Impact on Students Earns Zammito Top Teaching Honor

CONTACT: Mike Cinelli

PHONE: (713)
831-4794

E-MAIL: mcinelli@rice.edu

IMPACT ON STUDENTS EARNS ZAMMITO TOP TEACHING
HONOR

Associate Professor of History John
Zammito has won the 1999 George R. Brown Prize for Excellence in Teaching,
Rice’s most prestigious teaching award.

Alumni who graduated two and five years ago vote on the $6,000
prize.

A Zammito course can have an impact: “It was like opening my
eyes to the world,” says Hanszen junior Hadi Tabbaa. For Hanszen College junior
David Zetoony, it was both gripping and intellectually demanding: “I’d have to
mull over everything we talked about in class for hours and hours,” he
says.

Says Professor of English Alan Grob, a past winner of the
award, marvels at Zammito’s grasp of art, philosophy and literature.

“He teaches courses on subjects you’d wonder if he could get 10
students for and he gets 50. These students follow him like the Pied Piper,” Grob said.

Students have been known to applaud after a Zammito lecture,
but his effectiveness as a teacher goes beyond his ability to make things
interesting: It’s also the love and admiration that flows between teacher and
student.

In his 10 years at Rice, Zammito has been a faculty associate
at Hanszen College, and on any given day at the lunch hour, you’ll find him in
the dining hall surrounded by students. They generally revere him but feel free
to tease and be teased. They talk Nietzsche, movies and basketball.

Teaching, like basketball, involves going “one-on-one,” Zammito
says. “It doesn’t come from a pedestal. You’ve got to be a person.” What’s
important, he says, “is just spending time with them and taking them seriously
as people.”

A year out of college, he was working as an economist for a
stock brokerage firm in Memphis. At the office, he’d think to himself that he’d
rather be reading philosophy. He went back to school, studying intellectual
history at Berkeley.

After graduating, he became an assistant professor of history
at the University of Texas where he won the Jean Holloway Award, one of the
school’s most prestigious teaching prizes. Later, at St. John’s School in
Houston he won the Texas Excellence in Teaching Award for being one of the top
10 secondary school teachers in the state.

While at St. John’s, he wrote “The Genesis of Kant’s Critique
of Judgment,” named one of the best academic books of 1992 by Choice, the
journal which reviews academic works.

His research area is European intellectual history, primarily
German idealism and romanticism, and he refers to his course “European
Intellectual History: From Bacon to Hegel,” as “my baby.” Another of his
favorites is Huma 101 and 102 (“Introduction to Humanities”), which he has
taught since he’s been at Rice.

Noting that he feels complete support from the administration,
colleagues and students, Zammito says ,”I love Rice and am completely
devoted.”

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