Dear Editor:
I am a non-traditional student and I know a good professor when I have one. Professor Jura Avizienis is exemplary. Last semester I took Professor Avizienis’ “Intro to Literature” course and currently I am taking her “Honors 100: Thinking and Writing in Honors” class. Her pedagogical approach is refreshingly consistent in both environments. In the larger “Intro to Literature” class, as well as in the intimate (smaller student to professor ratio) atmosphere of Honors, she displays her competency as an academic and as a mentor.
Jura inspires in her students a level of engagement with academic topics which other lecturers often fail to do. For instance, she is able to make palatable the mechanistic (but necessary) aspects of an English course-namely, understanding the proper rules of grammar-by injecting an element of fun into it: she often supplements a grammar lesson with real world examples of how accomplished writers utilize (or violate) these same grammatical principles. This is an extremely useful approach because in order for academic education to retain its meaningfulness, it needs to be continually interwoven into the larger context of the world outside the classroom-otherwise, education becomes dead and scholarly activity is looked upon as impotent and irrelevant.
When we have educators, such as Professor Avizienis, who are able to uphold a more holistically-minded approach in their teaching styles, we should focus on ways of retaining them; certainly, we should not create conditions which cause them to abandon our university culture.
Jura is an exceptionally warm, benevolent, and humorous instructor. This can make all the difference in the world to a classroom of stressed-out, over-worked, under-appreciated students. Her smiles can be potent and redeeming. A professor’s demeanor is instrumental in shaping the atmosphere of the learning environment and Jura’s personal energy certainly fosters a fertile ground in which eager minds can sprout and blossom.
Education should be more than just collecting credit hours to pack into our degree-audit sand bucket. With this sand bucket we should go a step further; we should build castles. Academic mentors, such as Professor Avizienis, inspire us to create while the tide is still out and the sand is still wet. In my opinion, it would be foolish to kick Jura off the beach.
Sincerely,
James Douglas
Sophomore