Different teachers, different styles, different strategies, same goal

By Cassie Ferguson

Gazette Staff

Fanfare bouncing off the cathedral ceilings of Sanders Theatre heralds the arrival of students. As hundreds of undergraduates settle into the pews, the master of ceremonies, Professor of Music Thomas Kelly, strides back and forth across the stage, chatting and arranging microphones for a talk on Monteverdi's Orfeo, one of the earliest surviving operas.

Kelly says his goal for his popular Core Curriculum course, First Nights: Five Performance Premieres, is simply to get students excited about early music. His enthusiastic teaching style could be described as performance lecturing: he struts, hums, shows slides, and tells stories. To emphasize a point about musical phrases, he sings two or three -- accompanying himself on the piano.

And, before class begins, he invites students to approach him anytime with questions.

"You've got to love a person who's passionate about what he does," notes Angel Inokon '99. "Not only is Professor Kelly passionate, but he's very personable. You can see it in the way he talks to students. He values the connection between professor and student. He's also funny."

It's hard to define what makes a great teacher. Humor is certainly an ingredient; accessibility, enthusiasm, intensity, and imagination are others. In some cases, it can mean the ability to recite Shakespearean soliloquies, to untangle complicated biological systems on a blackboard, or to relate something that happened hundreds of years ago to students' everyday lives. An effective teacher can bowl over audiences with powerful speaking, or step back and encourage students to take over.

Large lecture courses like First Nights, with its 700-plus enrollment, require teachers in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences to use extra creativity to grab students' attention.

Professor of History William Gienapp, for example, engages students in his Core course on the American Civil War by playing marching songs, quoting Lincoln, and referring to the popular television show Seinfeld. Professor of Physics Eric Mazur keeps his classes interactive by asking students to solve problems. They type their answers on hand-held computers wired to a computer in front of Mazur, so he can see instantly whether he needs to review the material.

The more intimate setting of a seminar ensures that students take part in the class, learning as much from each other as from the instructor. This dynamic lies at the heart of some courses, like Professor of Afro-American Studies and Philosophy K. Anthony Appiah's, What is an African-American?

Appiah sits at the head of a large wooden table, leading his students in a discussion that ties together readings in history, philosophy, and literature.

"He's brilliant," says Nancy Nanka-Bruce '99. "You could ask him anything and he'd have an answer." And his students pull no punches, grilling him on everything from points in Hume's "Of National Character" to racial symbolism in Shakespeare's Othello.

Students rate Robin Gottlieb, senior preceptor in mathematics, as one of the best teachers at the College. In her class, "Introduction to Functions and Calculus," she knows everyone's name and frequently asks students to explain mathematical concepts in the

context of other disciplines, for example, the mathematical concept of slope in the context of indifference curves, a construct from economics.

Gottlieb will draw a colorful graph on a blackboard and prod even the shyest of students to participate with questions like, "Do you agree that this graph looks right?" and "How would you interpret this equation in words?" The key to her success in the classroom is her exceptional patience, says Dina Hasiotis '01, "No question is too silly."

Students in Professor Elaine Scarry's English and American Literature class, The Brontës, tend to question each other. Scarry hand-picks them to make sure they already have an appreciation for 19th-century writers as well as a powerful bent toward verbal analysis. Those who make it into the seminar will end up Brontë-saturated, taking in prose, poetry, biographies, criticism, and weekly films.

By the second meeting of class, the students are ready to debate the verbal architecture in Wuthering Heights and to present papers detailing the symbolism of dog fights in Emily Brontë's work. Scarry, the Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value, occasionally lectures, but for the most part she structures each class around the students' work, which she previews 24 hours before the class begins.

Sometimes, teachers take the learning experience outside the classroom, letting students see that professors are more than just figures standing in front of a blackboard.

David Latham, senior lecturer on astronomy, co-teaches a Core course called The Astronomical Perspective with Owen Gingerich, professor of astronomy and of the history of science. After class, both of them lunch at student Houses, one at Cabot and the other at Winthrop.

During the meal, faculty and students talk about all sorts of things -- the course, politics, or pet peeves about Harvard College. "Sometimes we come up with crazy ideas for projects to meet the requirements of the course," Latham says. Over the years, students have choreographed dances and produced movies and artwork as part of their coursework.

Why do the faculty bother to meet over lunch? "We do it, first of all, because we're hungry," says Latham. "We also hear things about the course and about our students when we get together with them informally that we wouldn't hear otherwise. It's a lot of fun."