A Passion to Teach
Writer: Kristina Twigg, redmirage49@yahoo.com
Contact: Bill Gibbs, billgibbs@tamu.edu, 979-777-0171
The time is early. It’s the first class of the morning.
The place is a 300-person lecture hall in the Kleberg Center on Texas A&M University’s west campus. Surprisingly, the room is more than half full and nearly everyone is wide awake.
And the students are smiling and laughing.
Behind the podium, their professor, David Reed, Ph.D., glows with energy and enthusiasm that belies the gray in his hair and beard.
“If I’m not mistaken, I think I have the Earth back here. You wouldn’t think it would fit in this room,” he says as he steps through a brown wooden door at the side of the stage.
“Here it is, the third rock from the sun,” he says, reemerging with a small globe decorated in black masking tape marking several important latitudes.
He wheels an overhead projector to center stage. But instead of whipping out transparencies, he uses the projector as a stand-in for the sun, aiming its light on the globe to show how seasons work.
Then the unthinkable happens: Reed drops the earth, rolling it across the floor. “That’d be one heck of an earthquake,” he jokes.
Maybe it’s the 31 years of experience, but Reed looks very comfortable behind the podium—a place not known for its comfort factor.
This is part 1 of a five part story.
Categories: News
