What makes a good teacher versus a good scientist: Can one be both?

An overwhelming majority of my work involves doing research. I do some “teaching” or more correctly mentoring of graduate and medical students. Unfortunately however, for the past ten years I have done almost no didactic teaching. Formerly, teaching was a regular part of my job and I taught much of intermediary metabolism as part of the biochemistry course. I actually like to give lectures to students and teach but that is pretty much not available to me.  

I’m a researcher; that is what I do. But does that mean I cannot be an educator, more importantly a good educator? Yep, under most circumstances, that is pretty much what it means. I’ll need to keep doing research, writing grants and publishing papers until the grant cash drops and teaching revenue becomes a more fiscally responsible choice for the administration.

I’m not sure that I am a good teacher, but I think that I am pretty good because I like to teach and let my students know that. What I am now trying to do to get back into didactic instruction is engage the concept of remote learning. A new course will be launched by the University of Cincinnati in September 2010 and I will be organizing and teaching one of the five courses. While this will lack  the classroom experience, I will be back in the classroom, well in-front of a virtual classroom of students. So, I’m quite excited by this prospect. I will be posting more specific details about the course and how to register soon.