Six faculty members honored with the George R. Brown Award for Superior Teaching

Six faculty members honored with the George R. Brown Award for Superior Teaching

FROM RICE NEWS STAFF REPORTS

The George R. Brown Award for Superior Teaching honors six of Rice’s top professors each year. The recipients are determined by the votes of alumni who graduated two and five years ago. Below are this year’s recipients and their responses to questions about teaching.

	EDWARD COX

Edward Cox, associate professor of history

What’s your favorite class to teach and why?

I really enjoy all the classes I teach. If I am to single out one, however, it is Natural Disasters in the History of the Caribbean. This course discusses the role of hurricanes, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and epidemics in shaping Caribbean society and economy from the 16th century to the present. I actually have been collecting material for this course over a number of years. The devastation of the region by hurricanes over the past five years and the resiliency of the peoples as they rebuilt their lives induced me to teach the course. The firsthand accounts with which we deal are very touching and help us better understand this important aspect of the economic and human dimension to Caribbean history.

Who inspired you to become a teacher?

My inspiration for becoming a teacher came from at least two of my high school teachers. They instilled in me a passion for learning and a commitment to repay an enormous debt that I think I owed and still owe to successive generations.

How do you know when you’ve given a good lecture?

It’s difficult to tell. I try my very best at all times. But I am most satisfied when either during the lecture or after class students ask questions as follow-up to what I’ve spoken about in class that day.

Describe one of your most rewarding experiences or fondest memories as a teacher.

One of my most rewarding experiences was meeting a student whom I had taught at another university. He was accompanying his son on a campus visit to Rice prior to his eventual enrollment as a student here. Once he heard my name, he asked about my prior institutional affiliation. He reminded me of the specific course he had taken from me, the room in which the class met and some of the issues we discussed. My feeling was that something remarkable must have taken place in that classroom for him to remember in such detail the specifics. I was stunned.

What’s the secret to being a great teacher?

For me, the secret to being an effective teacher is to be always prepared, to be passionate about what I do and, above all, to demonstrate at all times a caring concern for the well-being of my students without in any way compromising my basic principles.

	TERRENCE DOODY

Terrence Doody, professor of English

What’s your favorite class to teach and why?

My favorite courses, at the moment, are Contemporary Poetry and The City in Literature. Contemporary Poetry generates the best, the most searching discussions. The City in Literature treats the literature we look at in as unliterary a way as possible and opens up in it a surprising usefulness.

Who inspired you to become a teacher?

I had a charismatic teacher in my sophomore year of high school, but by then, I had decided on my own that I wanted to be an English teacher because only in what I was reading at the time — which wasn’t unusual — was I getting something like a true reflection of my experience. I certainly wasn’t getting it in the classroom. So I figured becoming a teacher would keep me reading in the way I wanted to.

How do you know when you’ve given a good lecture?

A lecture has been good, at least for me, if I have learned something in giving it and have generated enough energy in the room to promote the class’s attention and vouch for the importance of what I have been saying. It is much easier to measure a good seminar, where the less I have to say, the better.

Describe one of your most rewarding experiences or fondest memories as a teacher.

A couple of years ago, in a contemporary poetry class that had, perhaps, the best group dynamics in any class I have ever taught, we seemed to be finished with the week’s business by about 11:25 on Friday morning. So I said, “OK, let’s go to lunch and start the weekend early.” No one moved. No one left. No one wanted the class to end. So we did another poem and stayed until 11:55.

What’s the secret to being a great teacher?

You have to love what you’re teaching and do it with the confidence that this is the most important thing you can do with your life. (It also helps, I’ve been told, to know what you’re talking about, which can be a serious problem that enthusiasm alone can’t solve.)

	MICHAEL EMERSON

Michael Emerson, the Allyn and Gladys Cline Professor of Sociology

What’s your favorite class to teach and why?

I have two favorite classes to teach currently: Race and Ethnic Relations and Urban Life and Systems. They allow us to really dig into social realities that impact us in ways we are not even aware of. I am teaching both of these this fall.

Who inspired you to become a teacher?

I had a teacher of social psychology that did crazy antics to get students involved, and I loved it. I thought that was the way to teach.

How do you know when you’ve given a good lecture?

I feel a connection with the students — I see it in their eyes and hear it in their questions.  They don’t want class to end. Of course, when I give a bad lecture, they are bolting for the door!

Describe one of your most rewarding experiences or fondest memories as a teacher.

Winning this teaching award is as rewarding as it gets, given that alumni, who have had some time to see if you were feeding them garbage or something useful, determine the winners. Thank you alumni! And I love hearing from former students, to learn what they are doing.

What’s the secret to being a great teacher?

I feel odd answering this because often and for whole courses, I am not a great teacher. But when a course works well, it seems to have in common a teacher who:

1. Is passionate and knowledgeable about the subject

2. Chooses fitting readings and assignments

3. Is well-organized

4. Cares about the students — knows their names, asks them questions

	MICHAEL GUSTIN

Michael Gustin, professor of biochemistry and cell biology

What’s your favorite class to teach and why?

My favorite class to teach is BIOS 201, Introductory Biology. Biology is one of the most rapidly progressing sciences. To give students a feel for the dynamic nature of biology, I take a short break in each class and present a dramatic new finding (for example, singing mice, taste receptors in the gut, hair regeneration after wounding) that has just been published. Wherever possible, I connect these new findings to class material and show how our conception of biology is everchanging.

Who inspired you to become a teacher?

