantum Mechanics from a college-level text. Their passion and curiosity for the subject is beautiful to watch.