The geology professor has a few tricks up her sleeves: chocolate rocks, field trips, and a little spontaneity
Learning the names of hundreds of students is no easy task, but geology professor Marli Miller goes the extra mile. Keeping a martini glass full of chocolate rocks on her desk is just one of the tricks up her sleeve.
"I tell them that they should come and have some chocolate rocks and we'll talk geology, and some of them take me up on it, and I get to know their names," Miller said.
She also takes a picture on the first day of class and passes it around so students can add their name to it.
“I really love my students, and I know a lot of faculty do too,” Miller said. “I show it, and I know that the majority of students feel very welcome in my class.”
Miller has taught at the university for 27 years and authored the second edition of Roadside Geology of Oregon.
This spring Miller received a Herman Award for Specialized Pedagogy. She said she was thrilled but has found it to be a humbling experience, as there are many great faculty members at the university.
As I get older, it's really nice to know all these young people. It's a real privilege to be on campus and get to know them.
Taking a liberal arts approach, Miller’s focus is on helping students think about and work through problems, which they have a chance to put into practice on a yearly field camp in southwestern Montana.
“They're out in the field every day,” she said. “The sun's hot, there's no shade, and they're hiking around trying to figure out how one rock type is related to another, and they have to make decisions all the time.”
While students go to Glacier National Park to study the geological architecture, Miller said the trip is “more fun than work.” She also takes her structural geology students on a field trip to Death Valley.
A photographer as well as a geologist, Miller uses her own photos of landscapes in her teaching. She also enjoys finding opportunities for spontaneity, no matter the class size. In one class, she interrupts herself while explaining Pascals, a unit of stress, to ask if anyone has a potato.
“They look at me like I'm crazy, and of course, nobody's brought a potato to class,” Miller said. “So I go, ‘Well, I have one,’ and I pull it out of my purse.”
She then explains that the potato, mashed up and spread over a square meter would be a Pascal — an incredibly small value.
Her passion for her subject is clear, and Miller said her love of geology was what initially drew her to teaching.
“As I get older, it's really nice to know all these young people,” Miller said of her students. “It's a real privilege to be on campus and get to know them.”
— By Chelsea Hunt, Office of the Provost Communications