Peter Anderson is not good with attention. As an associate professor in the Classics department, he prefers books to the limelight, although he said it’s impossible to pick his favorite one.

It was not impossible for the students, however, to pick their favorite teacher. They thrust Anderson into the spotlight at the American Philological Association Annual Meeting in San Antonio on Jan. 8, where he received a Collegiate Teaching Excellence Award.

“The award is based partly on faculty writing letters of support, but also on students writing letters of support. And I’m convinced that I got it because my students were able to say what they thought was special about my teaching,” Anderson said. “So I kind of owe it to their effort.”

Charles Pazdernik, chair of the Classics department, said this is not merely a win for Anderson, but for Grand Valley State University as well.

“We’re delighted by this recognition of professor Anderson’s good work in the Department of Classics,” Pazdernik said. “Not only is the Collegiate Teaching Award amply deserved — as his students well know — but it also validates the claims we make in this university about teaching excellence and the quality and rigor of our programs.”

A Canadian native, Anderson moved to America to finish his doctorate at the University of Cincinnati with his wife and two kids in tow.

After originally aiming for a double degree in social work and early music, his music professor suggested he take Latin as a supplement. Anderson said he owes his love for classics to the energy and passion his teacher would bring to the classroom.

“He was such a dynamic teacher and I was so interested,” he said. “He was really quirky, like a lot of classics people are. His passion for it and the interest that he brought to it just kind of jazzed me.”

Although the class did not change his major, a year’s worth of thinking did.

“A year into that next program I thought, ‘I don’t want to do this, I want to do classics,’” Anderson said. In 2004, Anderson left his job at Ohio University to come to GVSU’s classics department – a switch Anderson said he was happy for.

Now a seasoned GVSU professor, Anderson said his favorite thing about teaching is the students.

“It’s really satisfying to see someone fall in love with a subject,” Anderson said. “So whether it’s my subject or whether they bring their passion for something else to the classics department and seek connections between what they are studying in my classroom and other stuff. No matter how bad a day is, or how long it is, I can always get through it if that week a student said ‘whoa, that’s so cool.’ It’s worth it, then.”

When all is said and done, Anderson only wants his students to walk away with knowledge – whether it be about themselves or about the world in some way.

“If I were to think of the most important thing, it’s for them to walk out of the class feeling like they learned about something they didn’t know about or did something they didn’t think they could do,” said Anderson.

Despite his place in the sun, however, Anderson added that he likes to think of this award as belonging to the whole department and not just himself.

“It’s really great, and humbling, to be selected and I really appreciate it, but it’s kind of like ‘eh, you should be giving that guy an award, and she needs an award,’” he said, pointing his finger at the invisible crowd of colleagues before him. “Especially here, because this department is really a great group of teachers. We’re all really good teachers and I’m not the best here, so it’s kind of like a shared award.”

[email protected]