Christopher Maley Email & Phone Number

Christopher Maley is a Dentist at Greensburg Dental Care. Colleagues describe him as "Chris was one of my students in a 300-level Biochemistry & Molecular Biology (BCMB) course at Ursinus College, Physical Chemistry for the Life Sciences (since renamed "Biophysical Chemistry"; BCMB-307, Fall 2016 semester). This was an extremely difficult course to teach, and not only on account of the physical aspects in a biochemistry course; physical interactions in biochemistry typically involve biological macromolecules (e.g. proteins), and yet, there is no official prerequisite course for BCMB-307 in which students are exposed to the biochemistry of macromolecules prior to being taught the physical aspects of said macromolecules. To complicate matters further, while BCMB-307 is a 300-level course and would be expected to enroll predominantly juniors, 9 out of 10 students in Fall 2016 were seniors, and thus had already taken other courses that introduced them to macromolecular biochemistry (e.g. Protein Biochemistry); Chris, by contrast, was the only junior in the class. Thus, on the one hand, there was tremendous pressure from 90% of students who had already taken Protein Biochemistry and wanted our course to go faster- in spite of its official prerequisites- and on the other hand there was Chris, the only junior who had not taken Protein Biochemistry, and for whom I had to be mindful to not neglect the official prerequisites of the course. What impressed me, however, was that Chris did not take the course lightly, nor did he finger-wag at me to slow down the pace of the course- which he had every right to do as the sole junior in a 300-level course. Instead, he encouraged me to teach the course however it needed to be taught in order to deliver an appreciable impact, regardless of whether the course was appropriately placed within the scheme of the BCMB curriculum, and whether the prerequisites actually made any sense. Chris is truly the ideal student that a professor wants to have at a teaching-focused institute with small class-sizes; he was there to learn and embrace knowledge, to be challenged, and he provided excellent and constructive real-time feedback that allowed me to fine-tune the delivery of the course as the semester progressed, so as to the satisfy the demands of the "majority" of the class while not neglecting or leaving behind any student who is legitimately following the structure of their program. Wholeheartedly, so many students can benefit from Chris' example of coming into a course and working above and beyond the standard expectations, while having mature and productive discussions with their professor, that lead to satisfying learning experiences for students and enjoyable teaching experiences for professors. Aside from his performance in my course, Chris was also a pleasure to teach because he is just such a nice and pleasant young man. The truth of the matter is, we now live and work in a day and age where the notion of respecting one's elders is gone, and perhaps because of exorbitant tuition fees, higher education"