More than 30-year Southern Arkansas University faculty member Tim Daniels will offer this year’s SAU installment of “The Last Lecture” at 4 p.m. Wednesday, March 18, in the Reynolds Center Foundation Hall.
The event is free and open to the public. The title of Daniels’ lecture will be “What kind of institution do you want SAU to be?…and some personal history of what it has been.”
This will not be Professor Daniels’ actual last lecture. Rather, “The Last Lecture” is a tradition that is popular at many universities around the country. Each year a professor is invited to share what he or she would say if it were his or her last opportunity to address colleagues and students. The tradition gained popularity in 2007 when Dr. Randy Pausch delivered a talk titled “Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams” at Carnegie Melon University. Pausch’s lecture became famous because it really was his last lecture as he’d been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and had only months to live.
Daniels, a 1977 graduate of SAU, is currently an associate professor and the interim chair of the Department of Biology at SAU. He also serves as president of the SAU Faculty Senate.
For nearly 30 years, he has typically spent two days a week in K-12 public school classrooms delivering model science lessons to teachers and their students. The program has been identified as a National Exemplary Program by the U.S. Department of Education. He has developed more than fifty model lessons for the K-12 sciences. He also provides around 25 days of professional development for K-12 teachers annually, both throughout Arkansas and in neighboring states.
Daniels works with the Museum of Discovery in Little Rock as a curriculum development team leader in science and technology. He is a past science director for the Arkansas Statewide Systematic Initiative of the Arkansas Department of Higher Education. He was also hired to write and script AETN’s “Making the Grade” films.
