Drawing on Experience
Ed Epping, art
A young man in Ed Epping’s Drawing II class 20 years ago was having a difficult time deciding on an independent project. He would try something and become frustrated. “Nothing seemed real enough to him,” recalls Epping. A brush with mortality was the cause. Two years before, during his sophomore year, the young man had been diagnosed with testicular cancer and had left midterm to undergo chemotherapy. As a result, says Epping, “A lot of subjects just seemed trivial or irrelevant to him.” One day after class, the student was telling a classmate and Epping about his experience with chemo. Even after many treatments, he didn’t lose his hair at first. To him it was a si gn that he was going to be fine. Then one morning he woke up in the hospital to discover that all his hair had fallen out. He got out of bed and found that the hair formed a perfect silhouette of his body. “That’s a pretty graphic image,” Epping told the student. “What if you were to use that as a basis for your drawing? Make the viewer know how it felt looking at that bed.” The resulting work—mammoth drawings, some of which incorporated real hair—were “some of the most beautiful, powerful images you can imagine,” says Epping. It was a powerful lesson for Epping as well, who realized, “One of the things we don’t trust often enough in students is what it is they already know. Our task is to help them fuse their experiences and truths with what they are trying to learn in class.” The student became an architect. And even though Epping didn’t stay in touch with him, he tells the young man’s story to his class at least once a year. “It’s one way to communicate to students that what they do know is a resource for how to make images. Because if the feelings are genuine and an image is a truthful expression of those feelings, we trust the image. It can’t be challenged.”Learning from Mistakes
Peter Murphy, English
As a relatively new assistant professor at Williams in the 1980s, Peter Murphy was struck by a remark made by a student during a meeting on the subject of teaching. “You know what bothers me?” the student asked. “Professors are always critiquing our problems and faults, but the professors are so resistant to admitting their own mistakes.” Murphy remembers thinking, “He’s right. It does seem wrong that I wouldn’t think of things that I say in the same way I think of things that students say.” It was a moment of revelation for Murphy, who used to feel “panicked” before his literature classes. “You’re so terrified when you’re young,” he says. “You’re thinking all the time that you have to be smarter and faster and assert your authority, when in fact the authority comes not from being right but from running the seminar and allowing the students authority—allowing them to participate in a collaborative way.” The student’s observation made Murphy realize it was OK to make mistakes; in fact, it made classes more interesting. “I could ask my classes actual questions instead of questions to which I already knew the answer. I could be wrong or the students could be wrong, and together we could figure out what was right. “If you go in thinking, ‘I must impart this great lesson,’” Murphy adds, “there’s a terrible pressure. Plus you screw it up about half the time.”
Beyond Office Hours
Wendy Raymond, biology
When a student invited her to lunch in the dining hall one day, Wendy Raymond figured they’d discuss the sophomore’s plan to major in biology. Instead, she learned the young woman’s mother had cancer. It was the start of a relationship that would extend well beyond the classroom. “I became not quite a surrogate parent,” Raymond says, “but more than a mentor.” The young woman, who was from Slovakia, “was 19 years old, halfway around the world from her home and didn’t know what to do,” Raymond says. So when the student’s mother took a turn for the worse, Raymond offered to help her find a travel agent to arrange a flight home. (She was on the plane when her mother passed away.) The young woman returned to campus, and Raymond helped her get extensions on her courses and checked in with her regularly throughout the semester. A year later, the student joined Raymond’s research group. Raymond became her thesis adviser. “She was in my lab with two other thesis students the year I got tenure,” Raymond says. “I have a photo up on the wall of them holding a walnut cake she had made and brought over to the lab that day.” In her valedictory address at graduation, the young woman acknowledged how crucial Raymond’s assistance and encouragement had been at a critical moment in her life. It was a very important lesson for Raymond, who for a long time assumed the most significant role she could play for her students was academic. “While it’s great to be a scientist and an educator,” Raymond says, “there is also a human side that I can give.”
