Great Profiles

One particularly boring day of class, a tale, lanky professor with chestnut-colored hair and a big, infectious smile realized that he was losing his student’s attention quickly. He remembered a book he had just read on a culture in Africa and was struck with an idea. He started groaning, which caught some notice from the students at the front of the class. While walking around holding his back as if in pain, he complained that he hadn’t seen his toes in several months, that he was bloated, and that he was having cramps. Soon his water broke. Suddenly, all of the young men in the class were laughing and the professor had the attention of the rest of the class as he continued the process of giving birth.

Every semester UM Professor Garry Kerr goes through birth in his anthropology classes. He claims, “I’m one of the few men who gives birth on campus regularly.”

“He doesn’t tell you he’s going to do it,” said Sarah Roberson. “It was amusing.”

Couvad or Sympathy Syndrome is where men empathize with wives who are going through pregnancy and experience many of the same things the women do, such as cramps and cravings. Kerr uses Couvad to first get attention, but then to teach about other cultures.

“It shows how other cultures deal with pregnancy,” he said.

In all cultures women give birth, but in some cultures they have absolutely no sex while the women are pregnant. Others have a lot of sex.

Some cultures believe that there are evil spirits that want to steal their baby, so the father would go out and fake a pregnancy to confuse the spirits, allowing the baby to be born safely. The male is also showing his right, whether or not he had fathered the child, by claiming paternity. Couvad also demonstrates the strong ability of culture to override biology, Kerr explains.

Kerr is always looking for new ways to teach, to get the attention of his students so they learn something, using his colleagues, books, and most importantly his own experiences. But Kerr didn’t always want to be a teacher.

He was born and grew up in Ithaca, N.Y., as the middle child of three, having an older brother and a younger sister. He then attended Cornell University, originally for Hotel Management – one of the best schools for that in the world.

Kerr did not fall in love, though.

“I wanted to learn more about food,” he said. “I really enjoyed the food labs. I wanted to be the Love Boat cook on cruise ships.”

Kerr needed to take other classes like food chemistry and accounting, which dealt with things that he wasn’t interested in, so he switched his major to Theatre Arts.

“I was the only straight guy there,” he laughed. “It was horrible. Everyone wanted me to life them up, to be their partner.”

He switched to General Arts and Sciences, then found Anthropology.

“I kind of fell into it,” he said. “It deals with everything – anything a person could do, can do, did do. It seemed like a good fit.”

After finishing his undergraduate degree at Cornell, he came to UM for his graduate work. After three years, the head of the department broke her leg and asked Kerr if he would teach her classes for her. Every night he would go to her house and they would go over her notes of what to say and go over for class the next day.

“I was scared to death,” he admitted. “It was a game for me. I had to tell myself it was a game so that I could do it. But I had her notes and knew what jokes to tell. It was fun. I thought it was the coolest thing on Earth.”

When the department head returned to work after her leg had healed, she told the department, “Let Garry finish the course,” and from then on, teaching was his life.

Kerr believes experience is very important: “If you experience something, you can teach it. There’s only so much you can get from a book. I don’t follow it too closely in my classes.”

Kerr does use textbooks to show what the writers think, but he believes experience makes a better teacher and a better student. He always encourages his students to leave, to take six months to a year off to do anything else – go abroad or work for a year – so that when they return they will be a better student.

Kerr also strives to get students to have personal experiences in class by bringing in artifacts. “I’ll bring in things like a stone grinder so that they can see how it works, hear the sound it makes, smell the burning of it.”

“He brought in skulls and kidney stones to class. They were interesting to look at,” Robertson said, who took Kerr’s Food and Culture class. “One time he brought in a grub and ate it in class, and offered to split it with another student. They were apparently tasty, unlike our silly, American preconceptions of them.”

Kerr uses many of his personal experiences in class, including all of his traveling. He has been many places for various reasons. His mother was born in France and christened at Notre Dame, so he always goes to Paris. Especially now that his mother is dating a 72-year-old Frenchman, so he has a place to stay whenever he wants to go.

Kerr also did a lot of traveling with his grandmother. When she was 84 she wanted to go to Egypt, so Kerr volunteered to go with her. He also went to Turkey, Greece and Stonehenge. When she was 88 she wanted to go to China, so Kerr dropped out of Cornell to go with her.

After he went to New Zealand to complete his geology minor, he stayed four months longer to look around, exploring the island, going over to Australia, and then visiting many places including Hawaii on his way back home. He doesn’t let teaching get in the way of his travel, either. Last year he went to Africa on a photo safari, which actually led to the creation of a new class.

