Professor of French Jeff Kline Wins Prestigious Metcalf Award
While 5,800 hopeful graduates pondered future possibilities at B.U.’s graduation on May 18th, Professor of French Jeff Kline was thanked and honored for past successes.
As one of three winners of the prestigious Metcalf Award for Excellence in Teaching, Kline was recognized as a “consummate teacher.” “A life without teaching is unthinkable,” Kline had remarked, and B.U. President Bob Brown added that Kline’s teaching is “infused with an irrepressible joie de vivre [that] has enriched countless lives.”
Added Brown: “Professor T. Jefferson Kline has inspired generations of students by his informed passion for French literature and cinema . . . Whether instructing undergraduate classes or graduate seminars, advising and mentoring students and colleagues, sharing his expertise with high school teachers or colleagues at other universities, or publishing seminal articles and books, Professor Kline is always the consummate teacher.”
The Metcalf Committee chose Kline for the award after reviewing his teaching record, student evaluations, and student letters, as well as observing his teaching. A BU professor for more than 30 years, Kline’s teaching style may be called a lesson in disciplined merriment. As one student explains, “Though his teaching exuded the freshness and humor of improvisation, I have since realized that it was the result of fastidious planning.”
Despite years of experience, Kline admits to still feeling nervous before each class. His nerves are a result, he says, of the “sense of the immense delicacy and importance of the task I have before me.”
To hear an interview of Jeff Kline with Edward A. Brown, go to
http://www.houndbite.com/?houndbite=3709
(Courtesy of BU Today.)