Every Word Counts
Edan Dekel, classics
Two years ago, two students who had been studying the Vikings in another professor’s history class approached Edan Dekel with a proposal. “We know you’ve done work 
on Old Norse literature,” they said, “and we’d love to read some of those Viking sagas in translation.” Dekel agreed to help them pursue their interest informally. For the next two years, he and the students met every other week to read the ancient narratives. “It was not something you’d expect students to do with their free time,” he says with a laugh. What Dekel learned from the experience is that “mentioning something in class, even off the cuff, can often open up new avenues of interest for students: personal, intellectual—even directions for research.” For that reason, he now makes it a point to refer to books he’s reading or ideas he finds interesting, even if they’re not directly related to the course he happens to be teaching. “You’ll say something a student will take to heart, or you’ll mention a book you like, and they come to you six months or a year later and say, ‘We didn’t talk about this in class, but I’m interested in doing something with that. Can you help me?’ It’s a lesson in the power of the instructor—that everything you say can be taken to heart.”
Changing Misconceptions
Gage McWeeny, English
It was his first semester at Williams, and Gage McWeeny’s Victorian literature and culture course wasn’t going as well as he would have liked. He asked his students to suggest improvements. A sophomore approached him and told him, “Here’s my sense of what you’re trying to do and what we’re trying to do. You gave us too much. You’ve intimidated us.” “She was the most astute person about pedagogy,” says McWeeny, who asked the student about her plans for a major after she wrote an especially good paper about a poem by Robert Browning. When she said “English,” he told her, “You have a real intellect there. You could do something good in this major.” The student, who ran track, seemed surprised and said, “There have been a lot of times I thought I was here just because I was fast. Maybe that’s not the case.” For McWeeny, who rowed in college, “It was a reminder to me that there are students here who are dedicated, gifted athletes who do many other things and who might temporarily forget just how good they can be in the classroom.” The student later won a Herchel Smith Fellowship to study at Cambridge. Says McWeeny, “I just happened to be sitting at the table when she got into her stuff.”
A Scientific Partnership
Protik Majumder, physics
Advanced coursework isn’t necessarily a prerequisite for success in the research world—a lesson Tiku Majumder learned from a rising junior who worked in his lab. 
The young man had fewer courses under his belt than the more senior students he was working with that summer, but it was clear he had a knack for asking the right questions and looking at the big picture. “He was very comfortable talking about every aspect of the experiment, not just the little piece he had been involved with,” Majumder says. “He was able to synthesize the whole project. It’s a process most of us take a long time to grow into.” Teachers of undergraduate physics tend to break things down into small pieces, each week assigning a problem set on a particular subject, for example. But Majumder’s experience with the young man—who as a senior was named the best undergraduate physics researcher in the country (in part for a half-hour talk he gave about his work in Majumder’s lab to the professional society granting the award)— made the professor realize he wasn’t being ambitious enough. “I probably came to Williams thinking that having undergraduates involved in our research was more of an exercise in training them how to become scientists, part of our teaching role,” Majumder says. “If they really wanted to, they could go to grad school and become professional scientists.” But “when you encourage students to start being scientists before they leave,” he adds, “with the right students, we can be very ambitious. We can treat them less like students and more like colleagues. We can approach more of a real scientific partnership where they’re publishing papers with us and they’re coming up with ideas that drive the work forward.”
The Personal is Intellectual
Carol Ockman, art
In Carol Ockman’s experience, college was about breadth: Specialization and depth were for grad school. And exploring questions of self-identity was principally a personal, extracurricular activity, not an academic pursuit. Then Ockman met an Indonesian-American art history major who challenged these views. In her last two semesters before graduation, the student chose classes in a range of subjects—Italian Baroque painting, medieval manuscripts, Islamic art. But in each course, she focused on two themes: gender and orientalism. “She chose courses or projects within courses that would enable her to pursue an interest that was completely embedded in questions of her own identity as an ‘exotic’ woman,” Ockman says. “Her courses were all over the map geographically and historically, but she was in the same place with the same questions in each.” Ockman let the young woman take a seminar on Ingres that she was teaching in the graduate program in the history of art. Her in-depth analysis of Ingres’ orientalist painting “The Turkish Bath” won the Arthur B. Graves Prize from Williams for the best essay in art that year. In her senior year, by design and with one exception, the student took courses with female professors only. Ockman found the approach exhilarating. “She looked for courses that would help her grow personally, not just intellectually. For her, personal growth and intellectual growth became one and the same thing.” Ockman is still in touch with her former student, who has since obtained a Ph.D. in art history with a thesis on ethnographic cinema, gone to film school, written a book on “exotic” cinema and made films. She now teaches film history, media studies and filmmaking at a university.
