Although a university researcher sorted through the ten million rankings on RateMyProfessor.com to establish the most popular teachers, not a single Terp professor made the grade.

The top honor goes to James Madison University’s Kimberly DuVall-Early, who serves as an unofficial psychotherapist and life coach to her students who call her “Professor D”.

DuVall-Early teaches Life-span Human Development to about 100 Dukes every semester. She plays indie-rock music as they file in the lecture hall to soothe them and leads the class in stretches halfway through, not to mention deep breathing exercises before each exam.

She peppers her courses with life advice, like “If you don’t like your life, change it,” or “We think, in our society, that we’re supposed to do two or three things at a time. If you’re washing the dishes, just wash the dishes, and focus on that. Go on the quad and just watch the squirrels. It’s relaxing.”

Professor D also advises about 500 students each semester, but they’re not the only ones who seek her counseling: the line of students crawls out the door each time she holds office hours, and some, like 2009 graduate Chris Antzoulis, see her once a week every week during their college careers.

Antzoulis initially visited her when he had trouble adjusting to freshman year and kept coming back.

“You just felt comfortable around her, like she actually cared,” he told the Washington Post’s Daniel de Vise. “Which is rare.”

Some of her assignments have changed her students’ lives, like the lifeline flowchart intended to show each person’s past, present and possible futures.

“It makes them think about what they have done, what they are doing now, and what they want to do,” DuVall-Early told de Vise. “And there’s a finite time they have on this Earth.”

Other local professors in the ranks include Daryao Khatri, a physics professor at the University of the District of Columbia, at No. 3 and Jim Thomas, a philosophy professor at the University of Maryland Baltimore County, at No. 6.

The site also features a Top 25 hottest college professors list, but judging by No. 1, Brigham Young University’s Paul Evans, it seems that category is a whole lot less scientific.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 30th, 2010 at 8:42 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.