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RELEASED: July. 24, 2003
DANVILLE, KY—It seems some college professors have a sense of humor after all.
Milton Reigelman, J. Rice Cowan Professor of English at Centre College, discusses some of his unique teaching methods in a cover story in the July 25 issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education.
The article looks at how some college professors use humor in the classroom to help foster better relationships with their students, and to make difficult concepts more clear and memorable.
A couple of years ago Reigelman invited Ed McClanahan, author of the novel The Natural Man, to visit his class. The professor didn't tell his class McClanahan would be making an appearance that day.
"We went outside and there's this guy already there," said Daron Mills '01, who was a student in Reigelman's American literature class that year. "We didn't pay much attention to him. At one point [Reigelman] is comparing McClanahan's style to another novelist's, when the man jumps up and yells, 'That's not right. I don't write like him at all.'
"Then he and the professor start laughing. Of course it was Ed McClanahan, and he stayed and finished the discussion and read some of his passages. That kind of thing is a tradition at Centre—the unexpected."
To read this week's cover story in The Chronicle, go to http://chronicle.com/free/v49/i46/46a00801.htm.
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