The College of Charleston has two of the country’s best undergraduate teachers, according to The Princeton Review’s new book, The Best 300 Professors. Spanish professor Devon Hanahan and mathematics professor Martin Jones are two of 300 professors that represent the top .02% of the roughly 1.8 million post-secondary teachers instructing students at colleges and universities across the United States. They were chosen from an initial list of 42,000 professors.
Watch a video profile of Martin Jones.
Watch a video profile of Devon Hanahan.
The Princeton Review teamed up with RateMyProfessors.com – the highest-trafficked college professor ratings site in the U.S. — to develop The Best 300 Professors. The selection process took into account qualitative and quantitative data from survey findings and ratings collected by both The Princeton Review and RateMyProfessors.com. After obtaining further input from school administrators and students, as well as from The Princeton Review‘s surveys of the professors under consideration, the editors of The Princeton Review made the final choices of the professors they profiled in the book.
Devon Hanahan ’87 has taught Spanish at the College since 1995. Her classes include Spanish 201 and Spanish 202, and she finds it enthralling “to teach a skill that anyone can use, no matter what their major or discipline.” The Princeton Review editors cite Hanahan’s classroom conduct as a reason for her selection. “She is very strict and predictable in terms of starting and finishing on time, sticking to the syllabus, returning homework promptly, and adhering to class rules.”
“So many people are afraid of learning languages. I want each and every student to believe that he/she is capable of learning Spanish and using it in the real world,” says Hanahan. “I also want him/her to be excited about the prospect of speaking Spanish, because that excitement is what motivates them.”
Martin Jones received his Ph.D. in Mathematics from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1989 specializing in probability and stochastic processes. Since then he has been teaching at the College of Charleston where he oversees the undergraduate and graduate statistics programs. Martin lived and taught mathematics in Venezuela for two years and in Costa Rica for one year. He regularly teaches statistics workshops in Nicaragua, El Salvador and Mexico. He is a vegan, plays jazz flute and has no TV, no cell phone and no car.
The Princeton Review editors say, “He is realistic about students’ perceptions of math (even if they are only superficial), and he uses this awareness in his teaching approach, which is “very animated, high-energy, but quite informal and relaxed.”
The featured professors are in more than 60 fields ranging from accounting to neuroscience to sports management. They hail from 122 colleges and universities across the nation. A complete list of the professors in the book is accessible at www.princetonreview.com/best-professors.aspx
