Meet Mattia Pistone
Assistant Professor in Petrology and Volcanology
When did you start teaching in the WIP?
MP: I started teaching in the WIP last Spring 2020.
What WIP courses are you teaching/have you taught?
MP: GEOL 4020 Internal Processes
Why did you join the WIP?
MP: GEOL 4020 Internal Processes already included a fundamental WIP component aimed to stimulate students in writing research papers.
What have you learned from your experiences as WIP faculty? About teaching? About writing? About your students?
MP: I learned to be patient with students’ progress in acquiring writing skills, to assign low-stakes tasks for writing, and to write along with my students to stimulate their effort and share the challenge with them.
What is your WIP teaching philosophy?
MP: Trial and error. Continuous practice of writing.
How do you put that philosophy into practice in the classroom?
MP: I always assign a writing component as part of students’ homework/assignments.
What are your biggest challenges you face as a WIP teacher/in your WIP courses?
MP: The low level of writing skills the students start with when they enter a writing-intensive course for the first time.
How do you address those challenges?
MP: I make my students write short essays or papers on the weekly basis throughout the course.
What do you hope students take away from your WIP courses? How do students benefit from the writing-intensive nature of your course?
MP: I hope students understand the importance of writing reports and papers and how to read references of interest and provide a report that summarizes previously published information. Students learn the logical structure of writing scientific contributions, without falling into plagiarism and with gaining the skills of being able to assimilate key information, think independently and with critical approach, and report what they learned objectively.
Why is it important that students write in your class?
MP: Because students will deal with reading and writing throughout their whole professional and personal life. Writing is the best way to fix ideas and provide solid propositions. As my Roman ancestors were used to say: verba volant, scripta manent = spoken words fly in the wind, written words remain like solid rocks.