Jadrich Named Top Teacher at Calvin

February 18, 2005 == MEDIA ADVISORY

Teaching is about humility for Calvin College professor of science education
and physics Jim Jadrich.

"I need to remember," he says, "that I serve the students."

That philosophy of education works, say Jadrich's students, who constantly
give him top marks on their course evaluations. Colleagues also say the
bespectacled and soft spoken Jadrich is a master teacher.

And now Calvin is recognizing his efforts in the classroom, naming Jadrich the
2005 winner of the Presidential Award for Exemplary Teaching, the college's top
teaching honor. He is the 13th winner -- dating back to the award's inception
in 1993 by then-president Anthony Diekema. The award includes a one-of-a-kind
medallion and provides the winner with a significant financial stipend thanks
to the George B. and Margaret K. Tinholt Endowment fund, set up at Calvin by a
donor in honor of George Tinholt, a former member of the Calvin Board of
Trustees.

Part of his approach to teaching, Jadrich believes, comes from his own
hardscrabble upbringing in a blue collar neighborhood in St. Louis, a
neighborhood where pretty much everyone, including Jadrich's own father, worked
for one of the local breweries.

"It was a tough place to grow up," Jadrich recalls, "and education wasn't a
big priority. If you wanted to learn you really didn't get a lot of help and
support from the people around you. In fact, there was a lot of fighting and
senseless cruelty. At home there was little peace because of an alcoholic
parent. To top it off, I have a social phobia. People, in general, terrify me.
Being a teacher, especially at a place like Calvin, was an impossibility. But
God had other ideas."

These days Jadrich, who has a Ph.D. in physics from the University of
California, Davis, works at Calvin training future teachers. One of the things
he does is ensure that Calvin students studying elementary education are
equipped to someday teach science to their own students in a first rate way.

It's an important topic - vital enough that the United States government pays
close attention to it, as evidenced by regular surveys comparing the test
scores of U.S. students in the sciences with those of their peers in other
countries.

Jadrich too believes that scientific knowledge in young people is important.
But he also believes that how prospective teachers learn the sciences-and
therefore how they one day will teach their own students-is a significant
educational challenge, one that too often gets lost in the college curriculum.

"The key question," says Jadrich, "is how do you teach science and how do
you teach someone to teach science. Those are important questions for us to ask
at Calvin, where education is our biggest area of study, and those are
important questions for us as a society."

For much more of Jim's story see
http://www.calvin.edu/news/releases/2004_05/jadrich.htm

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Received on Fri Feb 18 09:43:37 2005