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Award finalists welcomed to campus

April 29, 2009

By Sommer Ingram
Staff writer

Three finalists have been chosen for Baylor's 2010 Robert Foster Cherry Award for Great Teaching. The finalists will visit Baylor's campus during the fall semester, and the winner will be announced in spring 2010.

The three finalists are: Dr. Edward Burger, Distinguished Professor of Mathematics at Williams College; Dr. Roger Rosenblatt, Distinguished Professor of English at Stony Brook University; and Dr. Elliott West, Distinguished Professor of History at University of Arkansas.

The Cherry Award is the largest award given to an individual for teaching and is designed to honor exceptional teachers.

The winner of the award will receive $200,000 and an additional $25,000 for his home department. The winner will also spend a semester at Baylor teaching in residence.

"I am enormously honored to be chosen for this award by such a serious, nationally ranked university as Baylor," Burger said. "It's really great that Baylor celebrates teaching in such a profound way. At many universities, teaching isn't valued enough, but Baylor is really serving as a role model for all higher education institutes. To see a school that values both serious scholarship and profound teaching is encouraging."

Burger has taught mathematics at Williams College since 1990, and his area of expertise is in number theory.

"This is an ancient form of math that, at its core, aims to understand the mysteries and intricacies of the world of mathematics," Burger said. "This is a discipline rich and steeped in history, but it is also extremely useful in the modern and technological world."

Burger cites the series of middle school and high school math textbooks he co-wrote as one of the biggest successes of his career. Along with the textbook, Burger produced a video to go along with every example in the book explaining the math behind each answer.

"I get about half a dozen emails each day from students all over the country thanking me for these videos and telling me about the impact it has had on them," he said. "That's what we're trying to do as educators: change lives. We have to think more broadly about how we can help students understand. So to get that kind of feedback is really heartening."

Bringing undergraduates to the forefront of number theory research is something Burger takes pride in doing. He taught a course titled 'Exploring Creativity,' which integrated studio art, music, philosophy and mathematics.

"The mathematician has more in common with the artist than possibly any other discipline," he said. "In both fields we are using our imagination to look at the world in new and innovative ways. In math, we deal in absolute truths of nature, but at the end of the day both the mathematician and the artist are trying to create new ideas. We just use different canvases for our creation."

If chosen for the Cherry Award, Burger said he would like to bring a similar concept to Baylor in a classroom setting.

"I would love to engage as many students as possible beyond the mathematics department and actively engage the entire university to think beyond the divisional lines of departments," he said.

Rosenblatt, who has a 40-year career in literature, has published 12 books and more than 300 essays and articles.

"I love teaching writing to students. It's a way of teaching them how to discover themselves," he said. "I try to find ways to help them express themselves in the most interesting and original ways, but most of all, to help them actually have something to say."

He is currently working on a book based on an essay he had published in the New Yorker in December 2008 about getting accustomed to life with his grandchildren after the death of his daughter.

West is a specialist in the social and environmental history of the American West, and has studied and written numerous pieces about social history.

"I am especially interested in daily life, especially from a child's perspective," West said. "They see it very differently from the rest of us, which gives us a very different perspective of this part of American history."

Just last week West had his book, "The Last Indian War: The Nez Perce Story" published. In this book, West tells the story of the war of 1877, which is often regarded as a pivotal moment in a Western period called the Greater Reconstruction.

"What I do is try to put that really remarkable story inside of the bigger scheme of what was going on in the country at the time," he said.

If chosen for the award, West looks forward to teaching western history in Texas.

" I think the key to teaching is that it is a very individual enterprise," West said. "You have to ask yourself what it is about you that will make you the most effective teacher possible."

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