Dr. Joe McCullough is not your ordinary college physics professor. He is not only a professor but is also the Physics chair at Cabrillo College near Santa Cruz, California. But that is not what sets him apart. What makes Dr. Joe McCullough so different from the typical college physics professor is the depth and breadth of his commitment to help his students not just get through physics, but actually learn, understand and retain the information.
I met Dr. Joe (as he is known to his students) when he was introduced to me by my business partner and radio co-host, Marie Waite, at a conference in Los Angeles, and had the pleasure of sharing a table at lunch with him. Having also served as a college professor and as a Student Dean myself, I found Dr. Joe and the subject of his book fascinating. Later, during the same conference, we discussed at length his research and our experiences working with students, and how much we had in common. What I still wondered, after our conversations at the conference, was what led Dr. Joe to spend the time, effort and expense required to research, write and teach others about how to learn complicated information in a more efficient and effective way. Dr. Joe was able to explain the impetus for his mission to learn how humans learn and how to help his student to learn better when he agreed to appear on the radio show at the invitation of my co-host.
When one of the brightest students in his class, a student who had proven his knowledge of the subject matter in every other way, bombed test after test throughout the class, Dr. Joe became determined to figure out why. This student was not alone in experiencing test anxiety. Almost every student in any level of education has experienced test anxiety at one time or another. But some suffer so completely with test anxiety that they go entirely blank whenever a test is administered. This is the problem for which Dr. Joe sought to discover the cause and potential remedies.
Dr. Joe began a quest to learn how the human brain works. He read, researched and reviewed information about human learning. The breakthrough came when he began working with a mathematics instructor who introduced him to neuro-linguistic programming (NLP). Using NLP, Dr. Joe was able to help not only the one student, but all of his students to assimilate, process, understand and recall information on complicated subjects like physics.
This led further to his involvement in Super Camps. Super Camps are summer camps for high school and college students where, using NLP, the students in the short span of ten days, learn how to learn in an entirely new and infinitely more effective way. It is life-changing for the students. To learn more about NLP, Dr. Joe’s odyssey to understand and help both students and other instructors to understand how the human brain learns best, pick up a copy of his bestselling book, Accelerated Learning Techniques for Students on Amazon or Barnes and Nobel.com, or visit his website at www.Joe-McCullough.com.
Dr. Joe is an example of someone going well above and beyond to help those he serves. While his position is to teach physics to college students, his mission is to teach and equip students to learn everything, for the rest of their lives, in way that vastly improves their ability to learn, understand and retain the information, and to eliminate the mental paralysis and blank brain syndrome experienced as a result of test anxiety. While physics is certainly a worthwhile subject to study and understand, and can help students make a good living, what Dr. Joe’s students learn is priceless and can help them become life-long learners, which in turn will help them to make for themselves an exponentially better life.
