Student Favorite: Dr. Hoshi
Dr. Tomohiro Hoshi is one of OHS' longtime instructors, and is a community favorite. Contributor Roald Fradkine sat down with Dr. Hoshi to hear more about his life and time as an OHS teacher.
Pixel Journal: Hello Dr. Hoshi, it’s a pleasure to be speaking to you today. Tell us a little bit about your background before you came to OHS.
Dr. Tomohiro Hoshi: I’m originally from Japan and I did my undergraduate study in Tokyo and then I did my terminal master degree in philosophy at Texas A&M, that was my first study experience in the United States, and after that I did a little bit of teaching for undergraduate students at Texas A&M and then after that I came to Stanford to do my PhD in philosophy. For my fifth year of PhD program, so it was more or less when I was about to finish up my PhD program, I came up with this project of developing a philosophy curriculum for high school students, which was part of the core curriculum. I started teaching and developing a course for OHS, and I enjoyed it very much, so right after my graduation from the PhD program I joined OHS as a full-time instructor.
PJ: When you joined OHS what courses were you responsible for?
TH: I was developing the History of Science course for my first year.
PJ: As you continued at OHS, and you’ve been here for quite a while, how did your role expand into the role it is today as Director of Instruction?
TH: I started as a student worker developing this course, History of Science, and then became full time instructor and at that point I was doing History of Science but then I started working on Methodology of Science and Biology (9th grade core course) and then the next year after that I became the division head of Core and was still developing other courses, non-core courses, like the university level logic course for math and AP statistics. I was doing administration, right, and also lots of instruction but still doing course development, but at some point -I think it was 4 years back- I became the Director of Instruction then after three years I became Director of OHS.
PJ: You’ve continued to teach HSC through all your administrative roles at OHS, are there any particular reasons why you keep teaching, especially HSC?
TH: First, the general aspect: I have been trained as a scholar and also a teacher: if I stopped teaching I would have an existential crisis so I need to be teaching to the extent it’s possible. And, definitely, the way it turned out this year was that I already had a teaching assignment [before Dr. Hoshi transitioned to Director of OHS] and I wanted to continue teaching what I planned to teach. Teaching is very important to me and I want to keep teaching as long as possible. There is this general philosophy of life type of motivation that I have to keep teaching. The specific choice of HSC is just based on the enrollment and the need of staffing, how many discussion sections do we need for this course and how many instructors do we have and how many we need to teach this course, and I am just a more flexible instructor who can be put into different courses that have need.
PJ: You mentioned a philosophy of teaching and scholarship, do you carry out research in addition to your role at OHS?
TH: Not anymore. Right, up to four years ago and the beginning of director of Instruction, because I forgot when I stopped producing papers, I was focusing on doing reviews for journals just to stay updated in the areas of my study. But I don’t write papers anymore.
PJ: When you started at OHS it was a much smaller school, the student body was smaller, the course offerings were more limited, as OHS continues to rapidly expand what are some challenges you see the school facing as well as some solutions for these challenges?
TH: We have definitely, and it depends on the reference point I think, a considerably large school and definitely one large challenge for this school is to make sure that we have an actively engaging community. Community engagement is an extremely important thing no matter what the size of OHS is, so that was a very important project many years back anyways, but with a larger community we have a different level of challenge. As you, students and families, see, we at least try to produce more opportunities for student meeting, and other kinds of opportunities as clubs and competitions and we certainly see the great importance of Summer at Stanford, so we have been trying to make that program bigger. This year, as you may know, we have been trying to start a spring program of travel, so we would like to enhance the in-person opportunities for our students. We believe that online experience of people in our community are heavily founded upon the types of relationships people establish, and we hear great feedback about the relationships students establish in person, so in some ways it is a hybrid experience. Sometimes, for a limited amount of time students have this in person relationship but then they bring the relationship and resources they get in that way to their online experience. In person experience is definitely useful for online experience too.
PJ: You propose that students would benefit greatly from interacting in person, but for many students this isn’t a practical possibility, so how do you think OHS can continue to maintain the connectedness there was present in a smaller setting?
TH: Certainly, online interaction is a very important mode of communication. But you do have a fair point about the practical challenge on the side of students and families to participate in these in person events, but we would definitely want to push the boundaries there and provide more opportunities to reduce these challenges and increase engagement. There are lots of important student online forums, such as student assemblies and activities and clubs; in the past we have been putting a lot of resources into making sure we have a structured way of doing these things so that students can take advantage of those, so recreating these things in an online environment is key so that students can take advantage of those.
PJ: Do you have any advice for OHS students seeking to connect more with the OHS community?
TH: I think that first knowing the opportunities is important, but also this question means different things for different students so if you’re full time, part time, single-course student, this question would mean different things and the advice is going to be quite different. But the general advice is to read school publication which contain information about those opportunities. I think it’s important for students and families to have some time set aside for reading these school publications like Pixel Weekly and OHS connection so that they can see these ongoing activities and so forth. Concurrently with that, when they are interested in something they should not be shy to talk to the relevant people. If you’re interested, you can contact the necessary people as provided in the format of our announcements that we have, that way you can have an opportunity to connect and also gather the necessary information. Asking for help is very important here. And be creative! I think many students heard the student speech from the last graduation commencement that raised this idea of the opportunity to recreate the online community every year, and I think being conscious of that and taking it as an opportunity and thinking of how to best build the online community together, instead of feeling passive, and actively engaging in the creating of the community is an important thing for success at OHS.
PJ: On a more personal note, what do you do in your free time?
TH: Right now, I do running. I’ve been runner for the last 5 years or so and I’ve been running races like the half marathon and marathons. In December of this year I’m going to be doing my fourth, I think, marathon and I’ve been trying to train for that but I’ve been behind and I have less than a month so I’m a little worried about that.
PJ: What’s your favorite part of working at the OHS?
TH: Oh, definitely the people: students, families and staff members. That’s really the key. It’s such a supportive and engaging community of enthusiastic students and instructors and parents and we see really organic communication and interaction to achieve the excellent educational goals of OHS.
PJ: Do you have any closing advice for members of the extended OHS community?
TH: Because of the nature of the online school, and this is a part of the themes I’ve been saying in this interview, it’s really easy for people to not be engaged in school activities so you need to be (as citizens of this online community) very proactive in engaging in school activities; which requires certain specific efforts. You need to keep yourself actively engaged or otherwise you will miss out on many things and will not know about key opportunities. Additionally, being in an online environment we need to make another level of effort to do communications in the way that we do and have the level of transparency we might appreciate, so try to be conscious of your communication and try to be mindful of your interaction and adjust accordingly. For example, the tone of your email can be very different and mean different things. So paying closer attention to the modes, kinds, quality, and transparency of communication is the key to productively collaborate and interact with others in the OHS community.
PJ: Thank you, Dr. Hoshi!
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.