Kerr is teaching five classes this semester: Introduction to Anthropology, Honors Intro to Anthropology 101 in a FIG, Introduction to Honors, Survey Forensic Sciences, and Archeology and Anthropology of Olduvai Gorge.

In the Introduction to Honors course, among other things, he has the students go out and find someone who speaks a different language and learn different phrases, but also learn that Missoula fits into the world and how these people fit there.

“It’s good for them to get out there and find someone who speaks Hmong, Russian, Czech. It lets us know how luckily we are.”

Kerr believes his hardest class to teach is his Introduction to Anthropology lecture class in Urey Lecture Hall. “You have to get students to come. I have a decent reputation which helps, but once they’re there you have to keep them there,” he said. “You have to get them to learn.”

Kerr would rather get rid of the big lecture classes. There are very few people, in his opinion, who can keep the student’s attention and get the students there, but chemistry professor Garon Smith is one of those people.

“He would always go off on tangents,” said Robertson, “but they would always be relevant, unlike other teachers who go off on tangents and would just be wasting time.”

“The Honors College is so easy. You can tease them, learn their names and get them to talk. They can be a part of the education. Students think and talk, find their own examples rather than just telling them.”

In his Olduvai Gorge class, the class that was created from his own trip to Africa, students along with Kerr and Assistant Professor of Anthropology Kelly Dixon, will go to Africa’s Olduvai Gorge to study chimps. In class they learn about the chimps and the surrounding areas. They’ll learn a little Swahili, and they’ll have to get several vaccinations to go including for Yellow Fever and Hepatitis A.

“The list is a mile long,” Kerr joked.

Each student is required to pay for the trip, somewhere between $2,000 and $4,000, but the department is doing everything it can to get the cost as low as possible.

The class will be going next July, although it was originally planned for this January. Dixon is now six and a half months pregnant and so couldn’t get some of the vaccinations, and Kerr couldn’t find a dog sitter that he trusted, so they decided to change the date. The students understood and they agreed to make the trip during summer session rather than winter.

In his smaller classes, Kerr gives out chocolate on Fridays. He even admits that there are several different types of chocolate in his office among the artifacts, books and posters that litter the area, and none are more than three feet apart.

“Chocolate is a mood elevator, and can be healthy – especially dark chocolate. It opens discussion about cultures, like the Aztecs, and can help release serotonin and can calm them. Besides, it’s fun and it introduces them to 15 different types of chocolate.”

He has many different types of chocolate including French truffles, chocolate covered fruit, Lindor truffles, Ghirardelli squares, and even boxed chocolates.

Kerr even has chocolate M&Ms on his door, held by two sets of ceramic hands.

“There used to be only one set,” he said. “But I was filling them every 45 minutes. Plus, one of my student’s is in a wheel chair and couldn’t reach the first one, so now there’s two.”

One of Kerr’s colleagues wants him to put out a third with dog biscuits, but Kerr will continue to give those out to every dog he sees by hand.

Kerr said, “It’s fun to see students come and take a handful before class, smile in at me and say ‘thank you.’ It’s nice to know that when someone’s had a bad day, something that simple can brighten a day.”

While Kerr is constantly changing his classes, there are some things he know he doesn’t ever want to do, and certain things that he makes sure he does.

“I’ve had teachers I didn’t like before here [at UM] and at Cornell. One of them would shame the students in class. When they would try to answer the question, he would tell them they were stupid and that they shouldn’t be in the class. Sometimes they wouldn’t come back because they were too embarrassed,” he explained.

Kerr makes sure that he’s very flexible with the students. “If you’re in the hospital for a week, don’t worry about turning that in late. Other teachers have absolutely no flexibility. While the world isn’t flexible, if you’re in a car wreck, you’re going to be late or miss a class; that’s life.”

Kerr realizes that things come up, especially with his Intro to Anthropology course which contains mostly freshman who are still getting used to things. “There are bound to be some things that happen,” said Kerr. “A lot of them have new experiences with being out on their own, with the dorms, alcohol, the responsibility.” However, he makes sure that people aren’t trying to get out of class with excuses.

“And it’s [teaching] still fun. I hope I never get to a point where it’s just a job. When I grow up, I don’t know what I want to do. But, for now, it’s a good place to coast,” he laughed. “I always think I have the best life on Earth.”

Geography Professor Rick Graetz put up a saying on the hall wall just outside Kerr’s office: “Life is not a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a well-preserved and pretty body, but rather to skid in broadside, thoroughly used up totally worn out, loudly proclaiming ‘Wow! . . . What a ride!’”

That’s Kerr.

“Rick has the best outlook on life,” said Kerr. “Life’s not about arriving first – it’s getting there Rick’s way. I’m trying to get as much out of this life as possible. I can make a difference.”