Secrets of an 'outstanding' prof
September 4, 2008
Comments on this story
(14)
Louise Brown
EDUCATION REPORTER
Look to the person on your left, barks the professor. Now look to the one on your right.
In three years, one of you will be gone; it won't have worked out, you will have had to leave.
It's the hardball opener professors have used for decades to knock cocky freshmen down to size. But this was English professor Nick Mount talking to fellow University of Toronto professors in a workshop on how to design a good first class.
"How did you feel when I said that? Sure, the hard-ass Hollywood coach talks tough in movies, but it's exactly the wrong first impression to leave people with in an institution devoted to curiosity," said the award-winning professor to 40 colleagues who had signed up for his recent two-hour primer on how to hook students in from the start.
As college and university students across Canada return to campus, there is a growing focus on the quality of teaching, not just research. Faced with demanding "helicopter parents" whose children are paying record fees and expect value for their money, most institutions are working to buff up the undergraduate experience – including the lecture hall. More and more, good teachers like Mount are being tapped for their secrets.
No wonder. His lectures are so popular, students have set up a Facebook fan site called I Heart Nick Mount. There are waiting lists for his classes, his Rate-My-Professor rankings are in the stratosphere, he's a repeat nominee for TVO's Best Lecturer Award and he won an Outstanding Teaching Award in 2007 from the U of T's Faculty of Arts and Science, the largest university faculty in Canada.
To him, the first moments count.
"New research suggests we have only seconds to make a first impression, so don't waste them playing the heavy and reading the rules. Show them why you have a passion for the field, because passion is infectious – and if students catch that passion, you'll need fewer rules."
As part of its own back-to-school orientation for professors, the U of T's Office of Teaching Advancement asked Mount to share some of his Dos and Don'ts:
Don't try hard to be funny. Most profs weren't hired for their stand-up comedy skills. Play to your strength, teach what you love.
Don't dumb it down. Aim just over the head of the best student but make sure you can be understood by the worst.
Kick off the opening class with your best story, your best case history, your most rare biological specimen to show them why this subject is worthy of study.
Be approachable but don't work to become their friend; they have their own friends. What students are paying for is your expertise.
Don't try to be hip. You can't keep up.
"He's right. It's awful having a professor use that look-to-the-left line; two profs did that with us and we all felt awful," said veteran pharmacy professor Doris Kalamut, who came to Mount's workshop to polish her teaching skills. "We're baby boom professors teaching millennial students (children of the baby boomers) who learn very differently, so you need to keep up."
But you needn't change everything, said Mount. Despite the growing trend for professors to post their lecture notes online before class, Mount won't do it, not before class, not after.
When he takes 440 first-year students through the dub rhythms of a Toronto poet or shows them how the design of the ROM Crystal echoes a theme in T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land or plays Sting's "Don't Stand So Close to Me" to tie in with the novel Lolita, he wants students to actually think about what he's saying, not follow some point-form summary. His entire two-hour lecture, he says, should generate half a page of notes. The rest should be in their heads, not their laptop.
"The lecture is a unique genre, and taking good notes in a lecture is about picking out what actually matters, not making a transcript of the class," said Mount, whose first-year course "Literature of Our Time" draws full crowds despite the worst time slot on campus, Friday afternoon. Student David Topping says he has even brought friends to the lecture just to hear it.
Four years after taking a first-year class with Mount, student Sara Rhyno still remembers how he began.
"He started off by telling us his mother didn't understand his fascination with The Lord of the Rings; that she couldn't understand the value of something that was a `lie,' that was not real," she recalled. "Mount, a teacher of fiction, tried to explain to his mother, and I think to us, that the greatest truths are found in the way we construct our `lies;' our fiction," said Rhyno.
"He started off his course, and my university career, with the wisdom that literature can reveal truths in a way that reality often cannot. That sentiment has stayed with me and shaped how I approach my own study of literature."
Fourth-year student Joe Howell is first on the waiting list for Mount's theory course this fall because he remembers how much he enjoyed the first-year class.
"It was the best class I've ever had, but he's not easy. He opens up difficult subjects with the books he chooses and really probes into hidden meanings and symbolism that can be very, very challenging."
See the rest of our back-to-school section here.
Toronto Star