2007 NAGT Neil Miner Award

Journal of Geoscience Education, Mar 2008 by Gibson, Michael A

Thank you Don for your generous comments; as I will reveal soon, your influence on me is paramount to me standing here today. I would also like to thank you, my fellow geoscience educators, for this most memorable day of my professional career. I am honored and humbled that you have chosen me as the 2007 NAGT Neil Miner Award recipient. When I look at the list of past recipients, I am awed and can not help but feel a little bit out of place among them. Thank you for your confidence and rest assured that your reinforcement motivates me to do more, for much longer, and hopefully much better.

Would you not agree that we are the product of those who touched our lives over our developing years, especially past teachers? I know that I owe my own passion for learning, and much of my style of teaching, to the cumulative influence of my many past teachers, but there are a few notables that I can point to and identify specific traits that I think influenced me over the years. In pointing them out, I thank them for making it possible for me to be here with you today. I encourage eacn of you to reflect back on those who influenced you and rind some way to thank them.

I was fortunate to grow up in Williamsburg, Virginia, well known for its colonial history and archaeological riches, but also a place well endowed with fossil riches. Fossils were numerous in the ditches and fields I played in as a youth and over my formative years I amassed a fossil collection that rightfully gave my parents reason to question the load-limit of the floor in my attic bedroom in our small post-World War II box-style home. One of my most precious fossils is the Chesapecten jeffersonius, now Virginia's Official State Fossil, that I collected from a drainage ditch less than a half-mile from my boyhood home. One of my surviving memories of elementary school was the day the entire Mathew Whaley Elementary School 5th grade met in the school auditorium where William and Mary paleontologist Dr. Gerald H. Johnson brought Pliocene whale vertebra and seashells to share with us. I recall how animated he was when he spoke, how he moved among us and spoke directly to us, how he would have someone stand up and then demonstrate where vertebra would be found by running his hand down a backbone prompting a jump from the student and giggles from us. He gave me my first touch of a real fossil whale vertebra. The intersection of me finding fossil seashells near my home and learning that whales used to inhabit my neighborhood's ancient past was all the encouragement I needed to expand exploring range and my collecting mania.

I grew up on Wickre Street, named after the first person to build on the street, and whose spacious side yard was the neighborhood baseball field. One day while walking across Mrs. Wickre's front yard, I noticed a small goldfish pond behind a juniper tree with rocks and fossils strewn about. I quickly recognized many of the fossils as the same as I those in my personal collection. I proudly told Mrs. Wickre that I too had a fossil collection much like hers and we shared many talks about our fossils over the years. She encouraged me to seek out Dr. "Jerre" Johnson at the College of William and Mary, who she explained would teach me all I wanted to know about fossils and who really liked working with children; Dr. "J" as he would later become to me, had crossed my developmental path for a second time. Over the years Mrs. Wickre and I shared our collections, thus solidifying fossils as something special in my life and influencing my decision to later attend William and Mary for college. As for high school, I was a product of the 1960's reform Earth Science Curriculum Project (ESCP). I was first exposed to the science of geology in a formal way as a 9th grader in Mrs. Garrington's earth science class. Two of my fondest 9th grade memories were how I felt when I earned a perfect score on mineral and rock identification and explaining to my class my poster project on geologic time, where I proudly displayed the fossils I had personally collected over the years. Mrs. Garrington showed me that fossil collecting was part of the much broader science called geology, which became my new passion. Thank you, Mrs. Wickre and Mrs. Garrington, for taking an interest in me and giving me direction.

Mrs. Helen Hall was my senior Lafayette High School Biology II teacher and she absolutely adored dissections. We dissected everything, including recent road kills, and reconstructed the skeletons. She also liked fossils and moved me past "stamp collecting fossils" by teaching me to see them as once fleshy, living beings from a bygone dynamic world. Although we did not have a formal backpacking club, Mrs. Hall would take groups of us to the Appalachian Trail each month of the school year for marathon backpacking trips, thus and exposing me to a variety of new geologic materials, processes and landforms, further reinforcing my interest in geology. Thank you, Helen Hall for expanding my horizons and showing me a larger world.