Oral History with Luther Brice, Interview 2, March 26, 2015 (Ms2015-007)

Luther Kennedy Brice, Jr.

Interview 2

Chemistry Professor at Virginia tech, 1954-1986

Winner of the Wine Award and the Sporn Award

Date of Interview: March 26, 2015

Interviewer: Tamara Kennelly

Place of Interview: InnovationSpace, Virginia tech

Transcriber: Bryanna Tramontana

Length: 32:51

Tamara Kennelly: Today is March 26, 2015. My name is Tamara Kennelly, and I'm with Luther Brice. This is our second interview. You received two very prestigious awards at Virginia Tech. In 1961, you received the university's Wine Award, which recognizes a history of university teaching excellence, and in 1966, you were the first recipient of the newly established Sporn Award for excellence in teaching introductory subjects. Nominations for this award are made by students. I wondered if you would please talk about your theory of teaching and your approach to teaching students.

Luther Brice: I think this is something that I had an intuitive feel for from 1:00when I was a kid. I can remember that I had a blackboard in my bedroom and I would invite my young brother and our black maid to come and sit while I lectured. Not only that, but afterwards I would have tests prepared. I would give them the tests. They would go through and give the answers and turn the papers in, and I would grade them [laughter]. To me teaching is an intuitive thing that you're either born with or not. It's just like any other aptitude, whether it's for mathematics or words. I kind of had the sense from the 2:00beginning that this is what I wanted to do.

KENNELLY: Something you enjoy. Did they [brother and the maid] mind being--

BRICE: No, no they thought it was all great fun.

KENNELLY: Oh they enjoyed it.

BRICE: Oh yes [laughter].

KENNELLY: Did your approach to the classroom and how you taught change over the years?

BRICE: I don't think so. This was in spite of the fact that there's all sorts of stuff that you can read about--articles and essays and things like that that have been written about what makes a good teacher and what the right approach to teaching is and all that. Again my assessment is that it's intuitive. Some people have a knack for doing that. I don't think that it's really, at least for me, something that changed over time.

KENNELLY: One of the letters from your students talks about Brice's disciples. What did he mean by that?

BRICE: [Laughter] I think it was in the sixties when we started an honors 4:00chemistry program where freshmen could sign up for an advanced placement course. It was based on exams that they took and what grades they got in high school. Among that group, a smaller select group of students was selected too. Where each one of them, instead of doing routine experiments each week, each one had a research project assigned to him. They had the option of coming to the lab and working on their project during a wide range of times. Some weekends some of 5:00those students would come and work on Saturday on this project instead of going to a three-hour lab on Monday afternoon every week with thirty other students. A lot of them, like I said, got really wrapped up in it, and it worked very well.

KENNELLY: There are several letters that I've read from students that you had, talking about your teaching and how they did go on professionally many of them in chemistry because of that. There was one student who became a medical doctor, and he mentions what he calls your peopleology, an ability to connect with students. Another former students mentions in a letter that he never spoke in a 6:00class of a 125 students and that he hadn't introduced himself privately to you, but that when he and his roommate went to your office to talk to you to find out about their grades that you addressed them by name and that you knew their grades.

BRICE: The way that I picked that up was I would go into the classroom when exams were given. The teacher, and I did the same thing, would leave the class for most of the hour or two-hour period when the exam was given. Then we would come in the end of the period to pick up the test papers. As students would turn in their test papers, I thought to myself, I wonder which of these kids is 7:00getting these 98 and 99's on all the tests? Or some other aspect of his classroom behavior. Anyhow I would look at the paper where he gave his name and at his face, and I would remember.

KENNELLY: So you had a good ability to remember--

BRICE: I did. Back then I was very good at remembering peoples names, now it's just the other way [laughter]. But this is how I was able to associate the person's face and his name.

KENNELLY: I mean in a class of a 125 students--

BRICE: I didn't remember every 125, but a lot of them I would remember. One of 8:00the ones that I did remember is the one who made that comment.

KENNELLY: Yeah, that's pretty cool.

BRICE: Now I did learn to know when, well a lot of students would come for extra help, and I would remember those students' names.

KENNELLY: It really suggests that you saw the students as individuals.

BRICE: Individuals, yes.

