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Kaplan

teachers earn top grade

In a class of their own

ANNE BURKE
UCLA Today Staff

In a dozen years of student evaluations, Associate Professor Kathryn Morgan has received her share of flattering appraisals. But one in particular pleased the classics professor more than others.

“Professor Morgan,” a student wrote, “you rock!”

The Academic Senate Committee on Teaching apparently shares this enthusiastic assessment, naming Morgan among five recipients of this year’s Distinguished Teaching Award. The British-born teacher manages to make her very old subject matter fresh and relevant for 21st-century learners — a feat that she accomplishes by putting her own excitement about ancient Greece and Rome on full display in class. “I’m not bashful about saying, ‘This is the bit that makes the hairs on the back of my neck rise up,’ ”said Morgan, cited for Distinction in Teaching at the Graduate Level.

Morgan

Philosophy’s David Kaplan, winner of the Eby Award for the Art of Teaching, is possessed of what department chair Calvin G. Normore calls a “unique blend of irrepressible enthusiasm and boundless energy.” The Hans Reichenbach Professor of Scientific Philosophy attracts students from around the world — the intellectual rigor of his coursework notwithstanding. He is also an innovator whose Logic 2000 software program revolutionized the teaching and learning of logic. For that, he won the 2003 Brian P. Copenhaver Award for Innovation in Teaching With Technology.

After three academic degrees and four decades of teaching at UCLA, Kaplan shows no signs of leaving, even though the university retirement system would pay him more if he just stayed home. “That hurts my feelings when I think about it, so I try not to think about it,” said Kaplan, who tends to talk with tongue firmly planted in cheek.

Morris

Joan Waugh is known for her popular sequence on the Civil War and Gilded Age. Also a Copenhaver Award winner, Waugh makes her courses a multisensory experience, using photos, film clips, videos, music and Civil War re-enactors to transport her students back in time. Students even nibble on that staple of soldierly life — hardtack. Her Web sites are rich troves of primary documents, historical information, photos and links that help her students “learn about the minds and hearts of ordinary people, as well as understand about the cause and effect of larger events,” she said.

Mark Morris of the Physics and Astronomy Department led the team that restructured general education from an unwieldy smorgasbord of classes to a coherent and intellectually rigorous curriculum. The centerpiece is the freshman cluster, a yearlong, team-taught interdisciplinary course. Morris got confirmation that clusters were a success when one of his toughest critics — his daughter — gave the new approach a thumbs-up after recently taking one herself.

Torrecilla

“The cluster format has delivered in practice all that we had idealistically hoped it might,” Morris said. He is the creator and teacher of a cluster that is a big hit among non-science freshmen, “Origin and Evolution of the Universe, the Earth and Life.”

Jesús Torrecilla of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese enthusiastically takes on difficult teaching assignments and generously spends extraordinary amounts of time with students outside class. “Teaching does not end when you finish the class,” Torrecilla said.

As chair of the Curriculum Committee, Torrecilla guided the revision of the graduate program in Latin American and Peninsula literature. He was the first from his department to teach a Fiat Lux seminar, a course on “Exotic Spain.”

Winners will be feted at the 2004 UCLA Alumni Association Awards night on May 22 and the Academic Senate’s Andrea L. Rich Night to Honor Teaching on Oct. 7, co-sponsored by the Office of Instructional Development.

Waugh