Lighting Fires
A self-professed pyromaniac, William Scott fires his students’ love of learning. Sitting in his office, among his collection of antiques, William Scott declares he is “obsolete.”
He has no computer, he readily admits, swinging around quickly to look at his desk, as if to double-check that it hasn’t sprouted a Mac while he wasn’t looking.
“I don’t like computers. I don’t have to use them,” he explains. But I tell my students, ‘that’s okay for me—I’m obsolete. It’s not okay for you. Don’t do as I do in this case.’
His Thompson school students heed his advice, honing their computer skills elsewhere, but in every other area, they couldn’t have a better role model. As professor of applied business management, Scott’s classroom approach has earned him the Outstanding Educator award from Thompson School students, but that may be because, computer skills aside, he identifies so closely with them.
Interested in practice more than theory, Scott “was very much a student like my students,” Scott says with a smile. “I was last in my class in high school and third in my class at Drexel University. I tell my students, ‘I don’t care what you did in high school. I’m going to help you succeed.’”
The Thompson School of Applied Science offers the hands-on or “applied” approach in areas ranging from food service to animal science to business management. “Our students hook up with people who are doing what they’re learning about,” Scott explains. “We tell them, ‘Here’s what the book says you should do, there’s what the salesman does—what should you do?’”
Since coming to UNH in 1970 after a sales career, his goal has been motivation, or, as he puts it, lighting fires.
“When people ask me what I do for work, I tell them I’m a pyromaniac. My job is to light fires. If you’re excited about learning, you’ll learn.”
He uses a rather offbeat acronym—G.R.A.P.E.S.—to get his message across. It stands for “Growth, Recognition, Achievement, Participation, Execute, Several.” He believes in drumming the concepts into students’ heads as often as possible.
When he first began teaching, he was at a loss at how to capture students’ imaginations. “For the first two years, I lectured. The students were bored, and I was bored.”
He took a course called appropriately enough, “Anatomy of Teaching” and began to experiment, motivating students with a hands-on approach that lets them participate fully. “I thought, ‘this is fun, and this is a better way to teach.’”
He might, for example, ask students on the first day of a class in human resource management: who’s against unions? Two people might hesitantly raise their hands. His next question, who thinks unions are wonderful, might elicit responses from two more students.
“Then I take those four students to the front of the classroom, and I tell the rest to leave. They have no opinion, they can’t contribute or grow themselves unless they have some opinion.”
As the semester progresses, the students become more confident of their own opinions and of Scott’s approach. “Eventually, the class will be half and half, half for unions, half against. Then, I make both sides argue the other side’s case.” Scott grins. “And I give them fifteen minutes to prepare their arguments.”
This year’s Business Policy class “is the best class I’ve had in twenty-six years,” he says. “I actually gave them permission to ask me to leave class.”
On some days, Scott would arrive only to be told the students had formulated the agenda for the day. In some cases, he would merely sit in, and in others, he would lecture briefly to underscore a few pertinent points before handing the podium back to students. “A real question is, at what point do you shut up? At what point do you step in?”
Scott busies himself outside the classroom with business consulting as well as an antismoking educational program he developed eight years ago and which is being introduced into area schools. The consulting fills the gap created when he left the business world for academia in 1970, and the antismoking program plays into his theories about motivation and education.
But would he ever leave teaching to pursue either full-time? He seems horrified by the suggestion. “If I won the sweepstakes tomorrow, I’d pay you to let me teach,” he says without hesitation.
Scott seems more than content in the classroom, and in his office, surrounded by his antiques, being obsolete.
—Carmelle Druchniak, UNH News Bureau
