Telling others about what you do and what you find interesting is fun. Trying to explain difficult concepts to others is a great tool to deepen understanding. Sometimes I’ve struggled to explain a concept coherently, only  to discover it really is not properly understood. The idea that teaching gets in the way of research is nonsense – I’ve come across no better tool than teaching for staying focused on the big, fundamental questions. 

Lecture courses

I recently completed my 6th and final year teaching a 2nd/3rd year undergraduate course on Classical Mechanics for Physics and Physics and Philosophy students. In addition to learning about Lagrangian and Hamiltonian mechanics, and how these approaches led naturally to the Schrödinger equation and other fundamental concepts in quantum mechanics, I discuss many of the characters involved in this story – both heroes and villains. 

I have taught an introductory graduate-level course on Large-Scale Ocean Circulation on an ad-hoc basis. 

For the past 3 years, I have taught a DTP course on Numerical Methods, previously developed by Andrew Wells, Andrew McRae and Srikanth Toppaladoddi. We go through the theory in the morning and then the students code up tutorial problems in the afternoon using Python. This course is now taken over by Milan Klöwer. 

Summer schools

1_kleinI regularly teach on a number of summer schools, including the NCAS Climate Modelling School in Cambridge, every second year, and a Summer School on Physics of the Ocean at the Physikzentrum Bad Honnef, Germany, which is tentatively planned to next run in 2027.