You’d be wrong. Durstine teaches students.

“Exercise physiology and clinical exercise physiology are some of my subjects,” said the first winner of the new Michael J. Mungo Distinguished Professor of the Year Award. “First I teach students.

Durstine, a professor in and chair of the Department of Exercise Science in the Arnold School of Public Health, describes himself as a fair but demanding professor, saying he thinks most students want their professors to be demanding. “I think I’m very demanding, but more importantly, I think I’m very fair with students,” he said. “We as teachers need to be as fair as we can.”

Durstine, who has been at USC 23 years, also teaches subjects not on the course syllabus. ‘I teach students how to learn, and I teach them about life,” he said. “I help them learn life’s lessons.”

Durstine believes a good teacher is not only enthusiastic about the subject but also is a good entertainer. To hold students’ attention, he’ll often do “crazy” things in class. “When I’m talking about getting a rested heart rate, if there’s a table around, I’ll lie down on that table,” he said.

Or to teach students about resting cardiac output, which is different depending on body size, Durstine might compare a large male student to a small female student.

“I’ll ask, ‘What’s the difference between these two.’ Everyone will snicker a little bit and say that one’s a boy and one’s a girl, and I’ll say, ‘Yeah, Ok,’ and we’ll all laugh about that. But I get students to learn about cardiac output by understanding the situation.”

Durstine also teaches his students who don’t know it already that some things just have to be memorized.

“You might say, ‘But, gee, memorizing something doesn’t necessarily mean that you know it or you know how it works,’” Durstine said. “But, when you talk about body systems, for example, memorizing is the first step to understanding.”

The trick as a teacher, Durstine said, is first to get students to memorize without their knowing they are memorizing and then to get them to understand. “I get the students to do that by getting them to talk in class and developing interaction,” he said.

Durstine said he’s more interactive now because of the technology available in the classroom. ‘Not only can I entertain students with my body movements, my flamboyant behavior, and going one-on-one with them, but I’ve got PowerPoint. All of those things together hold students’ interests,” he said.

Besides being a good teacher, Durstine said he’s a good scientist. He is observant of how other professors lecture and present information and adapts the good presentations to his style of teaching. He attends teaching seminars on campus.

Durstine said he is honored and humbled to be the first professor to receive the Mungo award, the University’s highest honor for teaching. “It is very nice to be recognized by your peers, and that includes my students,” he said. “There are a lot of good professors on this campus, and, I hope, that one day they’ll get a chance to be recognized, too.”

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