From the time I was young, my original passion was the weather. One of my fondest memories of weather was standing in my playpen and watching James Spann give the weather with my grandfather. From there, my interest in weather has continued to grow.

Up until my senior year, my goal was to be a meteorologist. My ambition was to work under James Spann, a man who has worked at just about every station in the Birmingham TV market except one. He started at Channel 13 in the late 1970's. From there, after a stint in Dallas, he came back to Birmingham to WBRC (which was actually the ABC affiliate at the time) in the late 1980's. While there, he covered the infamous Blizzard of 1993, which occurred when my brother was not quite two years old. After WBRC switched to Fox in 1996, Spann then moved to ABC 33/40 with several of his other colleagues.

Since being there, he has covered several severe weather events, including Hurricane Ivan (2004), the April 27, 2011 tornado outbreak, Snowmageddon 2014, the April 28, 2014 tornado outbreak, and even the March 19, 2018 tornadoes (more on the latter two later).

When I was in kindergarten, my bus driver, Mr. Bernard Sanderson, would always ask me what the weather was going to be each day. That always made me look forward to the day and the bus ride to school. As I got older, I continued to grow more fascinated by the weather.

I collected weather pages well into my teenage years and would do my own forecasts (I actually still do this occasionally), with current temperatures and forecasts. I also went to several of the Storm Alert events that James Spann and the ABC 33/40 weather team put on. I have always been intrigued by the different weather patterns, and I still continue to study them to this day. There have been a couple of events that really stood out to me, however, which are the tornado that hit my house on April 28, 2014, and the tornado that hit the Jacksonville State campus on March 19.

While I had a plan to become a meteorologist, that took a turn following the April 28, 2014 tornado that hit my house. Months after that, I felt like I was being led toward a degree in Math Education.

On April 28, 2014, an EF-2 tornado hit my house on Pine Mountain. The structure itself was not harmed, but the back porch was moved several feet away from the house. Several trees were uprooted, and our pump house roof was blown off, as well as our tree house destroyed and a metal building.

A neighbor had just recently completed work on a little boat house on his pond and insured it days before, only for it to be picked up and moved into the pond. The Ridge took the brunt of the damage on Pine Mountain, damaging several of their cabins and messing up their courses, but it didn't take them long to get back up and running, holding their annual Panther Run in August that year. Several of the trees that fell from that tornado are still used in the mud run as obstacles.

From there, the tornado moved north, hitting the Straight Mountain and Highland Lake areas. Storm surveyors later rated the tornado as an EF-2. This was a rare occurrence for Pine Mountain, as the last one several decades ago (I believe 1920's or 1930's) destroyed two churches and the school at the time.

Another event that really hit home with all of us as Jacksonville State students is the tornado that ravaged campus on March 19. I followed this storm on a radar app on my laptop, and as the storm continued toward campus, the more impressive and scary it got on the radar. The damage was devastating, but the Gamecock spirit was stronger than ever.

While this was a devastating event for the Jacksonville community, I was blessed to have the opportunity to bring several of our youth from Pine Mountain Community Church to Jacksonville to serve with Samaritan's Purse.

These students volunteered two days of their own Spring Break, which was the week following the one allocated to Jacksonville State, to come and help total strangers. They left tired and very blessed because of the many people they helped during their time here. Each of the students learned what it was like to truly serve others in their time of need.

Severe weather is a part of weather that is devastating, but it is in those times that you see people come together to help their neighbors in need. Another example of this is my uncle, Dewey Lewis, who will be heading to the Carolinas on Monday with the Alabama Baptist Disaster Relief to help in the cleanup from Hurricane Florence.

An interesting thing about weather is that you can use examples from the models in other areas. For example, ABC 33/40 does a nightly "Behind the Scenes" on Facebook, and each night, Brenda Ladun and Christopher Sign visit with James Spann in his office to discuss the weather. Occasionally, he will show upper air patterns, and because of this, it helped me make sense of direction fields in my Differential Equations class.

Unfortunately, I did not get a response from James Spann on the Facebook live about what advice he would give to young people who have an interest in weather, but I will give my own advice. Like with anything in life, if you have a passion and excitement for weather, I would strongly suggest you go for it. There are several great meteorology schools, including Mississippi State and South Alabama. While I chose to go into education, I am still fascinated by the weather, and it is my hope to one day have some of my favorite meteorologists speak with my students when I begin teaching.

Meteorology is the best of both of my passions, math, and weather.