Know Your Profs is an ongoing series of profiles on the instructors at Camosun College. Every issue we ask a different instructor at Camosun the same 10 questions.
If you have an instructor you’d like to see interviewed in the paper, email editor@nexusnewspaper.com and we’ll add them to our list of teachers to talk to.
This issue, we caught up with Camosun Civil Engineering chair Zoë Broom to talk about bad grades, Facebook grammar, and weekends that are anything but relaxing.
1. What do you teach and how long have you been at Camosun College?
Civil Engineering; 18 years.
2. What do you personally get out of teaching?
Honestly, it’s just so much fun. I also love that I’m paid to nerd out and I get to really master topics that are of great interest to me. I also find a great deal of pride in the fact that many students arrive here quite unsure of what they are going to experience and whether or not they will like it. Then, less than two years later, they are confidently applying for and accepting career positions in well-paid, meaningful jobs that they are really excited about. This transformation really does embody Camosun’s objective of providing life-changing learning.
3. What’s one thing you wish your students knew about you?
Many of them know this already, but I was a terrible student at university. My grades were average, but my attitude was probably the worst in the class. I think being a poor student makes me a better teacher because I know what leaves students uninspired or irritated. Some of my classmates that got excellent grades did not have the best career success, so there’s more to life than getting straight As. I did, however, get straight As in my master’s degree. By then, I knew what I wanted and was inspired by the learning. I guess it’s a matter of finding your passion.
4. What’s one thing you wish they didn’t know about you?
I’m a bit hyperactive, so I’ve probably blurted out all kinds of inappropriate things in class. When you’re teaching about waterborne diseases, conversation tends toward diarrhea a fair bit. So far, it seems they are reasonably forgiving. I did get a few face-palms when we were brainstorming all the objects one might find on a preliminary sewage screen. I really hope my dean isn’t reading this.
5. What’s the best thing that’s happened to you as a teacher here?
I had a student once who was new to Canada. He had spent the 18 months before starting Civil Tech in the English Language Development program, as he’d learned very little English before leaving China. He was so clever that while in Civil Tech, he also taught himself French. He graduated as one of our top students and went on to complete his degree at UBC. One day he called me and said he had been offered seats in graduate programs at both Stanford and MIT and wanted my advice. I was too blown away to even remember what advice I gave, but he’s now at MIT doing a PhD in structural engineering.
6. What’s the worst thing that’s ever happened to you as a teacher here?
When we get news that one of our graduates has died. That’s happened a few times. It’s tragic.
7. What do you see in the future of post-secondary education?
I think all education is going to move away from knowledge acquisition and toward how best to manage and apply the wealth of knowledge that is available to us. Why would anyone need to memorize facts when we have Wikipedia literally in our back pocket? Wikipedia is an interesting example because there is no guarantee that anything on that site is factually correct. As the amount of technical data expands exponentially, no one person is ever going to know everything. We will all become specialists and will need the teamwork and communication skills to work with other specialists. There will be no place in the future for silos; all problems will require a multidisciplinary approach.
8. What do you do to relax on the weekends?
Weekends are not for relaxing. Weekends are for attending concerts, going to plays, taking an improv workshop, drinking with friends, weeding the garden, planning what I’m going to do in the summer, reading, thinking I should be taking notes on what I’m reading because it’s a book on the history of drinking water treatment, cooking, reading recipe books, cleaning the toilets, and doing laundry. I spend way too much time reading political journalism; that’s not very relaxing.
9. What is your favourite meal?
Rogan josh with naan bread. I made this for my neighbour on New Year’s Eve last year. She was having a dinner party for eight and when I said I was bringing it she said, “I’m not a big fan of lamb, but that’s okay, I’ll eat something else.” Yeah, right. I made a triple recipe and used $50 worth of lamb. They ate it all. One guy wiped out the pan with his naan.
10. What’s your biggest pet peeve?
I fully acknowledge that this is super petty and a complete waste of my energies, but I get very bent out of shape when people who comment on Facebook don’t use correct punctuation.