I love to teach, and I am very active at all levels of graduate and undergraduate education including the development of courses, recruiting and funding graduate students, advising graduate and undergraduate students. I have served as a member of both the graduate and undergraduate committees and an ad-hoc committee for recruitment. I have taught a variety of courses, including graduate courses in Solid State Physics, Advanced Solid State Physics and Electrodynamics and an undergraduate course in Electrodynamics as well as recitation sections using cooperative education techniques.
In the development of these courses I have become heavily involved in the
use of computers in education. I found that my students can use
the computer to solve more realistic homework problems, visualize their
answers, and reduce the algebraic tedium (using Mathematica or Maple).
The computer also allows me to distribute related courseware, and provide
more realistic classroom demonstrations. I developed a complete set of
courseware for courses in
Graduate Electrodynamics
and graduate
Solid State Physics, most of which is
available on the WWW (http://www.phys.lsu.edu/
jarrell/COURSES). These educational packages
contain complete course notes with embedded figures, many example
problems, homework assignments and solutions, and exam solutions. By
developing and distributing a complete set of courseware, I find that I can
more easily depart from the material covered in the usual texts and
tailor my course to complement local needs.
I have also been active in obtaining additional funds to support our graduate students. We wrote several proposals to the Department of Education's Graduate Assistance in Areas of National Needs (GAANN) program and one to the NSF's Graduate Research Traineeship Program. After several attempts, we were awarded a GAANN grant that provided almost $120,000/year in funding for graduate fellowships. We were able to use these fellowships to help recruit excellent graduate students.