A passion for teaching Dr. Nick Skinner connects with his students through humour and stories A number of years ago Professor Nick Skinner met a young woman who looked familiar at a Canadian Psychological Association meeting. He asked the woman, who was just finishing a PhD in psychology, whether she had taken his Introductory Psychology course. “Yes,” she replied, “but my undergraduate degree was in economics. I enjoyed your course so much that I changed fields.” The story is an example of the impact that Dr. Skinner has had The King’s Herald | page 18
on students during his 35 years at King’s. It also mirrors the way he, too, came to psychology. Born into four generations of doctors, he assumed he would follow the same path. But two months into medical school, he finally admitted it wasn’t for him. Without telling his father his plans, he left medicine and signed up for some liberal arts courses at the University of Alberta. One of them was introductory psychology. “I loved psychology from the very first moment,” he says. After his introduction to psychology, Dr. Skinner went on to earn his Masters and PhD in the field at University of Alberta. While in graduate school he chose to focus
wholly on research, giving only one lecture in six years. “I was petrified of the classroom,” he says. When King’s University College hired him in 1972 to teach three undergraduate courses, he found it a daunting experience. “I was working flat out, but at best I was about ten minutes ahead of the class,” he says. “I always felt apprehensive going in and never as prepared as I wanted to be.” To his surprise, Dr. Skinner subsequently discovered that teaching was something he excelled at. “I was dying out there in front of the class,” he says, “but apparently the experience of the students was different, as I found out years later in PHOTO: John Tamblyn