I had two exceptional biology teachers in high school (Mr. Marcus and Mr. Hood) who inspired me with their enthusiastic curiosity and fascinating stories of biology.

How do you know when you’ve given a good lecture?

A lecture feels right when more than a few students feel comfortable asking questions.

Describe one of your most rewarding experiences or fondest memories as a teacher.

I like trying out new ideas. In the past few years, we have taken about one-fifth of the class periods and broken up the large class into much smaller discussion groups, meeting in different locations, in which students talk about two different biology topics. Students are encouraged to share what they do and do not understand about each topic, plus add connections of the material to other parts of their knowledge and lives. Analogies can sometimes be helpful in understanding and even remembering. One analogy voiced by a student was how the separation of meiotic chromosomes resembled the splitting of Mel Gibson in the movie “Braveheart.” Although that analogy is not entirely accurate, I can never think again of meiosis without that imagery coming to mind.

What’s the secret to being a great teacher?

I have always wanted to understand biology at a deeper, almost intuitive level. That understanding increases my enthusiasm to learn still more. My energy and drive to understand are perhaps contagious. Plus, I occasionally use humor to relax students and allow them to reset and refocus.

	STEPHEN KLINEBERG

Stephen Klineberg, professor of sociology

[Editor’s note: In addition to the George R. Brown Award for Superior
Teaching, Klineberg received the George R. Brown Certificate of Highest
Merit Award.  See next week’s Rice News for more on this top honor.]

What’s your favorite class to teach and why?

During most of my career at Rice, my favorite was what I liked to call my ”liberal arts” course. Titled Conceptions of Human Nature, it explored the alternative understandings of the human personality that dominate the fields of psychology and sociology. As my research interests moved further into contemporary social change, I eventually had to stop teaching that course. During the past few years, I’ve taught only advanced seminars with restricted enrollments, in which students conduct original research and report on the results of their work to the class. In SOCI 308, the research has to do with Houston’s prospects for success in the new economy; in SOCI 367, it has to do with the societal transition toward ”sustainability”; in SOCI 436, with the statistical testing of hypotheses about the determinants of public attitudes, using data from that year’s Houston Area Survey, which the students themselves helped to design.

I have very much enjoyed all three of these courses, and because of their small size, I never expected to win another teaching award. This one is the last for which I am eligible, and it is the sweetest of them all.

Who inspired you to become a teacher?

I’ve had many inspiring teachers in my student days, but the greatest inspiration was my father, Otto Klineberg. He was a psychology professor at Columbia University from the 1920s to the 1960s, a renowned and distinguished scholar who always said that his greatest joy and pride was as a teacher. That sounded pretty good to me.

How do you know when you’ve given a good lecture?

There’s that palpable feeling at the end of such a class that virtually everyone present shared the sense of having participated in a voyage of discovery and now felt able to see more clearly than before into the complex nature of an important issue.

Describe one of your most rewarding experiences or fondest memories as a teacher.

This usually comes well after the fact, when I run into a former student who remembers, almost verbatim it seems, something said in class many years earlier that made a profound and lasting impression — a palpable reminder that good teaching matters in unexpected ways.

What’s the secret to being a great teacher?

The short answer, I think, is enthusiasm. You have to believe that what you’re sharing with your students is an exploration into something that is complicated, fascinating and truly important. This may be easier to do in sociology than some other fields, but for any successful teaching, it seems to me, you have to really love what you’re doing, and you have to come to know and care about the individual students who have embarked on that journey with you.

	MARCIA O’MALLEY

Marcia O’Malley, assistant professor of mechanical engineering and materials science

What’s your favorite class to teach and why?

I enjoy every class that I teach, but my favorite course has been MECH 343, Modeling Dynamic Systems. While I love teaching more advanced courses closer to my research area, this course is one of the first within the mechanical engineering curriculum that starts to make connections between all the fundamental courses our students take in the freshman and sophomore years. They see connections between math, physics, dynamics, electronics, mechanics, thermodynamics … you name it. They begin to understand why we want to model systems we encounter in our everyday world, and it is amazing to see the light bulbs go off in their heads.” … So that’s why we learned to solve differential equations!”

Who inspired you to become a teacher?

My parents. I’m the offspring of two educators, and I can remember playing school as a little girl, helping my mother grade papers for her high school accounting course, learning my way around a machine shop in my father’s school, and many snow days growing up in Ohio, observing Mom in the classroom when I had a day off school. It’s a very rewarding experience to get to teach and at the same time to have the freedom to carry out my research at a university like Rice.

How do you know when you’ve given a good lecture?

When the students ask questions that I can’t immediately answer. It means that the lecture engaged them and made them think beyond the typical limits of the classroom setting. I know I’ve done a good job when the students are hypothesizing how the laws or methods taught in class could be extended to new areas.

Describe one of your most rewarding experiences or fondest memories as a teacher.

I can’t identify a single event or experience, but what comes to the forefront in my mind are the collective successes of former students. A creativity award for great design work, success in a competition of fighting robots, landing that coveted job or acceptance to the first-choice graduate school — what makes teaching, for me, so rewarding is sharing in the achievements of my students.

What’s the secret to being a great teacher?

I’m not sure there is a secret. For me, I have to find some balance between preparedness and spontaneity. The material can’t be too rehearsed, and I seek ways to involve students in my lectures. I always strive to make real-world connections and to use examples from my research and that of my colleagues to keep the courses relevant. I think you have to be human, too. I don’t always have the answers, and I think students respect you when you say, “I don’t know, but let’s find the answer together!”