I took Kouba my first quarter at Davis. He is certainly one of the best professors I had. I had never seen calculus and he made it easy to understand and provided and insane amount of recourses. I actually had a friend start at Davis last fall and referred him to Koubas recourses. He was super passionate and made an 8 am calc class super fun and engaging. A lot of professors could learn from him.

I took calc from Kouba like 10 years ago at this point. I guess he made calculus as good as it could be (which is still pretty damn low from this biosci major's opinion).

..

Kouba's class was my lowest grade since like middle school at the time and yet I still just have overwhelmingly fond memories of it. It wasn't even that he made calculus that interesting--because that's a losing battle I think--it's just that with his explanations I actually felt like I understood it and was comfortable to be challenged by it for the first time.

That happened to be winter quarter freshman year, and so it was very perplexing when basketball season rolled around and I kept seeing him on the bench.

I've heard his A League IM teams won multiple championships. The players loved him, and he was part of our championship team.

Oh man, this guy is pretty special to me, even though I'm not sure I ever met him in person. When I was in HS, he called and asked me to join some oddball math program when it was time to register for classes in the fall. I had no idea what I was getting myself in to, but as a chemistry major, he had me sign up for the 21 series calculus (when I only needed the 16 series). I ended up being in a class of 40, with 4 hours of "lab" each week. It turned out I was one of two kids in the class who hadn't taken calculus in HS. I ended up changing my major from chemistry to chemical engineering my sophomore year, and would never have been able to do so if it hadn't been for Dr. Kouba reaching out to me. To this day, I still don't know why he reached out to me.

Edit - Well, look at that. This was a part of the Emerging Scholars Program that Dr. Kouba was in charge of. I'm assuming one of my HS math teachers reached out to Dr. Kouba on my behalf, without me knowing.

https://www.math.ucdavis.edu/~kouba/KoubaHomepageDIRECTORY/ESP.html