Top Teachers Receive Awards

Two faculty members and a teaching fellow received the Joseph R. Levenson Memorial Teaching Prize in recognition of excellence in teaching at an award banquet last Friday.

Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics Howard Georgi ’68, Preceptor in Mathematics John D. Boller, and graduate student teaching fellow in chemistry Bryan B. Chang received the prize.

Members of the Undergraduate Council’s Student Affairs Committee (SAC) sifted through more than 200 student nominations before deciding on the winners.

“I was actually very surprised and sort of thought it might have been a mistake of some kind,” said Georgi, who is also master of Leverett House. A recipient of the award in 1999, he said he did not believe the award would be given to the same professor twice.

But Antonio Copete, a teaching fellow in Physics 15b, “Introductory Electromagnetism,” which is co-taught by Georgi, commended the SAC’s decision.

“Even though it’s a class of about 70 students, it seems as if everybody knows each other, and its because of all the opportunities to socialize and work together [that Georgi provides],” Copete said.

Georgi said he focuses on student-faculty interaction.

“I actually don’t think of lecturing as a particularly important part of teaching,” he said. “Teaching does not have to do with a teacher standing in front of a room telling students something but it has to do with teacher-student interactions. “I think we could do to have more of that around this place.”

One way Georgi tries to maximize this interaction is the Personal Response System (PRS), a method pioneered by Harvard College Professor Eric Mazur which allows students to respond in real time via remote control to multiple choice questions. Georgi said he uses the responses to gauge whether his students understand the day’s material and to track student performance throughout the semester.

With the PRS “the course turns into a giant video game a few times during the semester,” Georgi joked, but it also allows him to identify struggling students and talk to them or their freshman dean or tutor. Georgi has even used the PRS to match students with student tutors in their dorm.

Boller, the junior faculty member awarded the prize, is a preceptor for Mathematics 23, “Theoretical Linear Algebra and Multivariable Calculus.”

Christopher G. Parham ’07, who nominated Boller for the award, praised Boller’s skill at keeping students engrossed in the material.

“He really takes an otherwise boring class and makes it entertaining,” Parham said.

Math 23 course assistant Emily Riehl echoed a similar sentiment.

“He’s an amazing lecturer,” she said. “The class is around one hundred [students] and he makes it feel like a seminar. He knows everybody’s names, he takes questions in the middle of lecture. It’s very interactive.”

Chang, the TF recipient of the prize, is a laboratory teaching fellow in Chemistry 27, “Organic Chemistry of Life.”

Known affectionately by his students as “B Chang,” he said he did not expect to win the award.

“I was pretty shocked. My students asked for my address [to complete the nomination form] and I thought they were going to send me a prank through the mail,” Chang said. “I never got anything in the mail—all I got was a banquet invitation.”

Chang, who won the award after only one year of teaching, said he approached his lab section from the mentality that “a lot of people think of labs as a drag, and I said I’m going to make this as fun and laid-back as possible.”

But Chang attributed his award to the students in his section.

“Even after having some time to think about this award, I still don’t know if I deserve it,” he said. “I know for a fact that the students are what made this teaching experience so incredible. Without this particular group of students, I’m certain that I would not have received any recognition for teaching this year.”

The prizes, first awarded in 1983, honor the memory of Joseph B. Levenson ’41, a former history professor at the College.

—Staff writer William C. Marra can be reached at wmarra@fas.harvard.edu.