If you take introduction to philosophy or introduction to ethics at Oakland University, it is possible lecturer Grant Yocom will be standing at the front of the classroom.

Once he makes it over the border from his home in Windsor, Canada, that is.

The tattooed and curly-haired young professor instructs each class with the same coffee mug within reach, plenty of hasty scribbling on the chalk board and steadily morphs the word “alright” into an unrecognizable series of vowels.

But these are the quirks students remember and recognize him by.

Yocom, 35, has been traveling across the border for seven years to teach at OU. In lectures, he makes sure students understand what can be very confusing material with diagrams, videos and even lectures on YouTube.

Mostly used in his courses taught online, he is the only philosophy lecturer at OU to use blackboard paint and turns a room at home into a virtual classroom and uses online video lectures.

“I didn’t realize how visual my teaching style actually was, so it is all a matter of how do I translate this to an online form,” Yocom said. “I am basically able to import my in-class teaching style into an online form.”

Yocom tries to teach year-round and in the summer he teaches at both OU and the University of Windsor.

Outside of teaching, he is now working on a project in which his self-proclaimed “different sort of philosophy” takes him to Detroit.

The existential social theory uses Nietzsche and examines marginalized and underserviced communities in the larger society — of which Detroit is an example.

Part of the uniqueness to this project is the way Yocom approaches his research.

“Largely I’m focusing on starting with examples and then I insert the theory, which is sort of an inversion of the way normally theorists approach a problem from the top,” Yocom said.”They come thinking they already understand it, and they just try to map examples into a general, theoretical, categorical structure. I’m starting the other way.”

He also likes to paint, sketch and go to museums and jazz shows. He likes to read science fiction for older societies’ views on what the future would look like, as well as gardening.