{"id":14457,"date":"2017-08-16T09:00:10","date_gmt":"2017-08-16T16:00:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/?p=14457"},"modified":"2017-08-24T09:05:03","modified_gmt":"2017-08-24T16:05:03","slug":"know-your-profs-camosun-civil-engineering-chair-zoe-broom-on-wiping-out-the-pan-with-naan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/2017\/08\/16\/know-your-profs-camosun-civil-engineering-chair-zoe-broom-on-wiping-out-the-pan-with-naan\/","title":{"rendered":"Know Your Profs<\/em>: Camosun Civil Engineering chair Zo\u00eb Broom on wiping out the pan with naan"},"content":{"rendered":"

Know Your Profs\u00a0<\/i>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.<\/p>\n

If you have an instructor you\u2019d like to see interviewed in the paper, email\u00a0editor@nexusnewspaper.com\u00a0and we\u2019ll add them to our list of teachers to talk to.<\/p>\n

This issue, we caught up with Camosun Civil Engineering chair Zo\u00eb Broom to talk about bad grades, Facebook grammar, and weekends that are anything but relaxing.<\/p>\n

1. What do you teach and how long have you been at Camosun College?<\/i><\/p>\n

Civil Engineering; 18 years.<\/p>\n

2. What do you personally get out of teaching?<\/i><\/p>\n

Honestly, it\u2019s just so much fun. I also love that I\u2019m paid to nerd out and I get to really master topics that are of great interest to me.\u00a0I 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\u00a0two 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\u2019s objective of providing life-changing learning.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Camosun College Civil Engineering chair Zo\u00eb Broom (photo by Jill Westby\/Nexus<\/em>).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

3. What\u2019s one thing you wish your students knew about you?<\/i><\/p>\n

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.\u00a0I 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\u2019s more to life than getting straight As.\u00a0I did, however, get straight As in my master\u2019s degree.\u00a0By then, I knew what I wanted and was inspired by the learning. I guess it\u2019s a matter of finding your passion.<\/p>\n

4. What\u2019s one thing you wish they didn\u2019t know about you?<\/i><\/p>\n

I\u2019m a bit hyperactive, so I\u2019ve probably blurted out all kinds of inappropriate things in class. When you\u2019re teaching about waterborne diseases, conversation tends toward diarrhea a fair bit. So far, it seems they are reasonably forgiving.\u00a0I did get a few face-palms when we were brainstorming all the objects one might find on a preliminary sewage screen.\u00a0I really hope my dean isn\u2019t reading this.<\/p>\n

5. What\u2019s the best thing that\u2019s happened to you as a teacher here?<\/i><\/p>\n

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\u2019d 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\u2019s now at MIT doing a PhD in structural engineering.<\/p>\n

6. What\u2019s the worst thing that\u2019s ever happened to you as a teacher here?<\/i><\/p>\n

When we get news that one of our graduates has died. That\u2019s happened a few times. It\u2019s tragic.<\/p>\n

7. What do you see in the future of post-secondary education?<\/i><\/p>\n

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?\u00a0Wikipedia 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.\u00a0We 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.<\/p>\n

8. What do you do to relax on the weekends?<\/i><\/p>\n

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\u2019m going to do in the summer, reading, thinking I should be taking notes on what I\u2019m reading because it\u2019s 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\u2019s not very relaxing.<\/p>\n

9. What is your favourite meal?<\/i><\/p>\n

Rogan josh with naan bread.\u00a0I made this for my neighbour on New Year\u2019s Eve last year. She was having a dinner party for eight and when I said I was bringing it she said, \u201cI\u2019m not a big fan of lamb, but that\u2019s okay, I\u2019ll eat something else.\u201d\u00a0Yeah, 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.<\/p>\n

10. What\u2019s your biggest pet peeve?<\/i><\/p>\n

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\u2019t use correct punctuation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Know Your Profs\u00a0is 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\u2019d like to see interviewed in the paper, email\u00a0editor@nexusnewspaper.com\u00a0and we\u2019ll add them to our list of teachers to talk to. This issue, we […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":14458,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,196],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14457","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-campus","category-august-16-2017"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14457","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14457"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14457\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14459,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14457\/revisions\/14459"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14458"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14457"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14457"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14457"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}