"Hi! I'm Joey Gordon, I have a Ph.D. and a B.S. in Nuclear Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley. I'm currently a Post-Doctoral Scientist at the University of California, Berkeley working on two projects related to basic nuclear physics and detector development. I am passionate about my research (and in my free time I'm usually reading about history or anthropology or philosophy or whatever non-fiction I can get my hands on) but I love teaching. My teaching experience is from tutoring my friends in middle school, high school, undergrad, and then being a Graduate Student Instructor (GSI) for the only nuclear physics course at the University of California Berkeley. As a GSI, I was in charge of writing homework questions and leading “discussion sections”. My goal when writing homework questions and preparing weekly discussion lessons was the development of an understanding of the fundamental nuclear physics concepts through a series of steps that first required a basic manipulation of equations (that can be found in lecture notes or the textbook) and an then a guided extension of these “basic” equations to more fundamental conclusions that are applicable to situations outside the specific parameters detailed in the question.

This quasi-Socratic approach to undergraduate-graduate education had phenomenal success and is how I personally gained the abilities that allowed me to obtain a PhD. Too many people, when faced with a 2 dimensional histogram, or a dense paragraph from Kant or Foucault, recoil, throw their hands up, and turn to outside help (SparkNotes, ChaptGPT, etc.) when, in reality, they have the capability to understand the data or concepts expressed but they don’t have the tools or heuristics that allow them to understand these complex, important finding on their own. My pedagogy is directed towards the formation of scholars, people who are curious and equipped with optimal techniques to satisfy their desire to know." less...