April 2012
04.30.2012 | by Bill Krueger | Filed under Alumni Association News, College of Education, Faculty News | Comments: One response |
The Alumni Association will honor 21 NC State professors on May 3 for their outstanding work in the classroom, in the laboratory and in the field. We talked (via email) with some of the recipients about their work and the keys to being a successful professor.
Today we’re visiting with Jessica DeCuir-Gunby, an associate professor of education in the College of Education. DeCuir-Gunby is one of seven professors being recognized with Outstanding Teacher Awards.
What is the key to being a successful teacher? I feel there are several keys to being a successful teacher. First, it is important to establish a healthy student-teacher relationship that is based upon trust and respect; this helps to create a welcoming learning community. I also think that a successful teacher is encouraging; it is imperative to help motivate students to believe in their abilities both in and outside of the classroom. Third, a successful teacher uses culturally relevant methods to help students learn course content; it is necessary to incorporate students’ experiences as well as popular culture and recent events into course materials. Last, a successful teacher makes course content applicable to students’ futures; it is essential to provide real-world activities that can be applied to students’ professional lives.
What gives you the greatest satisfaction as a professor? I love receiving correspondence from former students stating how they were able to use what they learned in my class in their respective professions. I receive great satisfaction knowing that my courses are directly applicable to my students’ lives. I also receive satisfaction when students decide to continue their learning based upon taking one of my courses. It is quite humbling to know that I have helped inspire students to further their education.
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04.30.2012 | by Bill Krueger | Filed under NC State History | Comments: No responses |
It was not that long ago that businesses in downtown Raleigh and along Hillsborough Street would refuse to serve blacks. But students, faculty and leaders at NC State battled to break down those barriers as the Civil Rights movement made its way throughout the South.
Chancellor John T. Caldwell and the Faculty Senate applauded a resolution by student government in 1960 calling for the integration of Raleigh’s public facilities. For three years, students and university officials talked with area business leaders and engaged in a letter-writing campaign calling for integration.
Those efforts finally paid off in 1963, when Baxley’s became the first restaurant on Hillsborough Street to serve blacks.
But the efforts didn’t stop there. In fact, they were intensified after Dr. Angie Brooks, a black United Nations delegate visiting from Liberia, was refused service at the S&W Cafeteria and the Sir Walter Raleigh Coffee Shop, according to Alice Elizabeth Reagan’s account in North Carolina State University: A Narrative History.
So on this day in 1963, students and faculty from NC State joined students from Shaw University and St. Augustine’s College to march downtown to protest racial segregation policies at the State Theatre in downtown Raleigh and at businesses in Cameron Village.
Within a few years, following the passage of federal civil rights legislation in 1964, most Raleigh businesses opened their doors to black customers.
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04.28.2012 | by Bill Krueger | Filed under Alumni Association News, College of Veterinary Medicine, Faculty News | Comments: No responses |
The Alumni Association will honor 21 NC State professors on May 3 for their outstanding work in the classroom, in the laboratory and in the field. We talked (via email) with some of the recipients about their work and the keys to being a successful professor.
Today we’re visiting with Don Thrall, a professor in the Department of Molecular Biomedical Science in the College of Veterinary Medicine. Thrall is one of three professors being recognized with Outstanding Extension and Outreach Awards.
What is the key to being a successful teacher? There are certainly others who are more adept at teaching than I, but I think patience and flexibility are important attributes. Many times helping someone become proficient requires reviewing the same point or concept on multiple occasions. Using different scenarios or examples to emphasize the same point has also been an effective method for me.
What gives you the greatest satisfaction as a professor? No question, the success of those you have helped instruct. It isn’t one’s personal advances but the advances, and the maturation of thinking and analytical skills, in your students that gives extreme satisfaction.
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04.27.2012 | by Bill Krueger | Filed under Campus Buildings, College of Engineering, NC State History | Comments: No responses |
Visitors to NC State’s acclaimed College of Engineering these days will find themselves in new buildings on Centennial Campus.
But over 60 years ago, engineering students and professors were still settling into new space on NC State’s main campus. On this day in 1951, the newly-opened Riddick Laboratory was dedicated. More than 200 NC State officials, professors, staff and students gathered for the dedication.
Riddick Laboratory, which now houses the Physics Department and offices and classrooms for the Department of Animal Science, was named for Wallace Carl Riddick. In addition to being NC State’s first football coach (hence Riddick Stadium), Riddick was the university’s first dean of engineering and its fourth president.
