Dan Suttin

SAN ANTONIO, TX - A retired high school math teacher has donated a geometric sculpture to this college as his way of "giving back" for his scholastic experience here.

"The level of teaching here is wonderful," Dan Suttin said Tuesday.

The "Big Ball", also known as "Variation on the Truncated Icosahedron," was created with 3,600 pieces of fluorescent poster board, held together with glue and 55,440 paper clips.

Reconstructing the sculpture "would cost $360 (for poster board) at 10 cents a piece and over $200 of paper clips," Suttin said Tuesday while constructing a mini tetrahedron model. Hedrons are geometric solids having multiple plane faces, or sides.

Suttin described how he came upon the idea of building his "Big Ball" from a class of children he taught in Massachusetts. He got a book of 18 basic polyhedron models for examples. "(The children) made tetras and hedrons, and I noticed they go together," Suttin said.

President Robert Zeigler collaborated with Suttin on where the sculpture would be placed on campus. They tried Chance Academic Center and the auditorium of McAllister Fine Arts Center before settling on the first floor of the academic instruction center, Suttin said. The sculpture's permanent location was announced Jan. 20.

"It took about a semester to decide where they were going to put it," Suttin said.

Suttin's "Big Ball" took him 500 hours to create in his dining room and was displayed at the Guardian Angel Performance Arts Academy at Blue Star Gallery as well as the Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center for Luminaria, an annual local arts event.

"It takes 30 hours to re-assemble it, and 60 pieces (of poster board) would need to be replaced to break it down each time," he said. "I didn't have enough room in my garage because of the next one (sculpture) I'm building."

His next work will contain 2,600 pieces of painted cardboard and will take a year and half to complete, he said.

"It's going to take two years at 40 hours a week to complete it," Suttin said. "I already have 35 percent of it done."

Suttin, who attends this college through the senior citizens program, tutors students in math. He also teaches students how to put together his tetrahedron models, available on his Web site at www.homespun4homeschoolers.com.

"If I could get about 10 students together on campus, I would be glad to do a workshop on how to construct a tetrahedron," Suttin said.