"I'm very boring," claims Rhonda Amsel, BSc'71, MSc'77, a reluctant star. But her students might disagree. Amsel, who teaches statistics (also labelled "very boring" by those who haven't taken her courses) in the Psychology department, was chosen from among 47 nominees as the 1997 Canadian Professor of the Year, a $5,000 award granted by the Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE)in Washington, D.C.

While modest to the point of being self-effacing, Amsel is also engaging and witty. It isn't difficult to see why students warm to her, even in the cold cavernous auditoriums where she teaches Introductory Statistics to classes of 400 students. Yet teaching was not initially in the cards. "I was hired by the Psychology department in 1973 as a statistician consultant, not as a teacher. I was shoved into teaching," she recalls. The push came from the administrative assistant at the time, Marjorie Rose, who countered Amsel's protests that she was too shy by saying, "Yes, you're right."

Introductory Statistics is not the most popular of courses. "Students are very negative coming into it," Amsel concedes. "They think they don't need it, that it's too dry. They wonder if they are being punished." But statistics is compulsory for many programs. "Students need to understand statistics to read research in their areas," she says. The challenge is to take a topic that is potentially as dry as Saskatoon in summer, and freshen it up.

"There are lies, damned lies, and statistics," opined Disraeli in the nineteenth century. Amsel's course teaches students to discern how statistics work, so that they cannot be deceived. She pillages popular culture and media for examples of how statistics permeate our world. "Almost every day I can find something statistical in the newspaper. I bring in funny articles: for instance, 'Do Canadians believe in ghosts?' and comparing responses from each province. We consider how such a survey might be done. And of course, political results, sports, reports on scientific research all include statistics. I teach them to read statistics critically," says Amsel, "but we have fun, too."

Having fun goes a long way towards making statistics non-threatening. "I avoided math like the plague," recalls Ray Satterthwaite, BA'90, now director of McGill's Annual Fund, "but she made it interesting. And you know she cares about her students, that they understand the content, because she's always available in or out of class. I wouldn't have made it though stats without her help." Amsel constantly tries to improve her courses. "Recently, I realized that anxious students approached assignments in a way that wasn't productive, paying too much attention to grades and not enough to what they could do to improve," Amsel says. "So I took the grades off the assignments, replaced them with comments, and asked for whatever revisions were necessary. If students still were struggling after a couple of revised submissions, we had interviews with them. Fortunately," she adds, "I have wonderful teaching assistants who are very dedicated." The consequence of Amsel's adjustment? The students, especially those who were struggling, were more comfortable asking her or the teaching assistants for help, and the bottom level of the class gained noticeably on the top level.

Although statistics courses occupy Amsel's classroom time, her McGill activities extend beyond teaching. As Associate Dean of Student Services, Amsel meets with students who have problems ranging from course work to battles with university bureaucracy to unemployment. She is a veteran of finding innovative ways to assist students. Ten years ago, she helped develop material to assist students with disabilities and their professors. "I had a student who was deaf and who didn't tell me until about two weeks through a one-month course," she explains. "I realized that I had to do something to encourage students to be more forthcoming about their needs." This led to research with Dr. Cathy Fichten of Montreal's Jewish General Hospital on perceptions of accommodations for students with disabilities, material to help faculty help students, and, most recently, an appearance in a McGill instructional video about teaching students with disabilities.

Amsel looks bemused when asked what motivates her. "I like students," she responds. "If you don't like students, you won't like teaching. I like making a difference in their perception of a topic. Teaching means putting in solid effort all along, organizing and reorganizingbecause I change things every year. Teaching," she emphasizes, "is steady work."

Steady work, along with imagination, integrity, and a sincere concern for her students: the characteristics of Rhonda Amsel, and clearly the ingredients for a professor of distinction.