Hegarty Award Citation for Associate Professor Timothy Woodcock

The Louise F. Hegarty Award for Excellence in Teaching is given each year to a full-time faculty member whose teaching has had a marked influence on the lives of Stonehill students. The Committee on Excellence in Teaching, representing Students, Faculty, and the Alumni Council, selects the outstanding teacher from those nominated by students and faculty members. The award, established in 1988, is named in honor of one of Stonehill’s most accomplished teachers and the recipient stands as a symbol of the entire faculty’s commitment to teaching and academic excellence. At this 2018 Academic Convocation, Stonehill College is proud to bestow the Louise F. Hegarty Award for Excellence in Teaching on Professor Timothy Woodcock, Associate Professor of Mathematics.

Designing engaged learning involves the right mix of knowledge, skill, passion, and motivation; however, for this 1993 Stonehill alumnus, the secret sauce is a certain autobiographical lighthearted story-telling that allows students to see that even a Math professor is fallible sometimes. His effectiveness as a teacher and advising is made abundantly clear in these words of students and faculty.

• In the classroom, Professor Woodcock can make one of the most challenging problems…seem so simple. He solves math problems with such eloquence….
• Woodcock revels in how many different ways there are for students and (and for him) to solve problems, and [he] fully analyzes your approach before rejecting it (which he does gently when you are wrong)…. [He] makes sure you understand mathematics and not just simply perform calculations or memorize algorithms to arrive at a correct answer.
• Professor Woodcock has more office hours than any other professor I have ever met, and probably more than any person who has ever been a professor. He has them after class, before class, and immediately before most exams. He answers your questions clearly and with extensive background information, and always asks, “Did you get to ask all the questions you needed?” before you walk out of the math lounge.
• Another way Professor Woodcock shows his passion for teaching is through his grading process. After each test, he types up a personal correction sheet for each student explaining where the student went wrong in the problem and how to do it correctly. This takes a large amount of time and patience.
• That Tim is an excellent teacher is clear from student evaluations. What student evaluations do not reflect is the thought and preparation that goes into his classes. Visiting his classes has demonstrated that he goes far beyond a standard text when preparing his classes. His examples are “real world” and interesting… At the risk of being technical, his final class in Calculus II made connections between the Fibonacci sequence and differential equations. This is not something you would find in a textbook!
• Professor Woodcock is a fantastic teacher…Whatever Stonehill is paying him is not enough.

Probably true, but today we take great pride in paying attention and paying homage to Professor Timothy Woodcock for exemplifying Stonehill’s commitment to provide an education of the highest caliber that fosters critical thinking, free inquiry, and the interchange of ideas.

Given this twenty-ninth day of August,

Two thousand and eighteen