Departments
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Week of 11 June 1999 |
Vol. II, No. 35 |
Feature
Article
Metcalf Award recipients honored for ability to engage students
By Eric McHenry
The Metcalf honors were established in 1974 by the late Arthur G. B. Metcalf (SED'35, Hon.'74), who was a longtime chairman of the University's Board of Trustees. The prizes recognize a professor's scholarship, dedication, and commitment to students. Candidates are recommended by students, faculty, and alumni, and undergo an extensive review process by a committee of faculty and students. The 1999 Metcalf Cup and Prize winner is Kevin Smith (see story, page 1). David Roochnik and Raymond Nagem are this year's Metcalf Award recipients.
David Roochnik
It's no accident that David Roochnik uses the present tense
when talking about a philosopher who's been dead for
two-and-a-half millennia.
"I simply think that Plato is right about a lot of things," Roochnik says, affirming even with his word choice a belief he makes manifest in the classroom: in fruitful philosophic inquiry, the great thinkers of the past are living presences. His teaching model, not surprisingly, is the Platonic dialogue.
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David Roochnik |
Here Roochnik refers not only to philosophy as his students experience it, but to his own thinking. Some academics notoriously feel that their independent scholarly work -- research, writing, and publishing -- is compromised by the demands of teaching, or vice versa. For Roochnik, who teaches both in the Core Curriculum and at the advanced graduate level, the two pursuits are indispensable to each other.
"I think for me the connection between teaching and writing is almost seamless," he says. "Almost everything I've written has had its origin in my teaching. There's something about trying to explain things to students, even introductory-level students, that helps me think. Philosophic inquiry is always a matter of going back to the basics, to the fundamental questions. In a certain sense, every philosophy course is an introduction to philosophy. So whether I'm teaching 101 or 801, I'm engaged in the activity that makes the most sense to me. If I were offered the opportunity simply to write, I wouldn't take it, because I would at some point have nothing left to say."
Raymond Nagem
Conversely, Metcalf Award winner Raymond Nagem
feels that if it were not for his independent research, he
would have little of value to bring to the lecture hall. An
ENG associate professor of aerospace and mechanical
engineering, Nagem is keenly aware that his is a field of
applied study. Engineering professors risk losing sight of
this fundamental fact, he says, when they fail to keep
current. But it's their students who truly lose out.
"To be just a teacher is probably not the best thing," he says, "particularly in engineering, because the way one teaches the elementary courses should be influenced by a sense of what the really important applications are. A professor who isn't active isn't going to do as well teaching, even at the introductory level."
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Raymond Nagem |
"For some teachers, this would be an embarrassing error, but the students in Flight Structure know better," Silber said. "They understand that Professor Nagem knows exactly where the demonstration went astray and that it is their task to scramble back up the tree of equations and diagrams to find the error and fix it."
"I try to approach a problem from the beginning and get the class to work through it together," Nagem says. "And we don't always take the most direct route to an answer. The important thing is to get the students to do something, as opposed to just sit there and listen or watch. Science isn't only about answers. It's about how one seeks and arrives at those answers."