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CWRU's Dave Smith is a little like the lead character in the movie Good Will Hunting -- the self-taught kid on the maintenance crew at Massachusetts Institute of Technology who astonished scholars with his mathematical genius.
Smith dropped out of college several times, preferring instead to study on his own. He bypassed getting his baccalaureate and master's degrees, yet was admitted to MIT as a Ph.D. student. He made a deal that if MIT would waive its pre-certification requirements, he would take the necessary graduate courses that would help him pass the Ph.D. qualifying examination.
Although Smith passed the Ph.D. exam with flying colors, he dismisses the idea that he might be a genius like Will.
"I just proved I deserved to be there," said Smith, CWRU professor of electrical engineering and computer science and one of this year's Wittke Award winners. "I made wooden extension ladders by day and read literature and did mathematical physics problems at night."
He believes this may be one reason why he is as sensitive as he is with his students.
"I am both firm and sensitive because I look back at myself at that age," he said.
Smith teaches about 100 undergraduate students each year in courses such as fiber optics, electromagnetic theory, analog and digital communications, and advanced electromagnetics. He makes a point of getting to know each student's name, and views his association with students as both colleague and teacher.
"I say to them, 'We are all in this together. Let's see if we can get through this with me teaching you as well as I can, and you actually learning something.'"
Smith struggles to come up with the right combination of formal instruction, class participation, homework, and quizzes. He tries to emphasize to students that while the specifics of technology change, the fundamentals do not. Learning the basics will serve them well in their careers, he believes.
Juggling his chalk and regaling students with a fictional account of his days as a performer with the Big Apple circus, Smith tries to make students comfortable enough to ask questions about what they don't understand. He also is not one to go rigidly by the book when teaching textbook material.
"It is not a race between you and the students to see if you can get to the end of the book before they can," Smith said. "If you cannot justify to your students why they need to learn something, then don't teach it, teach it differently, or teach something else."
Although his teaching style might seem quixotic at times, one of the students who nominated him for the Wittke noted that "Smith stands alone in the mixture of constant evaluation and adjustment of his teaching methods, animated and engaging style, and most of all devotion to his students."
Smith admits unashamedly that he wants his students to like him and to feel that there is a purpose in learning the course material.
"I think that my students don't want to do poorly in my course because it would be like disappointing a friend."
Prior to quizzes, Smith advises students what kinds of problems he will give and works on similar problems with them in class. He supplies students with a copy of his notes before quizzes and holds review sessions.
In analyzing the way people learn, he tells of his friendship at MIT with Bill Phillips, who later became a Nobel laureate in physics. Smith, a graduate student, and Phillips, a post doctoral student, would sit for long periods and try to describe how certain experiments work.
"Bill taught me that you have to keep your explanations extremely simple using concrete pictures like billiard balls and orbiting planets when describing atoms," Smith said. "He was an excellent teacher because he would simplify."
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