For AU Agronomy Professor Teaching's "The Icing on the Cake"

By Jamie Creamer

David Weaver came to Auburn University 25 years ago first and foremost as a researcher, charged at the time with establishing a soybean breeding program on the Plains. His position was-and still is-80/20: 80 percent research, 20 percent teaching.

The research aspect of the job is fulfilling and exciting, but the teaching.ah, the teaching.

"That's the most enjoyable part of what I do," Weaver says. "Teaching is the icing on the cake."

That the veteran agronomy and soils professor loves the classroom shows. In the past two decades, he's won a total of five outstanding teacher awards from the College of Agriculture's Student Government Association, the Auburn Alumni Association and the Southern Branch of the American Society of Agronomy. He says it's all about the students.

"Most students are here, not because they have to be, but because they're genuinely looking for knowledge, and as a teacher, you're the one providing that," Weaver says. "That's an awesome responsibility. But there's nothing like telling students things they've never even thought about and watching their expressions when things dawn on them."

Weaver, who teaches basic crop science every spring and plant genetics and crop improvement each fall, is a firm believer in getting-and heeding-feedback from students. In fact, in his Funchess Hall office, he has a filing cabinet filled with those end-of-semester student evaluation forms that go back at least 15 years.

"I've read them all, and I've kept them all," Weaver says of the anonymous ratings.

Those student comments, he insists, have helped shape him as a teacher.

"Student evaluations are not so much about getting high marks as they are about avoiding low ones," he says. "They show you if there's a problem that you need to fix. If you get low ratings on something like 'respects questions from students' or 'is fair in grading exams,' you need to look at what you're doing and adjust."

And as if those mandatory ratings weren't enough, Weaver seeks student feedback through another source: the relatively new Biggio Center for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning at Auburn. Among its offerings, the center provides what it calls "small group instructional feedback."

"The center sends a representative to your class mid-semester to talk to the class-with you absent-and ask them what's right and what's wrong about the class," Weaver says.

The Biggio Center facilitator then shares the feedback with the instructor and assists him or her in preparing a response to students indicating what actions will be taken to address their comments.

"The students seem to get as much out of that process as I do," Weaver says. "I think they respect a faculty member who wants to improve-which is always my goal. If I'm still doing this five years from now, I hope I'll be even better at it then."

Weaver was born and raised in the small town of Braselton, Ga., the son of a high-school ag teacher who also had a highly diversified farming operation.

"We had cows, hogs, peaches and pecans, but our big thing was poultry," Weaver says, noting that the farm produced about 200,000 broilers a year.

But when he went to college, at the University of Georgia, it was to the soil and row crops that Weaver turned.

He earned his bachelor's degree in agronomy in 1974 and then proceeded to obtain his master's in 1976, doing his research in cotton breeding. His major professor was one J.B. Weaver, a noted cotton breeder and agronomy professor-and the younger Weaver's kin.

"He was my uncle, but anybody in the field will tell you he was one of the best," Weaver says. "I learned under the best."

(And, no, Weaver insists, the uncle didn't play favorites.)

After receiving his master's, Weaver remained at UGA as a research associate for a couple of years, then left the South and cotton behind to pursue his doctorate in soybean breeding from Purdue University.

"This was in '78, and soybeans was a crop that was really coming into its own, so I decided that was the direction I wanted to go," Weaver says.

While at Purdue, Weaver got his first opportunity to try his hand at teaching. It was an undergraduate genetics course, and the venture was a real eye-opener for Weaver.

"I'd never realized it before, but I found out that if you're going to teach something, you'd better know it inside and out," he says. "It was a whole lot of work. I know I learned much more than the students did."

He apparently did very well in his debut teaching assignment.

"It was exciting, because I got positive feedback from the students in the course, and positive comments from faculty who sat in on some of my classes," Weaver says.

Still, he didn't consider that teaching might be part of his future. In fact, his plans were to get his Ph.D. and go to work in the commercial world as a plant breeder for some company in the Midwest, the heart of soybean country.

But just as he was finishing up work on his doctorate, the job at AU cropped up. Back in the South, closer to home, both research and teaching-it was appealing. He went for it and got it.

Research-wise, Weaver's chief area of interest remained soybeans up until about 2000, when declining soybean acreage in Alabama prompted him to shift more of his focus back to his master's area of study, cotton breeding.

With cotton, his major research goals are to develop new high-yielding cotton cultivars with improved fiber quality for farmers to grow and, on a separate front, to identify cotton germplasm that shows resistance to highly destructive microscopic worms called reniform nematodes. He recently had his first cotton research paper accepted for publication in the journal Crop Science.

"I'm trying to establish a reputation as a cotton breeder by finding a need and filling it," he says.

There's his teaching, and there's his research, but any story on David Weaver wouldn't be complete without talking about his music. Weaver-the father of AU agronomy senior Amy and freshman Chrissy, an animal sciences/pre-vet major-is a versatile, highly talented musician.

In fact, up until a year and a half ago, any of his students who frequented the legendary War Eagle Supper Club on a weekend night may have been surprised to see Weaver up on stage, playing bass and Hammond organ for the Tony Brook Band.

Weaver started playing with Brook in 1994, their music running the gamut from blues, jazz and country to gospel, bluegrass and rock. The band was a full-time part-time job, Weaver says.

"We were playing 75 and 80 gigs a year-Tallahassee, Oxford (Miss.), Atlanta, Birmingham, the Flora-Bama-you never knew where you'd see us," he says.

But that was wearing.

"It's a hard life, and there's no money to be made in it," he says.

He "retired" from the music business in June of '05.

"That's when we played our last gig at the Supper Club," he says.

"I miss playing, but not the driving, and not the loading and unloading, and not the setting up and breaking down for every show," Weaver says.

He still gets his music fix on a regular basis. At his and wife Shannon's Auburn home, he's got a "music room" that's fully equipped with guitar, bass, Hammond organ, synthesizer, keyboard and drum machine. Every now and then, Brook drops by for a jam session.

"And the good thing about it is, we don't have to wait till midnight to start playing," he says.

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