When David Peay was told he had been nominated for the 7 over Seventy awards, he had a playful response.
“I said, ‘I think they picked the wrong man; I don’t think I’m qualified, I’m not quite 70 yet,’” he recalls.
Considering he was born in 1929, Peay does indeed fall in the right age range.
But as a longtime math teacher, he likes playing around with numbers.
Peay is a native of Winston-Salem and attended local schools, graduating from Atkins High School and then going to Winston-Salem State Teacher’s College, aka Winston-Salem State University, where he graduated summa cum laude in 1951.
He taught, served in the Signal Corps during the Korean War and then returned to teaching — first in the town of Wake Forest, then back to Winston-Salem, and later in New Jersey for 25 years before finally returning to Winston-Salem.
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In all, he has worked in education on the high school and college levels for the past 71 years, including leadership roles with the College of Education at Winston-Salem State University and Forsyth Tech.
“Dr. Peay is a very humble individual who is thoroughly committed educating students,” says Joanette McClain, who nominated him for the honor. “He works nonstop in order to see that they get what they need in both the classroom and community settings in order for them to become productive members of society.”
Peay has always enjoyed the challenges of teaching, and of helping aspiring teachers learn the best ways to reach their students, including those with special needs or who had fallen behind.
“I always had a yearning to be in a classroom setting where kids wanted to learn,” he says. “And I wanted to kind of trick kids into learning, make them interested in a different kind of learning modality.”
By way of example, he recalls when he was supervising student teachers at Winston-Salem State University and would go monitor the teachers in their classrooms. Often he found students who were defiant to traditional learning techniques but who could be intrigued by a different approach.
He met some fifth- and sixth-graders who were at a third-grade level of math.
“We tried to change the way in which they were learning,” he says. He noticed that a group of boys were not interested in their assigned lessons but spent time in the back of the class playing cards.
He brought in decks of cards and said, “The math lesson today is going to be playing blackjack.”
Although he has technically retired from teaching after a long and fruitful career, he is still interested in mentoring.
He recently received Omega Psi Phi Fraternity’s inaugural Dr. David N. Peay Service Award.
“Hundreds of young African-American males can attest to the fact that the assistance they received from Dr. Peay is directly related the success that they have achieved,” McClain says.
Peay appreciates that he hears from former students about how much he influenced them.
“I get cards, emails, telephone calls from one of my students almost every day of the week,” he says.
