Even before the kid took a seat in his office, chemistry
professor Lou
Pignolet knew what the problem was.
"You can always tell when a guy's doing badly because he has that sheepish, embarrassed look on his face," says Pignolet.
Introductory chemistry classes can be one of life's great watersheds for newly minted University undergraduates, and this young man had been postponing the day of reckoning as long as possible. Finally he'd summoned all his courage and made the fateful trudge to Pignolet's office on the second floor of Smith Hall.
And that's when his prospects for a successful academic career began to improve.
The young man didn't realize it at first, but he'd had a tremendous stroke of good luck when he registered for Pignolet's class, Chemistry 1021.
Pignolet, named a Distinguished Institute of Technology Professor in 1992, is an acknowledged leader in developing interactive, computer-based methods for chemistry education. More importantly, he's an empathetic mentor who measures his success by his ability to help even the most bewildered of incoming freshmen to "get it."
In this case, the stressed-out student spent two hours in Pignolet's office unburdening himself of the tribulations of first-semester life.
"We didn't just talk about chemistry, but [I knew] I could really help this guy," says Pignolet. "I think he left with a good feeling."
It's those moments that provide some of the highlights of Pignolet's professional life. "It's exciting," he says. "I like teaching the freshman course because it's the biggest challenge to reach those students. I do more than teach them chemistry.
"I try to teach a philosophy of studying and how to succeed at the U."
Pignolet takes teaching so seriously that he's devoting the later stages of his career to it.
"About five years ago I closed my lab," he says. "My research was going well, but I decided that I could make more of an impact on students and on our department by [improving] teaching."
Since changing the focus of his work, Pignolet has pioneered computer-based teaching techniques. Before each class, students in his introductory chemistry course take a short online quiz on the reading assignment. A wrong answer launches an immediate online tutorial on the concepts the student failed to understand. Pignolet calls them "carrot quizzes" because they give students the incentive to keep working.
"I look at the quiz results and base my lecture on them. By looking at them I know where to focus the lecture," he explains.
Pignolet also hosts a student-only online bulletin board for course discussions. Most students post questions, but some make a point of helping their classmates understand key concepts. Pignolet keeps track of those Good Samaritans and rewards the most consistently helpful "posters" by taking them out to dinner at semester's end.
The online discussions are wide-ranging indeed. On a recent weekend the most popular discussion thread was entitled "What is love?" Predictably, the first response was "Love is a chemical reaction!" Subsequent postings strayed a bit farther from a strictly scientific point of view, a reminder that first-year college students are at least as interested in each other as they are in the wonders of chemistry.
In the lecture hall Pignolet keeps students engaged and intrigued. He accompanies eye-popping demonstrations with lively off-the-cuff remarks that anchor heady concepts in tangible reality. In a recent class he demonstrated the properties of light waves by setting off a series of chemical combustions with all the panache of a fireworks supervisor on the Fourth of July. He ignited a strontium-filled balloon, triggering a satisfying red flash, and without missing a beat asked, "Did you ever see a glowing dill pickle?"
A fat pickle skewered on two forks and plugged into a 110-volt current transformed the darkened amphitheater into a setting eerily reminiscent of old Frankenstein movies. "Why is it yellow?" called Pignolet over the sound of sizzling salt-laden gherkin. "What element burns yellow?"
His imaginative pedagogy has won Pignolet a shelf full of teaching awards and election to the University's Academy of Distinguished Teachers. The award he's most proud of, though, comes from the undergraduates of IT.
"They've voted me the best teacher in the chemistry department for five years in a row," he says.
Pignolet, who received a Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1969, first realized that he had a talent for teaching back in his undergraduate years at Lafayette College in Pennsylvania. When he took first-year calculus, he remembers, "the professor was confusing the students with his lectures. I was holding alternate lectures at night for my classmates. I developed ways of explaining things that the students could relate to."
That gift for teaching continues to earn Pignolet a place in the memories of students long after they've graduated. Of the young man who finally approached him with his difficulties Pignolet says, "Every year there are two or three students like that. I can work with them. They're the ones who come back years later and say, '[Coming to see you that day] made all the difference.'"
