My first experience with Rod Reid's dynamic teaching was in the undergraduate 4E course (modern physics) back in 1977. The next year he was excited in being able to teach mathematical physics when Erickson was away. I remember him saying he hoped to be able to teach every course in the department if they would let him because he learned so much himself. As an undergraduate he once surprised me late at night in the washroom, starting the conversation with "why did you divide by 3 on problem 4 on the last exam?". At that moment, I couldn't even remember the problem, as the exam was 2 weeks back.

As one of the few undergraduates that returned as a graduate student I enjoyed being a teaching assistant with Rod in those very courses I had taken a few years before. That was the year that Star Wars came out. Do people remember that he went and saw it many times and would come up with the most interesting details that he spotted in the corner of the frame of the film? That year someone replaced his department picture with that of a wookie.

Very late at night as we were confused on one of his creative homework sets (he usually made all the problems up himself, seldom using what is in the book), we'd go to his office, but couldn't tell if he was in or not because he would stuff journals at the bottom of the door, which blocked the light. He wouldn't respond to the first knock. We'd go outside, and have to count over to see if his office light was on, then go back and knock again, and wait, and wait. Eventually he would poke his head out to see if you were still there, and then he would talk to you for an hour. Now he always "claimed" that the journals were there to stop the cold air coming in under the door (even in summer?), and that he was so deep in thought that the knock did not register in his brain until several minutes later.

In one of my youthful depressions when I was debating about chucking the physics plan and doing something else, we had a very long talk. He told me about working in (I think) a hot dog factory in his youth, and enjoying it for a year as they all talked about cars and the production machinery and such. But the 2nd year, he noticed the conversations were all repeated where he was ready to do the next thing. That was being a physicist, you embrace learning something brand new (even about hot dogs) instead of taking pride in being trained to do one thing over and over. And he talked about taking pleasure in the small tasks. "A car mechanic", he said, "under a car with his arm twisted inside of the machine where he can't see feels some pleasure when finally gets the threads of the bolt to catch. A physicist feels the same thing when he does an expansion of a function and gets a simple answer to his problem when he takes the leading term".

As a teacher, I find myself emulating much of Reid's style, in particular his enthusiasm. I jump into being able to teach a course I know next to nothing about. I remember Rod's handwritten lecture notes where he excitedly try to derive things from scratch on his own, and give his unique understanding of the phenomena. Here I am at 2am sitting in my office writing up my own notes on figuring out the hydrostatics of a star from scratch rather than looking it up in a book because I want to have the students share the excitement of figuring things out yourself.

While I'm called "Bill" by everyone, he always called me "William".

sincerely,

"Dr. Bill" Pezzaglia
CSUEB (Hayward)