The Realities of Research
Lara Shore-Sheppard, economics
One of Lara Shore-Sheppard’s thesis students was studying the effect of a school-choice lottery system on housing prices in San Francisco. She went to great lengths to get 
data to test her hypothesis, but her models gave inconclusive results due to the rise and fall of the dot-com economy and corresponding boom and bust in the area real estate market. The student came to ShoreSheppard, frustrated. “But this is normal,” Shore-Sheppard recalls telling her. “It’s empirical research. You can’t control for every factor. What did you expect?” The student pointed out that she and her classmates had never seen studies that didn’t work out. “All the papers we’re assigned report successful results,” the young woman said. Shore-Sheppard realized that her students were getting a skewed view of the nature and difficulty of economic research. She has since made it a point to assign a few readings in which either the researchers report unsuccessful results or the successful results reported are based on dubious research. “It’s important,” Shore-Sheppard says, “that the students see that doing good economic research is not as easy as reading just the successful empirical papers might make it seem.” The student went back to work on her thesis and realized that the school-choice effect couldn’t be seen in the subsample of her data comprising condominiums. But there was evidence of it in singlefamily homes, which she argued were more likely to appeal to families with children, who would presumably care more about school quality. Her thesis earned highest honors—“not because she found a result,” says Shore-Sheppard, “but because it was creative and thorough.”
A Fresh Eye
Joan Edwards, biology
During a summer trip to Isle Royale, Mich., to collect botanical data, one of Joan Edwards’ honors students bent down to examine a patch of small, white flowers blooming on the forest floor. “Something just went poof!” the student told her. Edwards put the flower under a microscope, where she and her team could see that one of its petals held a trigger. When they gently pushed back the trigger, it released an explosion of pollen into the air. “The student’s eye had caught something I had missed, something that had been in front of me almost my whole life,” says Edwards, who had grown up seeing the blossoms since she was 12. Edwards brought some of the Bunchberry Dogwood back to her lab at Williams and, with the help of physics professor Dwight Whitaker, photographed its pollinating mechanism with a high-speed camera. Their discovery—that the buds of the bunchberry burst open and fire their pollen into the air three times faster than the time it takes for a bullet to leave a rifle barrel—was published in Nature and earned the flower a place in The Guinness Book of World Records. She and her student were interviewed on National Public Radio, and the flower opened up a whole new research avenue for Edwards. “Students bring a fresh eye,” Edwards says. “Bunchberry Dogwood was so familiar to me, I didn’t take the opportunity to look at it closely. When you’re used to seeing something, you tend to think it is ordinary— when in fact it might be extraordinary.”
Finding Common Ground
Joseph Cruz ’91, philosophy
A first-year student in Joe Cruz’s introductory philosophy class struck up a conversation with him that would continue intermittently over coffee, lunch, e-mail and strolls through 
town over the next three years—despite the fact that she never took another course with him and went on to major in political economy. “Usually I’m mentoring a student into my field,” says Cruz. “This student was not going into philosophy or cognitive science, but clearly we had a shared interest in the same questions: What makes us human? What makes our humanistic relationships work? For me, these were questions of cognitive science. For her they were questions of politics.” Cruz self-identifies as Puerto Rican, urban, East Coast. The student was from the Deep South. Yet they found a way to talk across their differences and disciplines. “She had a habit, which I admired, of drawing on many different fields in our discussions,” recalls Cruz. “I found myself stepping out of my own discipline to communicate with her.” They discovered they both had read Faulkner. Finding in Faulkner’s universe an example of Hume’s view that family ties and small-group relationships shape our moral behavior clarified the contrast between the Scottish philosopher’s ideas and those of Plato and Kant. Cruz says his conversations with the young woman reminded him that in order to teach philosophy to undergraduates, “I can’t just stay in philosophy. In this case, I had to think about the South; she had to think about Plato. “There is something glorious about blending across disciplines insights that will eventually bring you back to the thing you’re interested in,” Cruz adds. “It stretches you as a teacher and as an intellectual.” The student became Cruz’s teaching assistant in her senior year and, since graduating, has worked in politics and community service in the South. She plans to go to law school. She and Cruz still keep in touch.
