Professor Mark Utlaut's unique teaching style provides students with knowledge beyond astronomy and physics
By Anna Walters
One student failed to show up for the physics lab professor Mark Utlaut was leading in a cluttered basement room of the Old Science building on a Monday afternoon. Sitting on a stool with his worn cowboy boots propped up on a nearby table, Utlaut asked the students seated before him whether they were privy to the missing "computer jock's" whereabouts.
One student in the front row offered that the guy was her neighbor, and soon another student was on a cell phone trying to bribe the informant's housemate with candy to go next-door, ring the bell, and ask whether the computer jock was coming to class or not.
"You're just like wolves howling in the woods, howling for the poor CS guy out there," Utlaut said, referencing how a lost lone wolf will howl in order to convey his situation to the pack. The pack, hearing his cry, will howl back to disclose their location so the loner may find them again.
Unfortunately, the computer jock wasn't home, and vowing to put up a memorial for the missing student, Utlaut "gets down to business." He began to explain the evolution of human intelligence and eventually comes full circle, back to the phone call that was just made.
Before certain technological advances, if a person wanted to send a message or ask a student why he was a no-show in class, that person would have to mount a horse, ride to the student's residence, deliver the message, and then ride back with the answer, Utlaut said. The telegraph shortened this process considerably.
"It would take minutes," Utlaut said, explaining the timely (yet to an 1830s audience astoundingly speedy) task of sending code through a telegraph.
"Now, you can do it in seconds," he said pointing to the student who had made the call.
Utlaut (not Dr., not Professor, nor any title in fact, because to Utlaut titles are superfluous details) teaches just about everything at the University of Portland. Technically, he is a physics professor, but take one of Utlaut's classes and you'll soon discover that anything from the dangers of cell phone radiation to the nature of consciousness, to the principles governing attraction in humans, are all fair-game for discussion.
"In the world, it's really hard to understand what's going on with anything," Utlaut said. "Physics is easy. You can describe almost everything in the world [using physics]." The other branches of science are much more difficult to understand, especially biology, which includes the study of human beings, fantastically complex creatures, according to Utlaut.
Arriving late to his packed astronomy class one morning, Utlaut put his things on a nearby table and strolled to center to face his students. In a completely deadpan tone, he addressed his audience.
"Any questions?" Multiple hands sprang off the desks and for the next 45 minutes Utlaut fielded each question a student posed and seamlessly tied the answer back to astronomy and the universe.
And that is the way Utlaut conducts most of his astronomy classes. By his calculations, he covers exactly the same amount of material as he would if using a more rigid class structure, and using his egalitarian approach, students are better able to guide the dialogue.
"There's only boundaries in people's heads. People put them there because they like to have definition," said Utlaut. "[Some might say] 'You're not doing physics anymore, you're doing sociology.' It's the same damn quantum physics."
Fellow physics professor Tamar More thinks Utlaut's "eclectic" teaching style engenders mixed results among students.
"He works very very well for some students. Students that need their hand held more probably have a harder time," More said.
Senior Krista Scott, a student in Utlaut's astronomy class, appreciates the high level of control afforded to students attending his class.
"I feel like when I go into his class, we're learning what we want to know," she said.
Junior Ken Scholz cites Utlaut's penchant to refute his student's views as an effective learning tool.
"He likes to argue with people, no matter what their opinion is," Scholz said. "His job is to piss us off."
Utlaut's antagonism usually facilitates thought about all sides of an issue.
"He likes to argue both ways to make people think about the evidence out there," Scholz said.
In addition to teaching classes at UP and traveling around the world for his other job, a top secret enterprise involving ultra-short-beam lasers (femto-second lasers), Utlaut is also the department chair for physics. He leads the department much like he teaches, and physics professors are afforded much more autonomy then some professors of other departments.
"It's a matter of being open and not necessarily sticking with some advice somebody else gave," said More regarding Utlaut's leadership style.
But first and foremost, Utlaut is a teacher, and especially likes the opportunity teachers are afforded to expand upon their own wealth of knowledge.
"It's more fun when you teach things you don't know much about," Utlaut said. "And since no one knows much about anything, it's always fun."