KENNELLY: Not just this huge lecture class where there's a mass of people out there, but connected with them. Another former student wrote that your statement, and this is a quote, "Know the facts," has more than once prevented him from getting into embarrassing situations, and I just wondered if you could recall how you would be using that statement in the classroom, the "know the facts."

BRICE: That really doesn't ring a bell [laughter].

KENNELLY: That doesn't ring a bell, I guess it stuck with him though [laughter]. It was somebody who was actually a professional years later and saying, "Know the facts."

BRICE: Well I might have said that, but I don't have a recollection of that.

KENNELLY: I wonder if you had any recollections of what the classrooms were like when you first began teaching at Virginia Tech?

BRICE: For one they were smaller.

KENNELLY: Were your labs well equipped?

BRICE: Pretty well yeah. I think the lab equipment thing improved considerably I think in the 1970s when they did a total renovation of Davidson Hall, and that did make a difference.

KENNELLY: There's another one of the students who wrote about your coming to visit. I guess in the labs you would make the rounds, so to speak.

BRICE: That's another way that I would get to know students because you can talk to them as individuals. Their name would be somewhere that I could see, so again I could associate names with faces. I'd forgotten that. I probably got to know a lot more students that way.

KENNELLY: From the rounds. He said as a freshman, they were very nervous about your coming by on the rounds, and he just told a little story about how he had to light his gas burner, and he said it was an old contraption that was not easy to light, and whatever he did, it shot out a four-foot spray of water on you and on him and everybody else around. You just went on your way, you just turned 11:00around and went on your rounds. He thought his career was over, but it was just like the way you handled it.

BRICE: Again like I said that was a good way to get to know students individually.

KENNELLY: Just going around and I guess answering questions, maybe sometimes if people had problems they could--

BRICE: That's the way the labs were run probably during the first ten or fifteen years. After that, when the student body got much larger and when the number of graduate teaching assistants at Virginia Tech mushroomed, it was the teaching assistants that supervised these labs.

KENNELLY: I see.

BRICE: The last years that I was at Virginia Tech, I didn't spend a lot of time 12:00in the individual labs.

KENNELLY: So that was earlier on--

BRICE: It was earlier on. The student must have been from back in the sixties or early seventies.

KENNELLY: I read a newspaper article that said you had the nickname "take it twice Brice."

BRICE: That started out about the second or the third year that I was here. I went in the auditorium to pick up exam papers, and there was still a number of students in the class, but a fair number had left. Written across the blackboard in big capital letters were the words "It's nice to take it twice, or even thrice with Brice." [laughter].

KENNELLY: Oh wow [laughter]. That's where that came from.

BRICE: Over time it was just shortened to "take it twice Brice," leaving the "nice" part out [laughter].

KENNELLY: [Laughter] That's great.

BRICE: The article that was written about me when I retired in the local college paper, the title was "Take it Twice Brice Retires."

KENNELLY: Well it's good to get the whole story behind it. One student said, "I did in fact change my schedule the second quarter, so I could have another term of your excellent teaching." There you go.

BRICE: [Laughter] Well there were students who did that, and there were others I think who avoided it because somehow I had this reputation of being difficult.

KENNELLY: That your classes were?

BRICE: Yeah.

KENNELLY: Although, others said that you were able to--they talked about the 14:00clarity with which you presented difficult materials. People mentioned that and your passion for the subject, which

BRICE: Came through.

KENNELLY: Came through to the students. Do you have any suggestions you'd make to a teacher of today who wanted to strive for excellence in teaching? Or is it really they just have to have that intuitive thing?

BRICE: Again it's an intuitive sense and a personality thing that I don't think you can change. I don't think you can explain to somebody what to do. There are people obviously whose personalities are very different from mine who are also very effective in teaching. So I don't think there is any one thing that works.

KENNELLY: Would you tell about the episode when you played "Hearts and Flowers" for your physical chemistry class after a set of particularly bad test papers? Do you even recall that one, where you played it on your violin?

BRICE: Oh that was in a physical chemistry class. I've again kind of forgotten the circumstances there. I remember that incident, but I've forgotten what stimulated it.

KENNELLY: Another student said the highlight for him was a kinetics class demonstration to the "William Tell Overture," so that sounds quite dramatic.

