Scholarship and Service are valuable in their own right, but at a predominantly undergraduate institution such as Youngstown State University, I believe that their most important attribute is the support that they give to our central mission: excellence in teaching. A college education is, proportionate to their income, arguably the most expensive investment in both time and money that most students will make. Because of this, and because students tend to live up or down to our expectations for them, I try to give my students "good value for their money" in all of my classes. By this, I mean that I attempt to pace the rate and difficulty of my classes to the course goals and abilities of the students taking them. My aim is to make them sufficiently challenging to draw from my students the best that they are capable of while not pushing them "over the edge."

Given the many different strengths that individual students bring to our school, the variety of their backgrounds, and the variety of learning styles they employ. I try to be particularly aware of differences in student learning styles and strategies and to teach with these in mind. I also seek to employ evaluation methods that are as diverse as possible and that measure what each student can tell me that is relevant to the course content. To this end, I typically employ a wide range of evaluation measures for each class, including: formal term papers, individual and group projects, research style discovery lab projects, and exams that emphasize open ended page long and paragraph length questions. Since real life seldom presents us with multiple choice questions, I have never employed this or other computer grading strategies. I prefer to grade all questions by hand and make liberal use of partial credit, even when teaching several large sections.

The only way that I ever learned certain areas of chemistry was by practice, practice, practice. Just like Michael Jordan got to be the best in the game by many hours of shooting hoops, I encourage my students to master their course materials by practicing in the same way.