The completion of Riddick Laboratory in 1949, at a cost of $1.3 million, came at a great time for the engineering program. The program received new accreditation for several of its disciplines, meaning that only Harvard and MIT had more accredited engineering programs, according to Alice Elizabeth Reagan’s North Carolina State University: A Narrative History.
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04.27.2012 | by Chris Saunders | Filed under Alumni Association News, Campus Landmarks, Student Life, Student News | Comments: No responses |
Six years ago, the Alumni Association started placing student class rings in the Bell Tower the night before they were given out at the ring ceremony. That duty has always fallen to Thomas H. Stafford Jr., vice chancellor for student affairs, who would tuck the rings in at night in the historic landmark.
Today, students will experience a new twist on that already popular tradition.
For the first time ever, students receiving class rings at Sunday’s ring ceremony are invited to place the rings in the Bell Tower themselves. They can show up today at 4 p.m. at the Bell Tower’s base to receive their rings in the box — but remember, opening it and taking the ring out is bad luck — and listen as Stafford describes the significance of the tradition.
There are 330 students receiving rings, the most ever in a spring semester. On Sunday morning, the rings will be removed from the Bell Tower and taken to the Park Alumni Center for two afternoon ring ceremonies. One is at 2 p.m. and the other is at 4 p.m.
If you have any questions, please contact Meredith Craig, Alumni Association marketing coordinator, at (919) 515-0559, or by email at meredith_craig@ncsu.edu.
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04.27.2012 | by Bill Krueger | Filed under Alumni Association News, College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, Faculty News | Comments: No responses |
The Alumni Association will honor 21 NC State professors on May 3 for their outstanding work in the classroom, in the laboratory and in the field. We talked (via email) with some of the recipients about their work and the keys to being a successful professor.
Today we’re visiting with Barry Croom, a professor of agricultural and extension education in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. Croom is one of six professors being recognized as Distinguished Undergraduate Professors.
What is the key to being a successful teacher? There is no “magic bullet” to being a successful teacher. It’s a combination of knowledge, experience, skill, magic and luck. You see, the success of any teacher is dependent on how successfully the students learn. It’s not about what the teacher does in the classroom. It’s about what the student does. Learning is not a linear function. It’s organic, and depends upon the whole of a student’s life experiences up to and including their time in our classrooms. Successful teachers are those who understand that learning does not wait to occur in the classroom, nor does it always happen as we think it might when we are presenting a lesson. Great teachers pay attention to what the students are doing and thinking both inside and outside the classroom. The successful teacher thinks about student learning all the time, and continually devises ways to get students closer to the content of the lesson.
As a result of this continual focus on student learning, the best teachers create some amazing experiences that help students gain the most benefit from the lesson content. This occasionally means deviating from the prepared script of a lesson, and teaching a lesson differently than the way it was taught last semester. As one of my great teachers once said in a classroom over in Harrelson Hall, “We have the outline of lessons in the syllabus. We may complete them all, or we may not. In this course, we will go as far as you are willing to go.” Great teachers take
students as far as they can go.
What gives you the greatest satisfaction as a professor? My job is divided into two basic functions – teaching and research. As a researcher, my greatest satisfaction comes when a project significantly advances the knowledge base in my field. It is satisfying when my students see a practical and immediate use for my research.
With regard to teaching, the “teachable moment” is immensely satisfying. Whenever I cultivate interest in a lesson to the point where it is visibly evidence on the students’ faces and in their posture, that’s a good day at the office. I also find it satisfying when I see students apply the “triple transfer of learning.” That is, when students take subject matter that I taught them, and they teach it correctly to others, then I know they’ve learned the lesson well.
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04.26.2012 | by Chris Saunders | Filed under Campus Buildings, Sports | Comments: No responses |
NC State is at the center of a rock ‘n’ roll treasure hunt, as a music memorabilia buyer has set out to find a rare poster from a Rolling Stones concert at Reynolds Coliseum in 1965.
Andrew Hawley, of Vintage Rock Posters, has announced that he’s willing to pay $5,000 for the poster of the concert on NC State’s campus.
The poster was used in seven venues on that particular tour, including Raleigh, Charlotte and Greensboro, N.C., and they would just change the name for each city. Only 100 posters were printed for the Raleigh show. The poster’s unique qualities include a picture of the band with a title of one of their greatest hits, “Satisfaction,” in small print.
Hawley has this picture of the poster he's seeking from the Reynolds concert.
Why is the poster so valuable to Hawley and other collectors?
One reason is that the tour marked only the second U.S. tour for the Stones, who had first come to the states a year earlier in 1964. But there’s also a personal connection to the poster for Hawley, who has the posters for the Charlotte and Greensboro shows.