BRICE: I worked that out, and I published an article in the Journal of Chemical Education on that demonstration. Today if you go to a computer and Google 17:00"Iodine clock reaction William Tell overture," there is a list of references on the screen. A number of faculty members at other schools who read this article have made videos of this demonstration in their class.

KENNELLY: They made videos of it?

BRICE: Yeah, so you can see these videos on the Internet.

KENNELLY: So what happened that day? Or can you explain what happened?

BRICE: There is a chemical reaction where when you mix two perfectly clear solutions, after you mix them, it also stays perfectly clear until about thirty 18:00seconds. All of the sudden it turns black. The explanation for that is a little complicated. Then if you dilute those solutions and pour them together, it will take forty seconds before they turn black. Prepare two more solutions where they are still a little bit more diluted, and it will take fifty seconds. I prepared ten of these and had ten students to volunteer to come and stand behind each one. Then they are given the instructions that when the meter stick comes down, you pour one solution into the other and set the flask on the table. Just as they mix them together, I punch a button, and the "William Tell Overture" 19:00starts. The first solution changes to black almost immediately, the next one ten seconds later, the next one twenty seconds later as the "William Tell "Overture" continues. Then the last one turns black just at the last crash of the symbols.

KENNELLY: Oh that's great! I bet the students loved it.

BRICE: One of the videos shows all this, and the students behind who are doing all the mixing are just shouting and jumping around at the last crash of the symbols, when that last flask turns black at exactly the right time. The professor has to be very careful about mixing those solutions to make sure that they're exactly the amount that they will turn exactly one minute and thirty 20:00seconds or whatever the time is. In this one case, not only are the students behind the counter raving around, but this guy's running back and forth in front of the class doing this himself [laughter].

KENNELLY: Wow. So it's not actually your class in the video it's--

BRICE: That's right. In fact there are three of four of them at different schools. Not only that, but it's been translated into Spanish I found on another Internet site. So it's caught on.

KENNELLY: Its sounds like it very much so. You had mentioned the meter stick before, but I see the meter stick takes on a new kind of relevance that it was a part of this show.

Last time you talked about the chemical magic show you gave to both Mrs. 21:00Ogliaruso's second grade class and also to a packed house of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington, D.C. I wondered if you'd tell us about the beginnings of doing these magic shows, and what set that off.

BRICE: It started back in the 1970s. I think the first ones were given just to perform in Davidson Hall in the lecture room. It was the Chemistry Club that sponsored it. They are the ones that talked me into developing this chemical magic show.

KENNELLY: It was for a fundraiser, wasn't it?

BRICE: It was a fundraiser in the sense that you were charged admission to come to this show, and all of that money went to the Chemistry Club.

KENNELLY: Right.

BRICE: It turned out to be quite a hit. Most of the time when it was performed 22:00in Davidson Hall it would be packed with the audience and have standing room only. I think there was a little bit earlier performance given in Burruss Hall, and I've kind of forgotten who sponsored that, but all of the magic shows were based on demonstrations that I used to do in class so that's where the show came from.

KENNELLY: The people that were coming to your shows they weren't just your students. They were the general public who wanted to come and see.

BRICE: Oh yeah there would be ten-year-old kids.

KENNELLY: I bet. People would bring their kids, and they loved it.

So you even took that show on the road for a while didn't you?

BRICE: Oh yes. I've forgotten where the sponsorship came from. Excuse me, it was actually from invitations from different places, usually schools. I went on a tour through North and South Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama.

KENNELLY: Texas as well.

BRICE: Texas was later. That was a trip specifically back and forth to Texas. On the trip to Texas I got there by airplane, and back in those days, this isn't something that you couldn't do today, I had a suitcase full of chemicals [laughter].

KENNELLY: No way you could carry that on now.

BRICE: No inspection, not a problem.

KENNELLY: You just put it in the--

BRICE: I just carried it on like a suitcase.

KENNELLY: Put it in the overhead, and that's it.

BRICE: If I tried that today, I'd go to jail.

KENNELLY: Yeah all of these explosions. Wow that's interesting.

One of your students also, because we're talking about your students, gave you a cape and somebody else gave you a crystal ball as well.

BRICE: Well let's see. I think I had two capes and this pointed hat.

KENNELLY: Oh my goodness.

BRICE: I didn't remember the crystal ball.

KENNELLY: Its in one of those newspaper articles. Then you worked for a while, towards the end of your tenure at Virginia Tech, I think you were also the department chair.

