I am delighted to be able to report this.
I have been given a Students’ Association Teaching Award by the University of St Andrews for Innovation in Teaching! You can see a report here.
Unfortunately, I had to miss the award ceremony since I was in Glasgow (see the preceding post). But I am very pleased that my colleague Martyn Quick received a very well deserved University Teaching Award, as the “good-humoured go-to man”. His dedication to all aspects of teaching in the School is legendary.
You may wonder (as indeed I did), what my innovations in teaching were. It seems that the judges liked the fact that my teaching was so closely linked to current research, bringing the students right to the frontiers (not always easy to do in maths), and also the fact that the module I teach has three different syllabuses so that it can be kept fresh for the students.
Congratulations – that’s definitely one to be proud of!
And didn’t you win a similar award at QMUL a few years ago?!
Indeed I did. There are a few small contrasts: for example, at St Andrews they told me (indirectly) what my innovations were, while at Queen Mary they expected me to tell them.
I will certainly not forget the degree ceremony where I got the certificate at QM — the graduands did a Mexican wave!
What were your St Andrews innovations? If I recall correctly from your QME award, you said that your award-wining technique was something like “writing things on a blackboard with chalk, and carefully explaining them” which would certainly stand out from the sea of overcrowded and poorly typeset PowerPoint lectures that many undergraduates have to endure.
According to the citation, there were two things. One was giving lectures that reached the frontiers of research (though it is a bit hard to believe that none of my colleagues do that). The other was something that happened quite by chance. I wrote three syllabuses for the module, expecting that one would be approved. In fact they approved all three, so I can change the content from one year to the next with a minimum of bureaucracy; this keeps me busy, but it keeps the course fresh.