“My dad grew up in Roanoke Rapids, N.C.,” he says. “It’s been something I’ve always been looking for. I actually saw a picture of it a long time ago.”
Hawley, who is 46 and lives in Denver, Colo., spends his time tracking down posters of other rock ‘n’ roll greats like Bob Dylan, Elvis Presley, Janis Joplin and Buddy Holly. He appreciates the fact that the posters were randomly put up almost 50 years ago and are now resurfacing.
“I’ve been collecting posters since 1986,” he says. “A lot of this stuff was just hung up in laundromats and barber shops.”
Contact Hawley if you have any information on the poster.
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04.26.2012 | by Chris Saunders | Filed under NC State History, Sports | Comments: No responses |
The Wolfpack men’s basketball team in 1946 consisted mostly of freshmen. They faced a 28-game schedule that included a new approach — taking a six-game Midwestern trip before Christmas. And they were adjusting to a new brand of ball, with offensive fastbreaks and defensive presses that had not been seen in the Southeast.
Those innovations came from Indiana with the man who would bring a tradition of excellence to Wolfpack basketball for the next 18 years. On this day in 1946, the university hired Everett Case as the head men’s basketball coach. He compiled a 377-134 record and won 10 conference championships during his tenure in Raleigh.
Case, who was nicknamed “the Old Gray Fox,” came here wanting to change the culture of basketball at NC State.
“He wanted them to dream bigger,” Bethany Bradsher said in an interview with NC State magazine last winter. Bradsher’s book, The Classic: How Everett Case and His Tournament Brought Big-Time Basketball to the South, chronicles how Case used the Dixie Classic to put NC State at the center of the college basketball world.
“He wanted NC State to see they could be a national powerhouse,” she said. “He made sure there was a basketball goal in every boy’s driveway in North Carolina.”
As Bradsher points out in her book, Case just didn’t change basketball with a new style and lots of victories. He found creative ways to promote basketball, even going so far as to have his players warm up before games wearing red capes.
“He also introduced the now-ubiquitous traditions like dimming the lights during pregame player introductions and cutting down nets after a big win,” she writes.
Case died in 1966, two years after he left NC State, from a battle with cancer. He was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Mass., in 1982.
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04.26.2012 | by Bill Krueger | Filed under Alumni Association News, CHASS, Faculty News | Comments: No responses |
The Alumni Association will honor 21 NC State professors on May 3 for their outstanding work in the classroom, in the laboratory and in the field. We talked (via email) with some of the recipients about their work and the keys to being a successful professor.
Today we’re visiting with Shevaun Neupert, an associate professor of psychology in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences. Neupert is one of seven professors being recognized as Outstanding Teachers.
What is the key to being a successful teacher? I’m sure there are several keys to being a successful teacher. In a sense, if you consider each student a lock, no one key will fit everyone. The ability to be flexible, teach material in a variety of ways, and listen to students’ feedback are all important. Some of the ways that I strive to be a successful teacher are to: a) convey my enthusiasm for teaching in general and the course material specifically; b) provide students with the tools they need to be successful; and c) make clear connections between the course material and its application to students’ lives and careers.
What gives you the greatest satisfaction as a professor? Because many graduate students begin my quantitative courses with an apprehension (and some with an outright fear) of statistics, I take the time to explain that my goal is for each student to master the information and that I will do everything I can to facilitate the process. Sometimes this takes the form of encouraging words when trying to learn a new statistical software program, sometimes it means that I share stories of the difficulties I encountered when I first started learning the material, and many times it means meeting with students outside of class to make sure the material and its application are understood. I strive to give them a positive experience with a topic that many consider their least favorite when the semester begins. I am thrilled when students approach me at the end of the semester and tell me that they actually enjoyed learning about statistics. Many students ask me to serve on their master’s and doctoral committees, and my greatest satisfaction is seeing them apply the training they learned in my classes to their own research areas.
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04.26.2012 | by Bill Krueger | Filed under Faculty News, Memories | Comments: No responses |
With the Alumni Association getting ready to honor 21 NC State professors next week with the 2012 Faculty Awards, we were wondering about your memories of professors you had during your time on campus.
No matter what your major was, you probably had a professor who you’ll never forget. Maybe it was someone who always managed to crack the class up with a good joke. Maybe you had a professor who became a mentor or an inspiration, either for your career or the way you’ve lived your life.
We’d love to hear your memories of your favorite — or most memorable - NC State professors. Share your stories with us, and we’ll share some of them in the Memories section of the summer issue of NC State magazine.
Feel free to tell your story in the comments section or, if you prefer, send it to us by email at ncstate_editor@ncsu.edu
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