Graduate students affiliated with the 麻豆视频 & 麻豆视频 were feted earlier this month at a reception honoring their skills as teaching assistants and mentors to undergraduate students.
鈥淎ll of us can remember an extraordinary teacher in our lives, someone who helped us when we thought we might fail, somebody who opened a world to us,鈥 said Gretchen Ritter, Harold Tanner Dean of Arts & 麻豆视频, in congratulating the award winners. 鈥淭his is a great reminder to us that teaching can change lives.鈥
The awards are supported by alumni gifts, Ritter said, and recognize not only innovative teaching, but also student counseling, classroom presence, preparation and administration and the development of new courses.
鈥淭he students honored today are not only excellent teachers, but they鈥檙e first-rate scholars,鈥 said Michael Goldstein, psychology professor and awards committee chair.
The Deanne Gebell Gintner 鈥66 and Family Annual Prize for Teaching Assistants went to:
- Jessica Abel, English
- David Peck, neurobiology and behavior
The Dean鈥檚 Prize for Distinguished Teaching went to:
- Kacie Armstrong, psychology
- Magdala Jeudy, romance studies
- Elizabeth Wijaya, comparative literature
The Stephen and Margery Russell Distinguished Teaching Award went to:
- Debak Das, government
- Ethan Jost, psychology
- Claire Leavitt, government
鈥淚t sounds clich茅, but I really like seeing the looks of recognition on students鈥 faces,鈥 said Leavitt, adding that one class she taught was through Cornell鈥檚 Prison Education Program. 鈥淚 also like to show students that politics isn鈥檛 boring, even though, amazingly, even today, a lot of them think it is.鈥
She thinks part of her job is to encourage people to get interested in politics. 鈥淧olitics doesn鈥檛 really work unless people think it鈥檚 worth participating in,鈥 she said.
Peck, a graduate student in neurobiology and behavior, was honored for his work as a teaching assistant, his efforts to offer writing classes for other graduate students, his organization of a diversity recruitment weekend for the department and a project he worked on with Ithaca鈥檚 Sciencenter museum.
鈥淚 don鈥檛 view teaching as an obligation I have to be paid for, so I鈥檒l take any opportunity I have to teach more people in a different way,鈥 he said. 鈥淥ur society right now needs people who are disseminating knowledge.鈥
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