Teaching Awards Presented to Extension Faculty

This year’s recipients of the Petra T. Shattuck Excellence in Teaching Awards are Paul Bamberg, Eric Connally, and Helmut Koester.

Left to right: Paul Bamberg, Eric Connally, and Helmut Koester

Bamberg, senior lecturer on mathematics at Harvard, received the Dean’s Distinguished Service Award in 1995 and was honored for 25 years of teaching in 1994. He has earned consistently high ratings on evaluations (4.9 and 5 on a 5-point scale with 100 percent of his students completing evaluations). His enthusiasm for teaching prompted one student to write, “I think he would teach for free.”

A student of Connally’s wrote, “I do not like math and have avoided it all my life . . .” just before naming Connally the best instructor the student had ever had. Connally has changed many students’ attitudes about math since he started teaching in 1991.

One student describes discussions with Helmut Koester, John H. Morison Research Professor of Divinity and Winn Research Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Harvard Divinity School, as intellectual feasts. Koester began his Extension School career in 1977. His course, The Apostle Paul: His Theology, World, and Legacy, inspired one student to commit to becoming an ordained minister and to pursue a doctoral degree.

The Carmen S. Bonanno Award recognizes excellence in foreign language instruction.

This year’s winner, Antonio Di Sanzo, is director of foreign languages for the Town of Reading and has been teaching elementary Italian at the Extension School for 26 years. He is known for his energetic teaching style and masterful understanding of the teaching process.

John Lenger is the recipient of this year’s James E. Conway Award for Excellence in Teaching Writing. The editor in chief and assistant director of the Office of News and Public Affairs at Harvard, Lenger has been teaching journalism at the Extension School since 1997 and serves on the advisory board of the new Master of Liberal Arts in Journalism. In nominating him, several students remarked that his course had changed both their career plans and their lives.