There is no great secret to good teaching. The main thing is that you have to truly care about it. If you do, then you will be dedicated to it and will work hard at it. Excellence will follow, if only you have an ounce of talent (and a ton of energy!). But you must care enough to give a great deal—of your human qualities and personal wisdom as well as professional knowledge, for we are not just teachers, we are leaders and role models for our students. We must inspire them by example.

I seek opportunities to engage students in intellectual pursuits outside of the classroom. In Chemistry 1A, for example, I regularly take groups of students to lunch at the Faculty Club. This provides us the opportunity to talk freely about their interests, and it allows me to introduce them to some famous figures on campus, such as Nobelists Charles Townes, Melvin Calvin, and Yuan Lee. In addition, every year I have invited one or two undergraduates to work in my research group; many of them have gone on to highly successful careers in graduate school at MIT, CalTech, and elsewhere.

It is critical to expand teaching beyond the immediate material of a given course, to provide perspective and context. Hence, I try to combine state-of-the-art knowledge and cutting-edge results with basic principles, going well beyond the textbook. In Chemistry 1A, I start each lecture with a newspaper or magazine article involving the course material, and I bring in guest lecturers, like the director of NASA's Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI).

The most important product of any course should be an enhancement in the students' abilities to think rationally. Accordingly, I try to incorporate some controversial materials, such as discussions of religious "miracles," into my courses. This makes students think about the things they believe in, and encourages them to calibrate their beliefs against facts.

Effective learning requires the establishment and maintenance of very high standards, for the instructors, for staff, and for the students. I work my classes very hard. I ask them to be independent and responsible. I make sure that I am always well-prepared for classes and office hours, in order to set an example for them.

As faculty at the greatest public university in the world, we have a unique power to make our classes come alive with the excitement of discovery and the love of creative learning that drive our own lives. We are in a perfect position to compel the interest and attention of our students. When we give a significant piece of ourselves to our students, mainly in the form of accessibility and genuine concern for their welfare, we can influence their lives tremendously.