By Emily Daughtry |Contributor 
A strange professor is making students yell holes into the walls of Washington Hall.Assistant Professor Melanie O’Meara is changing the way Augusta University students are understanding communication. Her unique teaching methods encourage students to think in creative and outside the box ways.O’Meara’s day starts early in the morning. She takes her two children to school and then comes to campus at 8:30 teach a course called Voice and Movement, a Department of Communication class with a focus on putting theatrical texts into action.“Melanie is such a fun and outgoing professor,” said Ceara Hester, one of O’Meara’s students. “I really enjoy having her. She makes every day spontaneous.”Hester is taking Voice and Movement with O’Meara this semester. The course consists of many strange exercises. Students can be often found yelling others into submission, bar fighting, tongue twisting or sometimes yelling holes into the walls. Hester says it took some time to understand the strange exercises but she has grown to enjoy them.“I went to school for performance studies,” O’Meara said. “We had a black box theater and we were learning to adapt literature for the stage. That’s what I love to do.”O’Meara loves performance studies and loves empowering students to grow as performers.“My mind works in very strange ways and often times that’s put right on the stage,” O’Meara said.Last semester, O’Meara directed a play of her own creation, “Fanny’s Fantastic Food Frolic.” This abstract play told the story of a girl who’s everything is gray. Throughout the performance, O’Meara’s weird, wacky and charming creativity was set to stage in a performance one could not soon forget.“That show was based off of a series of photographs by the French photographer Sophie Calle called the ‘Chromatic Diet,’” she said. “I really love to work with photos and still images and find out how these things perform and bring the answer to that question to life through theater productions.”O’Meara loves working with photographs and stills and thinking about how they can be adapted into performances.“If you saw my recent production of ‘Fanny’s Fantastic Food Frolic,’ for that production I crafted a lot of the props and the set pieces myself,” O’Meara said.Upon entering her office, one will find it is littered with props from her recent production. Sitting atop her cabinet is a lemonade stand that was worn by Fanny, the protagonist of her production last semester.O’Meara, who earned her doctoral degree from LSU, hopes to inspire her students to be like Fanny and learn to live a more colorful life.