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- Dr. Frank Breit
College of Education Faculty Oral Histories
Dr. Frank Breit
LB: Today is January 26, 2006. I’m Lou Bowers and I’m interviewing Dr. Frank Breit, who is a faculty member in the Instruction Technology Program, and before that he was a faculty member in Science Education Program in the Secondary Education of the College of Education. Frank, thank you for coming in today and sharing with us your many experiences here at USF.
FB: I’ll be happy to talk to you a bit about my experiences in the College of Education.
LB: Excellent! Before you came to USF however I know you had a life. What are some of your personal and professional experiences before you came to USF?
FB: My first professional teaching experience was teaching junior high school science, which I did for seven years. It was very enjoyable and I might have done it for a longer time. However, due primarily to the advancement of the Soviet’s Sputnik satellite program, a load of federal money became available for junior high science teachers to purse advanced degrees in the area of science education. So, I took advantage of the opportunity and received a master’s degree from Texas A & M and a doctoral degree from the University of Texas. In both of the degree programs, tuition and room and board were paid for. I got kind of a free ride to the University of Texas and my Ph.D. didn’t cost me a penny.
LB: Wow! You were in the right field at the right time.
FB: Plus, they were paying us something like $600 a month for extra costs, just to live on. It was a great deal, but I couldn’t have done it except for the fact that there happened to be a small window of opportunity when science teachers and math teachers were given all this wonderful free education.
LB: Yes, so you graduated from University of Texas?
FB: Yes, in 1968, the last year they won the college football national championship until this year.
LB: How did you hear about USF?
FB: Well, when I graduated I started thinking about where I wanted to teach. My advisor gave me a list of schools that they thought were ranked high that year. I went to five or six colleges but narrowed it down to three. They were USF, University of Northern Iowa, and Emporia State University, and I visited all three. Tampa wasn’t much back then. It was basically a small town, but the weather happened to be real nice the weekend I visited. Emporia State and Northern Iowa were really cold and kind of mid-western kinds of places, and I kind of wanted to get away from it. In addition, at that time there was a heavy emphasis on teaching with very little pressure to publish. It was very different than it is now. So that appealed to me also, since my main interest was working with teachers on developing new science curriculum.
LB: When you came in 1969, what was the Science Education Department like? Was Larry Monley the department chair?
FB: Yes, Larry Monley was the department chair. The College of Education had just moved into what was then the new College of Education building in 1968. That was a big deal because up to that point faculty had offices all over campus. Larry Monley was chair and his office was still in the Chemistry building which was across campus. There weren’t that many buildings on campus, but there was the Chemistry building, a library, a student union, and few others. John Bullock was also working in the Science Education Department. When I came down for the interview, John picked me up at the airport. It was the old Tampa airport where you had to walk on the ground to get to the airplane. It was a tiny little airport. He picked me up and brought me back to campus and he and Lee Dubois took me out to lunch down in Ybor City. That sealed the deal right there. They made sure I got a sense of what the Cuban culture was all about.
LB: About Larry Monley, was he in the Science Department in the College of Liberal Arts before joining the College of Education? Do you remember that?
FB: Yes, he was.
LB: His background was in chemistry?
FB: He was a chemistry teacher. He taught college chemistry in the College of Liberal Arts for quite a while and then became our chair person. I think there was realignment after they had hired some new people in the Science and Chemistry Department, so Larry wanted to move out. He joined us as the department chair. He was a great guy. He would tell us stories about learning how, during the Second World War, to fly B-24 bombers using the Army Air Corps airport which was on land which is now just south of the USF campus. He took us out there one day and there were still old gun shells and things that were remnants of the Second World War. It was in the area where the parking lots for Busch Gardens are now.
LB: I read recently that the building that today houses Mel’s Hotdogs was the guard house for the entrance to the air field which was named Henderson Air Field.
FB: I didn’t know that.
LB: Yes, the land for the USF campus was the north end of the air field.