I think that it is crucial to provide students with a working knowledge of physical systems and to teach them problem solving skills for building upon this knowledge. Teaching a person to think analytically is at the core of what a student should take away from any science course.

For students not majoring in physics, it is important to teach them how science affects their daily lives and how to make informed decisions about it based on information available. For physics majors it is crucial to teach them the knowledge pertinent to their course of study and how scientists solve difficult problems using approximation, computational, and other quantitative methods. These important tools are invaluable to future researchers because they aid in the careful design of experiments and in determining the predictions of a model or theory.

I also strive to cover a range of topics in my teaching. This enables me to teach an array of different methods for approaching physical problems and to demonstrate how similar approaches can be applied to problems from disparate fields. Furthermore, being a theoretician, I am well suited to teach physics majors how to construct theories and models, to derive predictions from these models, and to test these predictions against empirical data they have collected from the literature or obtained in the laboratory.

Mentoring students is one of the most long-lasting contributions a researcher can make, and it is a process that I find fun and rewarding. From my experience, I learned the importance of engaging students through examples and of pitching material at a level that assumes intelligence but not necessarily knowledge, blending the known with the unknown in a combination that gives the student the feeling of possibility rather than that of impossibility that formal and impressive methods may impose.