Arthur C. Guyton Teacher of the Year Award. Learning to teach: an evolution in fits and starts.

173 Have you ever thought about why you became a teacher? About which people or experiences influenced you? How did you develop your attitudes to teaching and students? I was prompted to reflect on these questions when I was nominated for an APS Arthur C. Guyton Educatorof-the-Year Award because I had to explain my teaching philosophy for the jury. It struck me that we might be able to be better teaching mentors if we understood how our mentors and experiences shaped us. We might even see how to avoid inadvertently turning off grad students and postdocs from a satisfying and exciting academic life of teaching. Perhaps my story will stimulate you to think deeply about your own formation as a teacher and encourage you to apply what you learn to your students and your academic programs. When I look back over my development, I see that it resembles the pattern of biological evolution: its progress has been marked by a series of crucial events that have markedly changed my ideas about my role and behavior as a teacher. I can identify experiences that influenced me reaching as far back as primary school. In my small rural school, my teachers allowed me to help younger students with their schoolwork after I had completed my own. I can still recall how good – how special – that made me feel: I experienced a distinctive kind of pleasure from interacting with other children in this way. Later, in high school and at university, I was taught by a few teachers who engaged me in an extraordinary way because of their intelligence, their enthusiasm for their subjects, and their humane ways of interacting with students. In fact, because of the influence of my first-year chemistry professor, I switched my major from the arts to sciences and earned a BSc in chemistry. These experiences gave me a sense that teaching was a pleasurable human interaction that