The Memorable Brother Bott

I think anyone who has been a student at BYU has probably heard of or taken a class from Brother Randy Bott. Just wanted to let you all in on a little news. Check out the following article. (This is just pieces of it, but you can check it out on the BYU webpage: www.byu.edu
Randy Bott doesn't sugarcoat the challenges his Brigham Young University students will face when they serve missions for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He tells it like it is during the missionary preparation courses he teaches, with a mixture of wit and wisdom, and they love him for it. They love him so much that Bott is the highest-rated professor in America in 2008 at RateMyProfessors.com.

"Everyone says before you leave BYU, you have to take a class from Brother Bott," said psychology major Cassandra Lawyer, a 22-year-old senior from San Diego...This year alone, 3,149 have taken Bott's classes. That's a full 10 percent of BYU's student body.

"It's ruined my life," Bott said with customary deadpan humor. "My colleagues ask me if they should bow or curtsey. I am by no stretch of the imagination the top professor in the United States."

BYU ranked seventh on the Web site's list of highest-rated faculties, but Bott's place at the top isn't a surprise...Students consider him a mission coach and self-help guru. At the start of his mission prep class on Monday night, Bott asked which of a couple hundred students had received mission calls in the prior week. One woman stood to announce she will be going to Portugal in February. A man was called to go to Brazil in April. Bott also asked if anyone got engaged during the week. None had. "Huh," Bott said, shaking his head in sadness at a sorry group. "Anybody manage a date?"

Short, stout and 63, Bott wore a white, long-sleeved shirt and tie. A low-lying crown of white hair circled his head topped by a wisp of white on top. The packaging made him wonder at the RateMyProfessors.com rankings. "I'm a bland person," he said. "I'm not audio-visually friendly." The smile came after the joke.

To his students, Bott is like a cool older uncle or grandfather who makes you laugh, makes you feel good about yourself and sometimes tells a family secret when parents won't, but only to teach you and help you love the family more. He peppers his teaching with highly relevant stories drawn from those sources and his own mission to Samoa.

"Those lessons stick, said Ken Alford, who joined BYU's religion faculty this fall after nearly 30 years as an Army officer. "I have a son on a mission in Fiji who took a class from Brother Bott," he said. "He raved about him then, and he's raved about him even from the mission field."

Bott's ministry extends beyond the classroom. He spends four to six hours a day responding to e-mails from students and former students who ask him for help with life problems. The issues range from the silly — an Armenian woman was told by missionaries he could help her prepare a Relief Society lesson — to the heartbreaking, like handling the divorce of parents and moral trouble. "You get known for that type of stuff," Bott said. "Now I get e-mails from parents and friends of students, too."

Getting an "A" from Bott is easy, according to the ratings on RateMyProfessors.com. Lawyer said tests are open-note, open-book. "It doesn't have to be a hard class to be a good class," she said. "Missionaries all over the world will tell you they are using things he taught them."