Professing

---

After switching  from being a geologist to being a professor, my life’s work has been to profess what I know to be true: that knowing “how the earth works” will be essential for the future lives of my students.  Teaching is what I do.   This means the sharing of content is more important than the content itself. This is true whether I’m standing in front of the class, sitting in a seminar, writing course texts, running an online course, or publishing articles and books.   The centrality of teaching was true in June 1973 when I was certified by the State of Minnesota to teach high-school science, and it remains true today as I chair the Geoscience curriculum committee at UConn, help oversee and teach UCONN’s  Honors Core curriculum, and co-advise many graduate students.

Link to:    Academic appointments  —  Courses  —  Students

---

Photo: Chalkboard in my old office. I took this photo after a student walked in and asked what it signified.  I couldn’t remember.  That episode helped me realize that my thinking was largely visual and abstract . The picture of Millard Fillmore involves a family story, though my students often ask:  “Who’s the geologist?”