At least three Penn professors do not have to worry about students skipping class.
In total, more than 150 people turned out to hear professors Thomas Childers, Max Mintz and Andrew Shatte lecture as part of Education Week -- regardless of the fact that none of the talks were required for any class and despite this week's low temperatures, snow and sleet.
"We were concerned because of the weather that students wouldn't make it out," said College sophomore and Student Committee on Undergraduate Education Chairwoman Samantha Springer.
Childers, Mintz and Shatte were chosen from among more than 300 professors to receive the first Spotlight on Teaching Awards administered by SCUE and were invited to speak to the student body on topics of their choice this past week. Each professor gave a separate lecture.
The awards recognized the best lecturers on campus, as selected by the student body in December.
All three professors expressed great pleasure at receiving the awards, noting that this recognition holds special significance because the students themselves voted on the winners.
"I won some teaching awards in the past," said Mintz, who teaches in the Computer Science Department. "The student-driven one means a little bit more. They're the reason we're here."
"The students are the end users, the client or customer if you will," added Shatte, a Psychology professor, "so it's most important to me to be acknowledged by them."
The talks given by the winners this week were as diverse as the professors themselves.
Childers, who teaches history, lectured on World War II, which he called "the single largest event in human history," while Shatte discussed the concept of resilience, "one of the fundamental attributes that predicts success," he said.
Mintz decided not to focus on a topic in his discipline but instead discussed his own life's path, which led from being "an 11-year-old interested in radio engineering" to becoming a computer science researcher at Penn.
The variety in the subjects taught by the winners was no accident; the SCUE awards recognized professors in a three different disciplines: humanities, social science and hard science.
"We recognize that lecturing in the humanities is quite different from social science, which is still different from the hard sciences," Springer explained.
Childers won the award for humanities, Shatte for social science and Mintz for hard science.
Despite the differences in discipline, all three professors seemed to share a great love for teaching.
"There's a concept in psychology called 'flow,'" explained Shatte. "It's those times in life when ... you are so in your element, so rapt in what you're doing that you do not notice those external milestones like minutes and hours."
"When I teach, I'm in flow," he said.
Mintz said he teaches because of the pleasure he gets from passing on knowledge to his students.
"There's a look that people get on their faces when they finally get something," Mintz said. "This is a great moment for someone teaching a class, when someone's face lights up."
Childers shared a more concrete reason for teaching.
While growing up, he often heard of his father share his experiences from World War II. These tales seemed to come alive for Childers, and he too "wanted to capture the humanity of [history] and make it seem real" to others, he said.
When talking about teaching, the professors mentioned varying methods they use to try to engage students.
"There ought to be connections between what I'm doing and the wider world," Mintz said. "And of course I try to tell terrible one-line jokes from time to time."
Shatte said it is important to progress smoothly from one topic to the next.
"Each lecture should be a self-contained intellectual and emotional journey, and each lecture should link cohesively to form the 'saga' of the semester," he said. "It's the same principle as performance art."
Childers also likened teaching to an art form.
"Much of what teaching is about is a sort of storytelling," he said.
As different as the professors' methods may be, students raved about their teaching abilities.
Engineering senior Katherine Moore praised Mintz as an "energetic and enthusiastic" professor.
"I'm not alone when I tell you that Max has even met my parents," she added.
Shatte is "able to present psychological theories and empirical data in a way that grabs the students' attention without watering down the science," said Psychology graduate student Seth Gillihan, who served as a teaching assistant for Shatte.
Both Childers and Mintz have been recognized for their teaching in the past.
Childers received the 2000 Senior Class Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, among other awards.
Mintz has also been honored many times, including being one of the recipients of the 2000 Lindback Awards for Distinguished Teaching.
