B Y   P A U L   K A R R

"It was a nice surprise," said White, dean of Athens Area Technical Institute's Division of Health Sciences as well as co-instructor of a new program on real world chemistry (see previous article) that is attracting attention.

But if White was surprised, nobody who works with her at Athens Tech was.

"She's very hard-working," says Athens Tech President Dr. Kenneth Easom, who has worked with White for more than 20 years and described her as a "dynamo" in a letter of recommendation for the CMA award. "She maintains that unique perception of a student's needs-she sees the opportunity to serve students."

The trip to Boston wasn't her only significant travel last spring, either. just before receiving the CMA award, White was busy perfecting a presentation to delegates at the American Chemical Society's national convention in Anaheim, Cal. She headed off to California to make a presentation on the innovative, real-world chemistry class that she and Kennesaw State instructor Ken Hughes recently developed.

Colleagues and former students cite her teaching and concern for students as primary influences in Athens' growing lab-research community.

"She deserves these awards," says Rosetta Gaines, who credits White with transforming her from a mediocre student into one who now trains staff for the University of Georgia's Animal Physiology Research Unit. "She was a very good instructor. She wouldn't let me slack off. I needed someone who could both teach me the skills I needed in a way that I could understand them inside the classroom and keep a caring eye on me outside of the classroom, too. She did that. And she kept track of me and her other students afterward."

For instance, White taught Gaines how to perform a lab process called protein analysis, a skill that proved extremely useful in her current work. Then the Athens Tech dean helped encourage her former student to keep applying for the prestigious UGA job, over and over again, until one day she got it.

"When I graduated, I was prepared. I had the skills," finishes Gaines. "Later, when I got this job, I was able to come right in and begin working immediately without training. All her technician students are considered the best in the Athens area; in fact, of the technicians in this building, I'd guess at least half of them came from Athens Tech. Maybe more than half."

But White has always had a well deserved reputation for making science topics interesting in the classroom. On the first day of class, for instance, she may ask students to think about their names for a moment and then follows the silence by asking, "How did you do that? What sorts of chemical processes occur in the thinking process?"

That one little question always gets them talking, she says, and no longer seeing chemistry as something on a textbook page, but rather something captivating and relevant to daily life. Making it relevant is her teaching philosophy in a nutshell. Frequent and innovative field trips also have helped her students grasp this connection. Her classes travel to a variety of settings, as near as Athens' local water-treatment plant or as far as Skidaway Island's marine ecology lab near Savannah.

"I try to make chemistry understandable for students," White explains. "I try to break complex concepts down into manageable segments. We begin with basic concepts, build on those, and allow opportunities for them to experience success at each stage of learning."

The drive to explain comes from her own experience as a student.

"I remember having a great deal of frustration when I studied chemistry," remembers White, "because the problems required a quantum leap from one concept to another."

After training at the University of Georgia in analytical chemistry and doing research in biochemistry, White started teaching at Athens Tech in 1979 and was promoted to department head four years later. During her career, she has advocated for better science education at two-year institutions and actively participated and held offices in national and state professional associations. As a result, two local pharmaceutical labs funded two scholarships for research laboratory technology students.

Her honors include the Lighthouse Institute for Excellence in Teaching, selection to Who's Who Among American Teachers, an Athens-area community service award and numerous others. In 1994, White was appointed to one of the four dean posts at Athens Tech.

But it is success stories like Gaines' that fan the flames of enthusiasm, says White, who intends to continue bringing her accessible teaching style to Athens Tech students for the rest of her career.

"I thought I would work here two or three years," she says. "I am still here and I can't believe it's been nearly 20 years!"