BRICE: I was the department chair for just one year. This was early in 25:001964/1965. It was the point at which the department head had retired, and there was a year before they hired another permanent full time department head. They asked me to act as the department head during that interim. So I was acting department head.

KENNELLY: Did you enjoy being the department head?

BRICE: It was okay. I didn't even move into the department head's office. I just stayed in my own office. There were secretaries in there, and it was okay, but not something I would want to do long term.

KENNELLY: Just helping them out for a while there. Lets see, now you had your 26:00own sloop.

BRICE: Yes, it was an eighteen-foot sloop, correct. Out at Claytor Lake.

KENNELLY: The Molly Qule?

BRICE: It was spelled M-O-L-L-Y another word Q-U-L-E. Bob Krug, who was department head at the time, he, of course, knew about my new sailboat, and he came into my office one day and said that his wife has a name for your sailboat, and he wrote on the blackboard Molly Qule. I was so taken by that, that I got 27:00metal letters M-O-L-L-Y Q-U-L-E and screwed it on to the back of the boat. So that whenever anybody would come out, they would look at it, and they would, "What is that? Molly Qule? Molly Qule" I said the last word is pronounced "cule." They said, "Oh!"

KENNELLY: How did you get interested in sailing?

BRICE: Through a colleague who was here for just a few years. I went out sailing with him just a few times, and it kind of grabbed hold of me.

KENNELLY: So when you had gatherings out at your Claytor Lake place, would some of the people get to go out?

BRICE: Yes, we'd do some sailing then. I had quite a few students who found out 28:00about my interest in sailing and came out. I taught many students how to sail right from scratch. Again you either have that aptitude or you don't because I know there was quite a variation in how well any one student would catch on to how to sail a boat. Some would get it just like that, and others never really picked it up.

KENNELLY: Its just one of those--

BRICE: It's the same thing as teaching or an aptitude for mathematics or an aptitude for words or anything else.

KENNELLY: It must have been fun. Do you still sail?

BRICE: No, I haven't done sailing for quite a while. I sailed every summer 29:00starting in the early 1960s while I was at Virginia Tech. Then when I moved to Washington, I kept the property, but it was just impractical to manage a lake front property when you're only there several weeks a year. So I finally gave it up.

KENNELLY: You had to sell the Molly Qule?

BRICE: Oh yes all of it. It got sold.

KENNELLY: Do you come back to Blacksburg and Virginia Tech very often?

BRICE: Oh yes every year without exception.

KENNELLY: What brings you back?

BRICE: I still have friends and colleagues that I keep in touch with and come down and visit.

KENNELLY: I sort of asked a little bit about this question, but I just wondered if there are things about the campus or student life that you've observed that 30:00could be improved. I know you said that the tuition could be improved, but is there anything else? I know you would like to see tuition that was affordable, because it was very hard on some students. I just wondered if there is anything else that you have observed that you would like to see changed or you thought we could do better here?

BRICE: I don't think I can really think of anything. I think it is still a first class education. I still have great respect for all of my colleagues, and of course most of my colleagues are retired, so I don't really know many of the new people on the faculty. I should say the current people on the faculty.

KENNELLY: Is there anything else you'd like to add?

BRICE: I can't think of anything.

KENNELLY: Or anything that I didn't ask you about?

BRICE: No, I think we covered a lot.

KENNELLY: Well thank you very much, and thanks for doing a second interview because I really did want to talk about the teaching.

BRICE: I think that the only other thing that I can think of is the problem of identifying the guy in architecture. I am going to try to go over to the library and look through some of those catalogues myself, and I might be able to pick him out.

KENNELLY: We have them in Special Collections. Now I could scan those pages and send them to you if that would be better. But if you just want to go over there--

BRICE: Yes, I have a friend who can get me into the library, and I kind of 32:00planned to do that tomorrow.

I think it's the catalogues from the mid-fifties to the mid-sixties if I kind of leaf through those. I know you sent me copies of several.

KENNELLY: I could just systematically just get someone to photocopy every page, and we could just mail it all off to you if that would be good.

BRICE: Let me first try looking around myself, and if I'm not able to do that maybe I'll let you do the scanning.

KENNELLY: That sounds good to me. Thank you so much.

[End interview]