When Professor of Mathematics and Statistics Brad Hartlaub received a career teaching award earlier this month, he became the second faculty member in his department to be honored nationally over the past year for their work in the classroom.
Hartlaub was presented in early August with the American Statistical Association’s Waller Distinguished Teaching Career Award. It recognizes a statistics faculty member with 20 or more years of experience for “sustained excellence in teaching and statistics education” as well as “innovation, scholarship and creative efforts in education.”
His colleague, Professor of Mathematics Carol Schumacher P’13, ’14, was similarly honored the previous summer when she was given the Mathematical Association of America's Deborah and Franklin Tepper Haimo Distinguished Teaching Award. It spotlights college faculty who are “widely recognized as extraordinarily successful and whose teaching effectiveness has been shown to have had influence beyond their own institutions.”
These awards from professional organizations — in addition to others given out by the College — are a testimony to the dedication of math and statistics faculty to students and quality teaching, according to Noah Aydin, professor of mathematics and department chair.
“We are excited about our discipline (mathematics, statistics, and computer science); we love teaching it; and we always look for ways to improve our teaching,” he said.
Both Hartlaub and Schumacher are past recipients of Kenyon’s prestigious teaching honor now known as the Trustee Teaching Excellence Award, as are three of their departmental peers, Judy Holdener, Erin Leatherman and Bob Milnikel. Maintaining this tradition of excellence is a lifelong commitment that faculty take very seriously, Aydin said.
“We are lifelong learners, and we work hard. We learn from our students and from colleagues in and outside the Hill.”
Hartlaub, who said he was shocked and honored by the recent award, explained that his teaching style has changed significantly over the years, transitioning from a lecture-focused approach to one incorporating more activities.
“My students at Kenyon have embraced that change,” he said. “They like doing the projects. They like doing the activities. They like a guided handout to get them through understanding the material — the technical details — and applying them on their own.”
“One of the things that makes this approach so successful,” he continued, “is that the students take ownership over their own learning.”
Hartlaub joined the Kenyon faculty in 1990 as its lone statistician and has since helped develop a robust curriculum. On sabbatical this year, he typically teaches courses such as introduction to statistics, nonparametric statistics, statistical computing, probability, mathematical stats, sports analytics, and linear regression models.
A former chair of the department and the Division of Natural Sciences who also served as associate provost, Hartlaub currently is working on a project with a former student to develop activities and labs to share with other teachers who want to incorporate rank-based methods and nonparametric statistics into their courses.
Hartlaub also helped in the creation and growth of the AP Statistics Program, serving as its chief reader for five years. He is a Westerville resident with a doctorate in statistics from The Ohio State University.
Schumacher, who has been at Kenyon since 1988, said she shares a similar philosophy about teaching and student learning as a longtime champion of inquiry-based learning and making students think actively about ideas.
“It’s kind of proverbial among mathematicians that you don’t learn math by watching somebody else do math — just like you don’t learn to swim by sitting on the side of the pool and watching,” she said. “We really need to make the classroom an environment in which students are invited to and supported in thinking actively about mathematics and statistics.”
The author of two textbooks — “Closer and Closer: Introducing Real Analysis” and ”Chapter Zero: Fundamental Notions of Abstract Mathematics, 2nd Edition” — Schumacher regularly teaches courses in calculus, real analysis, applied differential equations, and “Foundations.”
A Gambier resident, Schumacher has served four terms as chair of the mathematics department and one term as chair of the faculty. She is a former vice president of the Mathematical Association of America and has assisted in Project NExT, its professional development program for new or recent Ph.D.s in the mathematical sciences, by addressing summer workshop participants. She has a doctorate in mathematics from the University of Texas at Austin.