This article profiles Rebecca Knuth, winner of the LJ Teaching Award for 2009. The way she plans a class she's teaching illustrates why she was nominated by her students and won the award. The award, which comes with a $5000 honorarium and a celebration at the American Library Association (ALA) Midwinter Meeting, is sponsored by ProQuest. For Knuth, a tenured professor in the Library and Information Science Program at the University of Hawai'i, Manoa (UHM), building a course and its syllabus is a lot like writing a book. The key point of Knuth's method is to have students understand and believe that what they're doing and what the program is teaching is important.