Teacher

After switching  from being a geologist to being a professor in 1979, my life’s work has mainly been to help my students grow into more effective planetary citizens.  That’s forty five years and counting.  Teaching is what I do, more so than researching or writing.   This is true whether I’m standing in front of the class, guiding a field trip, sitting in a seminar, writing course texts, supervising an online course, or publishing articles and books.   The centrality of teaching was manifest as early as June 1973 when I was certified by the State of Minnesota to teach high-school science. It remains central today across the span from first-year seminars for the Honors Program to co-advising PhD students in the Department of Earth Sciences.  In 2023, a team I’m leading won the annual Teaching, Learning, and Student Success Award from UConn’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences for ERTH 1000E – The Human Epoch: Living in the Anthropocene.

Link to:    Academic appointments  —  Courses  —  Students

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Photo: Chalkboard in my old office. I took this photo after a student walked in and asked me what the scribbling signified.  I couldn’t remember.  That episode helped me realize that my thinking has always been largely visual and conceptual. The picture of Millard Fillmore provokes students to ask:  “Who’s the geologist?”