Dan Fleisch, Wittenberg associate professor of physics, is known for doing anything necessary to help students succeed. From renting an ice rink to help a student with an interest in hockey understand a physics concept to changing the pen color he uses to review papers to relieve a student’s grade-related anxiety, Fleisch lives his passion for teaching daily. no wonder the council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE) and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching recently named Fleisch the 2010 Ohio Professor of the Year.
By Karen Gerboth ’93
Photos by Erin Pence ’04
The only national program to recognize excellence in undergraduate teaching, the U.S. Professor of the Year program annually honors top educators from across the United States. This year, professors representing 46 states were recognized, including Fleisch, whose award continues Wittenberg’s longstanding tradition as the state leader among four-year institutions in the number of professors earning the Ohio Professor of the Year distinction. Fleisch’s award brings the official count to six and again shines the spotlight on Wittenberg’s superb teaching inside the classroom and well beyond its walls.
“I’m a person for whom the life of the mind is such a driving force,” Fleisch explains. “Helping others have those ‘wow’ moments is most rewarding.”
Two years ago, Fleisch inspired a unique “wow” moment nearly 700 miles away in Ottawa, Canada. Upon learning that Michael Cuhaci had received a damaged copy of Fleisch’s international best-selling book, A Student’s Guide to Maxwell’s Equations, which he purchased as a Christmas gift for his nephew, Fleisch boarded a plane early Christmas Day in the midst of a snowstorm to hand-deliver a copy of the book to Cuhaci himself.
“I opened the door, and there’s this guy in front of me saying,‘Which book would you like, hardcover or soft?’ “Cuhaci recalled in a Spring field News-Sun article on Fleisch’s holiday trek. “I was surprised and shocked. I was trying to understand what was happening.”
Not wanting to disrupt the Cuhaci’s holiday further, Fleisch left the book with Cuhaci and headed back to the airport for what turned into an 11-hour journey back to Springfield.
Such commitment to his students, people and his profession defines Fleisch, whose innovative thinking has led him to create a variety of unique learning opportunities for his classes, including one involving study abroad in England three years ago.
Called “The Roots of 21st-Century Science,” the course took two seemingly unrelated disciplines, physics and biology, and wove them together using parts of the curriculum to tell the story. The students would study the origin and development of two important fields of 21st-century science, the life sciences and electromagnetic telecommunications.
Fleisch and his colleague at the time, Tim Lewis, former professor of biology at Wittenberg, then went a step further by adding technological elements to the course, which would make it completely paperless.
“By incorporating a technological component, the traditional boundaries of the classroom dissolved, and more peer-to-peer teaching occurred,” Fleisch recalls.
Add to his course development work, which includes a forthcoming follow-up course in Italy, Fleisch’s sheer love of teaching, and the portrait of a model educator reveals itself even more. Every semester, for example, Fleisch invites students from each of his classes to his home for “Quality Circle” dinners during which he asks students to help him find ways to make the class the best possible learning experience for them.
“I get to work with fantastic students at Wittenberg, and I want them to be engaged with the world around them,” Fleisch says.
Outside of the traditional classroom, Fleisch also continues to activate the mind through his work.
An expert in electromagnetics and space physics, Fleisch has witnessed his Cambridge University Press-published 2008 book on Maxwell’s equations enter its eighth printing with translations underway in Japanese, Korean and Chinese. His has also been contracted to write A Student’s Guide to Vectors and Tensors, slated for publication this year, all while working with students on research projects ranging from radar imaging to the detection of extrasolar planets.
In 2004, Wittenberg awarded Fleisch its top faculty prize, the Alumni Association Award for Distinguished Teaching. Two years earlier, Fleisch won the Omicron Delta Kappa award for Excellence in Teaching, and he was named the Outstanding Faculty Member during the Wittenberg Greek Scholarship Awards in 2000. Additionally, Fleisch was recognized for Faculty Excellence and Innovation in 2003 and 2005 by the Southwestern Ohio Council for Higher Education (SOCHE).
Now, as the 2010 Ohio Professor of the Year, Fleisch looks to inspire young people in high schools around the state to pursue science using iPads and other technology in his efforts.
“I have the entire universe as my subject,” Fleisch says, “so how can I not find something interesting for students of all ages with the universe at my disposal?”