James Marshall

What do you love about Sarah Lawrence students?
A lot of my students are wonderfully self-motivated, and especially during conference projects, I feel they’re teaching me as much as I’m teaching them. One student wanted to study formal logic, so we spent a semester going through a formal logic textbook together. Another student wanted to study the theory of computation, which is a course I took as an undergraduate. We spent a semester doing theory of computation proofs, which helped me to relearn some of the material and get back into that mindset. It felt like we were colleagues for a semester, grappling with these ideas together.

What do you love about teaching at Sarah Lawrence?
One thing I really like is the flexibility in teaching, and being able to design courses that really excite me. I based my most recent First Year Studies course on Douglas Hofstadter’s book Gödel, Escher, Bach, which is one of my very favorite books. I always wanted to design a course around that book, and I was able to do that here. The Computational Beauty of Nature explored fractals, chaos theory, and complex systems, all topics that I find fascinating. Another great thing I love is hanging out with my colleagues in the Science and Math faculty group. We talk about quantum computing sometimes, or things like information theory or cognitive science. We often get together for social events and parties, too, which is fun.  It’s nice that we’re all from different disciplines, not just from computer science.