Students were this teacher's trophies
Adrian C. Davis found reward in those he taught at St. Petersburg High, not the many actual awards he won.
By CRAIG BASSE and JON WILSON
Published October 19, 2005
ST. PETERSBURG - Adrian C. Davis won a trove of top teaching awards while inspiring St. Petersburg High School students for 37 years.
In 1972, he was named National Biology Teacher of the Year for Florida; in 1978, Pinellas County Teacher of the Year; in 1980, Pinellas County's Outstanding Science Teacher.
But Mr. Davis, who died Monday (Oct. 17, 2005) at age 84, treasured his students more than the awards.
"I've got people all over town that are my trophies," he said in 1978. "My own dentist, my doctor, my ophthalmologist are all my straight-A students."
Mr. Davis, a 1940 St. Petersburg High graduate, returned to his alma mater as a teacher in 1950. A year before he retired from the school in 1987, Mr. Davis was named Florida's Outstanding High School Science Teacher.
An innovator, Mr. Davis introduced human physiology (1954) and marine biology (1970) to the county school system.
His most widely known high school courses were in marine biology. He wrote his own textbook and took students on field trips that captured their interest.
"He called his classroom "the sea in the attic' because it was designed as a sea landscape," said Bill Grey, who was St. Petersburg's principal toward the end of Mr. Davis' career there.
Mr. Davis' personalized classroom in a third-floor garret contained thousands of specimens, aquariums and porthole windows he cut out. Students decorated the entry with life-size paintings of octopuses, squid, sharks and stingrays.
"It looked like Captain Nemo's ship in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea," Grey said.
Mr. Davis' creativity extended beyond the classroom.
His oil painting of St. Petersburg High is displayed in the school's front hall case and serves as the cover for a high school history scrapbook Mr. Davis compiled with Barbara Boggess Stephens in 1996.
Mr. Davis entered military service during World War II and saw combat. While hospitalized in the Philippines recovering from an injury, he became interested in medicine. He planned to go to medical school on the GI Bill.
But after majoring in pre-med at Emory University and working summers at Mound Park Hospital (now Bayfront Medical Center) and a funeral home, he changed his mind. He decided he was more interested in biology than medicine.
He then made another career decision: to teach biology rather than to carry out research, which would have been more financially rewarding.
Teaching, he said, would be more fun than "boring research, counting pollen grains."
Later, he confessed: "I love to teach. It's the teacher who makes the subject interesting. A good teacher is one that creates an epidemic of learning by their contagious enthusiasm."
Les Burrows, a teaching colleague, said Mr. Davis liked to tell a story about a 15-year-old conducting a microscope experiment in which the teacher gave the boy a slide to examine.
Soon, the student exclaimed, "There are things down there!"
As Mr. Davis told the story, he hurried to the boy's work station, peered through the microscope and shouted, "My God! You've found paramecium!"
Said Burrows: "Adrian said, "I've seen a million paramecium, but it was his first time."'
The student went on to become an orthopedic surgeon, Burrows said.
Students appreciated Mr. Davis' efforts. They dedicated the yearbook, NoSoWeEa, to him a record four times, in 1958, 1969, 1975 and 1988. And former students once held an Adrian Davis Night, raising money to send the teacher on a trip to Australia, said Bob Chick, who graduated from St. Petersburg in 1957.
"He was a person who transcended learning. His idea was to make sure you got an education," Chick said.
A year after Mr. Davis' retirement, principal Grey unofficially named the high school's science hall the "Bell Building." The name referred to a bell Mr. Davis had donated to the school, which was placed over the building's entrance and rung after major school achievements.
"Hopefully, we can get that building renamed the Adrian Davis Building," Grey said.
After retiring from the high school, Mr. Davis became an adjunct professor at St. Petersburg Junior College (now St. Petersburg College). He also served as director of the high school alumni association.
In 1989 and 1990, he was asked to address Pinellas County's new science teachers. In 1991, he gave the keynote speech to middle school and high school science teachers at their back-to-school work session.
In 1995, he retired from the junior college, where he taught oceanography and earth science. He moved to his Suwannee River home in Mayo. Arrangements were pending at the Joe P. Burns Funeral Home in Mayo.
Information from Times files was used in this obituary.