Graduate School Excellence in Teaching

Graduate School Teaching Assistant award recipients (from left); back row: David Harrison, John Tauer; middle row: David Hanson, Joseph Wong, Eric Benedict; from row: Jennifer Klug, Alexandra Walter, Cheryl Grood.

Eight top teaching assistants have been honored with Graduate School Excellence in Teaching Awards for 1998-99. The students — four from the Humanities and Social Sciences Divisions and four from Biological Sciences and Physical Sciences — each were presented a certificate and honorarium of $1,000.

Fannie LeMoine, a Graduate School associate dean and chair of the committee that selected the recipients, calls the opportunity to recognize outstanding graduate student teachers “one of the great pleasures of the spring semester.”

She adds, “Departments show a great deal of care and attention in nominating their students. My only regret is that we are unable to reward more of these excellent young teachers.”

This year’s recipients are:

Eric R. Benedict, electrical/computer engineering, who has received excellent reviews of his teaching for eight semesters, has been active in the college’s teaching improvement workshops and plans to become a university professor;

Cheryl Phyllis Grood, mathematics, who has been given a perfect score on the quality of her teaching from her students three times, has been a TA leader, a mentor for undergraduate women math majors and a tutor for Women in Science and Engineering;

David T. Hanson, botany, who has been praised by faculty members for his mastery of a variety of subjects and courses, organizational skills, enthusiasm and concern for students, has been called by a faculty member “one of the kindest and most patient teaching assistants I have known”;

David Richard Harrison, French and Italian, unanimously nominated by his department, has been praised as both the department’s outstanding senior graduate student and a TA whose classes are “lessons in the pleasure of learning”;

Jennifer Lynn Klug, zoology, a TA for only three semesters, has been praised by a lecturer as the best TA she had seen in 12 years on the job, and by an undergraduate student who said simply, “She knows everything”;

John Michael Tauer, psychology, a perfect 4.0 graduate student who considers teaching his top priority, has taught six different courses to rave reviews from students and was called by his department “the best teaching assistant we have seen in years”;

Alexandra Walter, Slavic languages and literature, who in four years has earned more teaching experience than any TA in the history of the department, has combined intense commitment to students with real-world knowledge gleaned from working on a Russian fishing boat and helping establish the first social day care program for Russian-speaking elderly in New England; and

Joseph Yit-chong Wong, political science, whose student evaluations after his first semester of teaching were so good that they caused the department’s TA evaluation spreadsheet to generate error messages, is considered political science’s best TA in many years.