UM educator named professor of the year

One of The University of Montana’s most popular educators has been named 2008 Montana Professor of the Year by two national organizations that promote teaching excellence — the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Council for Advancement and Support of Education.

Chemistry Professor Garon Smith, better known to many on campus and throughout Montana as G. Wiz, will receive the award, along with professors from other states, at a formal luncheon and congressional ceremony in Washington, D.C., this month. The U.S. Professors of the Year program salutes the most outstanding undergraduate instructors in the country — those who excel in teaching and positively influence the lives and careers of students.

“Students volunteer testimonials about the quality and contagion of his teachings,” wrote UM President George Dennison in nominating Smith for the prestigious award. “His teaching abilities, in a word, strike me as magical. I mean this quite literally, as any one of the hundreds of undergraduate students from varied disciplines who take his introductory Chemistry 151 course each semester can and do attest.”

Smith dons a purple wizard’s cape and robe to capture students’ attention, regaling and instructing them with fiery tricks and clever, humorous incantation. Of equal importance, his faculty colleagues confirm that students leave Smith’s course with a very solid grounding in and understanding of chemistry, well prepared for advanced work, Dennison said.

When not teaching at UM, Smith tours elementary and high schools around the state, teaching short lessons to get kids interested in science. Most often, he does this on his own time and at his own expense, simply because he loves opening young minds to science. He also participates in organized outreach tours throughout Montana to help recruit students to UM.

On campus, Dennison said, peers recognize Smith’s teaching excellence. Through the University Center for Teaching Excellence, Smith advises other faculty members on innovative ways to become more effective classroom instructors, a talent for which he has earned national acclaim from educators around the country. In 2004 he won the Innovative Excellence in Teaching, Learning and Technology Award, presented during the International Conference on College Teaching and Learning.

His popularity in the classroom has won him several other teaching awards on and off campus, including one the students themselves bestowed. In 2004 Smith won the coveted Most Inspirational Teacher of the Year Award from Silent Sentinel, a senior honor society that asks seniors to vote for the teacher who most inspired them at UM.