Whose face appears in your mind when you think of blue shirts, insane stories and corvettes? For the ones who have general psychology this semester on Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 10 a.m., I bet it is Thomas Carskadon. And for the ones who had him in the past, I’m sure you thought of him because he would be hard to forget.
Class usually isn’t the brightest part of my day, and I’m sure there are plenty of students who agree with me. But if all your classes consisted of stories that made learning easier and a little more fun, you would enjoy it! That’s how I feel when I walk to Dorman Hall for Carskadon’s psychology class. It’s never boring in there, and he always walks in with a smile on his face only to say, “OK scholars, let’s see where we left off last time.” It almost feels as though I have a 50-minute story time or that I am watching a stand-up comedian. This man is intelligent and knows how to teach college students.
He seems to get so involved in the topics that we cover during class. In fact, he gets so involved with the students by making examples through them that you forget you’re even in class. I’m not saying that his class is a breeze because his tests do require that you listen and takes notes. Instead of teaching directly by the book and leaving his students to take notes for themselves, he prints a workbook that is convenient while studying.
My other instructors do a great job at teaching, but I do wish that more of them would be like Carskadon. Being in a good mood helps you think better, and if you laugh throughout class, you will more than likely remember what it was you were laughing about. It takes many years to be able to tweak that type of teaching and make it work for the teacher and the student, but Carskadon has managed to perfect this method.
This article isn’t written to bump my grade up because I know he wouldn’t do that, but just to praise this man for making college a little more humorous. The image my high school teachers gave me of college professors was nothing like him. In my mind, I pictured my psychology teacher to be short, fat and boring. I also expected for him to talk 90 miles an hour while I rushed to get notes down.
But to my surprise, Carskadon claims to be the skinniest man alive, and he is the farthest thing away from boring, and he would be glad to repeat something if needed. If I had to take psychology over again, I would enjoy having him teach it to me.