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Laura ProvostProf. O’Toole-BolthrunisIntro to Professional Writing11/4/2015Mr. Brian Alves is one of those teachers that you would pass in the hallway and not even notice. But if you did see him sauntering by, you would see an average Joe with a 70’s haircut and a set of teeth direct from Great Britain. He has been one of my professors for three classes now, and even now, when thinking about what led up to this point in his life, “exciting” isn’t exactly the first word that springs to mind.But one of my favorite things about people is that they can be some of the most average looking specimens on the planet, and yet they could have lived a life completely different from mine, learned things that I will never learn, and seen things that I would never be able to comprehend. One of my favorite examples are teachers; every year they get a new batch of a dozen to a few hundred people to interact with, learn the names of, and figure out where they’re going. For Alves, one of his greatest achievements was becoming a college professor. He teaches digital design and web coding, and he claims that one of the best parts about being a college professor is that “it’s a creative environment like no other. I’m surrounded by talented young men and women who always think differently than I do, and it not only gives them an opportunity to converse with other people about their ideas, but it also inspires me to continue being creative.”Alves began instructing himself on how to code around the year 1997, back when the world only had dial-up and just before Google became the answer to all of our first world problems. He received his Bachelor’s degree at Bradford College, and his MFA at the University of Iowa. After a brief period of time living in Washington State, in 2004 he moved back to New England and returned to Bradford as a professor, where he taught up until 2014 when he came to Salem State University. One of the key facets of his teaching style is that Alves claims that he does not have students. “I consider them more like colleagues,” he said. “And I’m more like a mentor or a higher-up in a company. I want to create a more professional environment in which my students learn to take on real-life projects, with no detriment to their actual career pursuits.” Another interesting factor in Alves’s teaching style is his opinion on the grading system, which he considers to be flawed. “Being an art professor is different from other departments, I understand, but I think that in general the system with which we grade students in the education system just doesn’t accurately explain how a student is doing. What I prefer to do is have a student show their work, and receive feedback from both their peers and myself, and then from that constructive criticism they can improve upon what they’ve done. Giving a student an ‘A’ or a ‘B’ may help reaffirm that they’re doing a good job, but realistically it doesn’t help them fully understand why they’re doing a good job.”This point truly comes into play in the classroom. Alves uses a variety of professional examples when explaining assignments, and encourages students to search into more obscure sources of inspiration to take their assignments to the next level. In many cases, he will sit with a single student for almost the entire length of the class just to help them solve a technical issue with whatever program they’re using at the time. He insists that students from one class come while he is teaching another class so that they can have more time to complete an assignment and ensure that it is up to par with the student’s standards. He grades his students not on how their final assignment has ended up, but on how much the student has learned from their mistakes (as they are bound to make many) and how they have overcome them. He allows a student to grow in their own way, and in their own direction, and offers complete creative freedom.From bringing his dog to classes on occasion, to pulling up obscure artists that you’ve never heard of, or memes that everyone’s heard of, it would seem that Brian Alves lives to teach, and would do anything to inspire his students every day. But even so, if you saw him walking down the halls of Salem State University, you might not even give him a second glance. From such an assuming person comes an incredibly memorable professor. ................
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