Professors: The Little Professor That Could

One of our professors is an adorable, round little bald guy. He's super nice and cares for all his students. What does he teach? Grass.

As a subset of Nutrition, we have a once weekly lecture on agronomy. That's basically learning about grass and pasture. You'd be surprised at how passionate some people can get about grass. The lectures are pretty good, and they're interesting except for the fact that they are about grass.

This guy cares so much for his students. He's willing to spend as much time as anyone needs to teach them about grass, saying that we pay enough to get as much one-on-one time as it takes. We have an assignment to do that involves a lot of work in spreadsheets, and he constructed a fancy template, examples, and even set it up so if we enter data points into the template they will automatically form a graph. Before giving us any problems, he pretends he's a student and does them himself to make sure they're reasonable. Even during lectures, he's always commenting on the body language, and if people look too bored he'll adjust the lecture accordingly. He'll also make sure to give us as much extra readings and resources as any A+ student could ever want. Before our physiology midterm, he cancelled his class, since it was on the same day.

How much friendlier could you get! Once, he responded an email of mine, and then sent a second email saying, "PS, keep smiling!"

He does go a bit overboard. I guess he wasn't very good at math when he was growing up because he goes entirely out of his way to make sure we understand any calculations we may need to do. This would be fair, except for the fact that they are some of the most basic equations you can get. It's not really necessary to explain how to plug in numbers, or describe the equation for a line. However, he's very concerned that we might find it patronizing, and will give a polite explanation of why he feels the need to go into detail about something.

One thing that's pretty funny is he likes to toot his own horn every so often. He'll make some comment like, "Back when I was an undergrad, I wasn't a straight A's honors student because I regurgitated formulas. I learned the concepts behind them."

One time, a slide of his read that a farmer had purchased a "fairy farm" instead of a "dairy farm." I didn't notice at first, but I did hear muffled laughter around the room. Poor guy was just as confused as I was, until finally he changed slides and someone pointed out the mistake. He was pretty embarrassed, but that's a great typo if you ask me.

There's something just really cute about everything he says. I think it's a combination of his concern that everyone understands everything and is interested in what he's teaching, and the fact that he's teaching about grass. He often waffles around with anecdotes, grinning about a study or a discussion about a colleague he wants to tell us about. The other day, he went off on a side story, prefacing it with, "As an aside with a smile..." Adorable!

Now, if he were teaching anatomy or physiology, we'd be all set.