Passion and Technique Stir Hearts of Honored Professors
Calculus isn’t for everyone, the mathematics department readily admits, but as the primary language of science and the social sciences it is required for a good number of majors. Harriet Pollatsek, Julia and Sarah Ann Adams Professor of Mathematics, has tried various strategies to advance her students’ grasp of data, functions, and their graphs, and finds that short writing exercises are particularly helpful.
“Mathematics uses its own special language, and translating it into ordinary English deepens a student’s understanding,” says Pollatsek, a member of the faculty since 1970 and one of two winners of the 2007 Mount Holyoke College Faculty Prize for Teaching. She was happy to report that by spring term those enrolled in her yearlong Enriched Calculus class were boldly moving on to “embrace the unfamiliar.”
Professor of Politics Christopher Pyle, the other recipient of the prize for teaching, was honored not just for his provocative teaching in classes on constitutional law and American political thought but also for teaching that “transcends the confines of the college and whose very purposeful engagement with the world serves as a model for our students and all of us,” according to the award citation. Pyle has taught classes in Northern Ireland, at Plimoth Plantation, and on the high seas aboard the HMS Bounty.
For Stephen Jones, professor of Russian studies and chair of European studies, the Republic of Georgia provides a focus and all manner of research possibilities. Widely published and fluent in Georgian, he is at work on a book about contemporary Georgia that he says is much like “the biography of a political adventurer confronting adversity, trauma, and finally, liberation.”
A winner of the 2007 Meribeth E. Cameron Faculty Prize for Scholarship, Jones, who trained as a political scientist, often is consulted by the U.S. government for his expert understanding of the post-communist societies of the Caucasus.
Bettina Bergmann, whose research has focused on ancient Roman art and archaeology, is fascinated by many elements of excavated sites around the Bay of Naples, which were buried in 79 AD by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. Currently at work on an essay about the area’s ancient gardens, she shares the spectacular fact that because of cavities left by tree roots in the lava, archaeologists have been able to reconstruct what the ancient gardens looked like, which plants and trees grew where, and how vines were tended and perfumes made.
Bergmann is Helene Phillips Herzig ’49 Professor of Art History and the second winner of this year’s Faculty Prize for Scholarship.
This is the eighth year that professors have been honored with teaching and scholarship awards. Nominated by their peers and alumnae and selected by committee, the winners receive cash awards of $3,000.—M.H.B.
Photo by Paul Schnaittacher
