Get him talking about students and his philosophy of teaching, and he has so much to say that he'll leave sentences dangling as he jumps from topic to topic. That energy and enthusiasm in the classroom earned him a Charles B. Murphy Outstanding Undergraduate Teaching Award this year from Purdue University, one of five given annually. It also has paid off for his department, where he leads a recruiting effort that increased enrollment from 53 in May 1991 to about 200 in May 1994. All his teaching and recruiting efforts are driven by the belief that students know a lot more than we give them credit for. A big part of my job is to build their confidence, to give them positive reinforcement.
Students can tell what they're getting.
When I first came to Purdue, I didn't know much about teaching, so I took a course from Sam Shermis in the Department of Education, and he became my mentor. The presentation is a slide show about bait color, fishing poles, reels, lines, how depth finders work and other aspects of fishing and how they all relate to physics. Krutz makes the presentation several times a year to high-school science classes across the state as part of the School of Agriculture's Professors in the Classroom program to discuss Purdue and career opportunities. And usually some bright kid will catch on and say she's going to give him a TIE, and then they all realize that they've been had. He also gives a lecture each semester to the 1,700 or so students enrolled in Purdue's Freshman Engineering curriculum, about 5 percent of whom will wind up in agricultural engineering.