Melody Nye
I had Gail Liljestrand for freshman and senior year AP biology at Kimball High School in SW Oak Cliff. What a mind! I wasn’t surprised when she went on to earn her doctorate in biology a few years after I graduated in 1980. She took the senior biology AP class out to her lovely lake lot every year at the end of spring semester. She helped me get into Wellesley College and earn a scholarship to the school. She taught us all how to think, not just regurgitate facts and opinions–like when we divided up the class to debate evolution and creationism. This was not to determine who was “right” (though we know where she came down on that argument), according to her teaching; it was to help us learn to make a cogent argument with FACTS, not hearsay, not belief, not mere opinion. That took some guts in the late 1970s in Dallas. I loved working with her while planning the Kimball Science Symposium for four years, two of those as student head co-coordinator. She gave me an invaluable basis for understanding how natural phenomena work, and I continued this interest in science at college by taking geology, the natural history of dinosaurs, and astronomy courses. I noted how she encouraged excellence in scholarship in all of her students, and her lectures were always clear and very detailed. She was definitely one of the best teachers at Kimball for many years. One of my good friends had her for biology at Highland Park High School, and she also calls Mrs. Liljestrand one of the best teachers she had while there. Hers was a life well-lived, indeed.