Stories by Diane Luckow

Each year, SFU recognizes three outstanding educators with $2,000 teaching excellence awards at the university’s annual awards dinner. This year’s winners, who a committee of faculty, alumni and students selected from 24 nominees, exemplify teaching at its best, willingly contributing their time, enthusiasm and knowledge to help their students learn and grow.

Lynne Quarmby
“Inspiring” is a word that appears consistently in the student letters nominating cell biologist Lynne Quarmby for a teaching excellence award.

Students frequently say that her passion for science has inspired them to pursue a career in cell biology, or her compassion towards them has inspired them to be more compassionate to others.

Quarmby, a professor in the molecular biology and biochemistry department, approaches her teaching with a view to sharing her excitement about science.

“I’m not just teaching future scientists, I’m teaching future citizens,” she says. “Whatever my students end up doing, their science education will be of tremendous value.”

She particularly enjoys the challenge of engaging disinterested students. The key, she says, is to make lessons relevant and put them into a larger context.

“You have to come up with a hook,” she says. “What they’re learning should be interesting enough that they would want to go home and share it over dinner with their family and friends.”

Quarmby’s love for teaching science extends beyond the university classroom. She has taken science-writing courses and now writes a blog at blog.quarmby.ca and a science column for online literary magazine Numéro Cinq at numerocinqmagazine.com as a means of engaging a bigger audience.

She also now asks her students to write a 750-word popular science story on what they are learning, an exercise that helps deepen their understanding of the material while they discover its relevance for themselves.

Despite her devotion to teaching, Quarmby remains a committed researcher and says the two vocations “feed each other wonderfully.”

“Research breathes life into my teaching,” she says. “Not only can I share my excitement and stories from the front lines, but also a sense of the amount of work required to make a discovery that becomes a single paragraph in a textbook.”

Ash Parameswaran
Several years after Ash Parameswaran joined SFU’s School of Engineering Science in 1990 the school abandoned its newly introduced best teacher award, as chosen by the undergraduate student society.

Parameswaran had won it three years in row, recalls acting director John Jones, and it was clear he would always win it.

“The reason Ash’s teaching stands out, even in a school with a number of very good teachers, is simple,” says Jones. “He takes delight in discovery and creation, and he is able to convey that delight to his students.”

Parameswaran says he loves everything about teaching and engaging with students.

“In my mother tongue, Tamil, there is a saying that knowledge is the only form of wealth that you can give to someone else without losing anything yourself,” he says.

And there’s no question that Parameswaran likes to spread his wealth—and his passion for learning. He works alongside students in the lab, often late into the evening, and willingly comes in on weekends to help enthusiastic students.

“I don’t want them to lose their enthusiasm,” he says. “From society’s point of view, that would be a waste.”

Recognizing that students don’t all learn in the same way, Parameswaran’s teaching style is flexible. “Some of my students will learn from lectures,” he says.

“For others, I create the learning environment and they learn themselves, and for others, I have to sit down with them. I try to balance it all.”

He strives to develop students’ ability to innovate. For many, their first laboratory experience is to create a “MacGyver-style” radio from everyday items.

“I have to deprive them of the resources and say ‘this is all you’ve got’—that’s how you get innovation.”

Teaching and motivating his students to go out into the world and accomplish more than he has himself is, says Parameswaran, “the fire that keeps me going.”

Jamie Mulholland
Students and faculty can’t say enough about math lecturer Jamie Mulholland. Their praises cite his devotion to students, his passion for his subject, his creative learning materials and his fairness.

They even claim he can make calculus fun.

“One of my students called me the ‘Mister Rogers of Mathematics’,” he says with a grin, referring to the gentle cardigan-clad host of the popular children’s television series, “I guess because I speak softly but with authority and I’m respectful of students.”

He earned his PhD in number theory at UBC, but Mulholland knew he loved teaching from the moment he taught his first class during his undergraduate studies at SFU. “It felt natural,” he says. “I love math and I like to share that with people and lead them to appreciate the beauties and intricacies of the subject.”

Mulholland returned to SFU six years ago as a math lecturer and began filling his office with puzzles such as Rubik’s Cube that he frequently uses during lectures. He’s even developed a math and computing-science course based on puzzles—Math 302.

Mulholland also designs visualization tools such as videos and small computer applications to help students understand basic calculus principles.

To demonstrate that math is everywhere, he even mapped out his three-year-old son’s cowlick to explain a principle about vector fields on surfaces. He says visualization tools develop students’ intuitive understanding of a problem before he introduces complex formulas and equations. And they also help to reduce math anxiety.

“Teaching is always on my mind, wherever I go,” says Mulholland. “My goal in terms of lifetime achievement for my career is to have everyone appreciate mathematics, but if I just make them less anxious, then I’m happy.”