Six professors recognized with George R. Brown Award for Superior Teaching

Six
professors recognized with George R. Brown Award for Superior
Teaching
…………………………………………………………………

BY B.J. ALMOND,
LIA UNRAU and DANA BENSON
Rice News Staff

The George R.
Brown Award for Superior Teaching that John Ambler won this
year is his fourth; these awards, along with a Brown Excellence
in Teaching Award that Ambler has received, have given him
more pleasure than any others.

Five other Rice
professors have experienced the pleasure of receiving the
$6,000 Brown superior teaching award this year, which is
based on the votes of alumni who graduated two and five
years ago. In addition to Ambler, the recipients are Miguel
“Mickey” Quiñones, associate professor
of psychology and management; Richard Baraniuk, professor
of electrical and computer engineering; John Olson, the
Ralph and Dorothy Looney Professor of Biochemistry and Cell
Biology; Jack Zammito, associate professor of history and
of German and Slavic studies; and Steve Cox, professor of
computational and applied mathematics.

Ambler, a professor
of political science who specializes in teaching about the
various types of political systems around the world, said
he gets excited about working with the “good, responsive
students” at Rice. And while he acknowledges that maybe
he has gotten better as a teacher, Ambler said the real
reason he’s gotten more awards is that “some of
the people who have been most eligible have maxed out.”

Ambler much prefers
the intimate class sizes at Rice, having taught a European
politics course to a group of 75 students at the University
of California at Berkeley, where one student remarked that
Ambler was the only professor on the campus of 27,500 students
who had learned his name.

To Ambler, preparation
and enthusiasm are the key ingredients for successful teaching.
“If you’re bored with the material, the students
will pick up on that,” he said. “You don’t
have to be a dramatic orator, but you have to convey the
sense that this is important and exciting stuff.”

Quiñones,
who received the Superior Teaching Award for the second
time, said the students who voted for him probably took
his class on statistics and found it to be very applicable.
In fact, it was a statistics course that Quiñones
taught as a graduate student at Michigan State University
that convinced him he wanted to be a teacher.

“While
walking around the classroom and glancing over the shoulder
of a student who was working on a regression problem, I
watched the student form an equation, work it out and solve
it,” Quiñones recalled. “This was something
I taught the students to do, and here they were doing it.
I was hooked.”

The most challenging
aspect of teaching, Quiñones said, is planning for
a good discussion. “You want to make sure that you
have thought through the material and the issues in such
a way that you can ask questions and start a discussion
that really engages students and makes them appreciate the
subject matter and enjoy the learning experience.”

A master at
Baker College, Quiñones is awed by the “very
bright and talented” students at Rice. He always is
pleased when students stop by to say that what he taught
them made them think. “The immediate feedback is great,”
he said, “and this award is even more feedback.”

For Baraniuk,
receiving his first George R. Brown Award for Superior Teaching
is gratifying.

Baraniuk’s
goal is to give students not only the details, but also
to provide the whole picture so they understand how their
projects fit into the outside world.
“I’m lucky that I get to teach courses about signal
processing,” he said. “It’s material that
is still being actively researched and is connected to real-world
things, such as cell phones, the Internet and medical imaging
technology. Students can see the big picture and absorb
the material more deeply.”

He added, “The
Brown award gives me some feedback to know my approach is
working. None of this would have been possible without the
strong teaching mentorship of Sid Burrus [dean of engineering]
and Don Johnson [the J.S. Abercrombie Professor and chair
of electrical and computer engineering],” he said.
“I watched them teach early classes and saw how seriously
they took it. It’s really nice to be at a place like
Rice where good teaching is recognized and matters.”

He is a past
recipient of the

and the 2000 Eta Kappa Nu National Outstanding
Teaching Award for electrical engineering professors.

However, Baraniuk
quipped: “My proudest teaching moment occurred when
I appeared on the back page of the Thresher. I knew I had
finally made it.”

Olson adds his
third Superior Teaching award to his growing collection,
all received in the last four years. He also received the
Amoco Teaching Award in 1995.

Olson, who teaches
biochemistry and physical chemistry for the biosciences,
focuses on the types of problems students will need to address
in medical school, graduate school and biotechnology jobs.

“I put
myself in their place and try to imagine how they’re
struggling to find the solutions,” he said.

“One of
the best rewards is when former students write back and
say, ‘Boy, am I glad you made me learn enzyme kinetics
because it made medical school a lot easier.’”

Olson’s
favorite class to teach is physical chemistry “because
most of the students are hostile at the beginning. It’s
a challenge to convince them that they can do it,”
he said.

Olson suggested
that receiving this award “means that students really
do want to be pushed or at least they are grateful for having
been challenged.

“It’s
very pleasing that former students think that my classes
were worthwhile and taught reasonably well,” he said.
“It’s always amazing to me when I win a teaching
award, considering the complaints I hear during the course.”

Zammito is a
past recipient of the Brown Superior Teaching Award, the
George R. Brown Prize for Excellence in Teaching and the
Nicolas Salgo Distinguished Teacher Award.

“Clearly
there must be something happening in my classroom because
I’ve won several of these now,” he quipped. “It’s
a very gratifying experience.”

Zammito noted
that students often comment about his enthusiasm, not just
for the subject he teaches, European intellectual history
in the 17th through 19th centuries, but also for the students
themselves.

“I’m
interested in their experience at Rice and not just their
experience in my classroom,” said Zammito, a faculty
associate at Hanszen College. “A big part of teaching
excellence is loving the material and teaching the students.”

Zammito has
long been recognized for his teaching. After earning his
doctorate from the University of California at Berkeley,
he became an assistant professor 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.

Cox, who has
described teaching at Rice as the best job in the world,
has received the Brown Superior Teaching Award for the second
time in three years.

As a math teacher,
Cox strives to make his subject matter real. “Ironically,
even our brightest science and engineering students still
see mathematics as a bag of tricks that one must be a magician
to plumb,” he said. “By staying close to the roots
and demanding class participation, I hopefully give them
the confidence to build careful mathematics arguments.”