Great Teachers

So, tell me about some of your favorite teachers professors or even tutors.

Joe Moretta, 8th Grade, AP History, Howard Bishop Middle School. The guy had the ability to make everything interesting, make us think about things, incite wonder and curiosity. He also did it with an amazing sense of humor.

One little thing he did every day, was put some letters on the board that stood for something, and we had to figure out what it meant. If we didn’t figure it out, he wouldn’t tell us until the end of the class. Phenomenal teacher.

Another little thing he did, was notice this ugly duckling of a girl who was smarter than she was given credit for, who had some serious issues at home, and let her know she was a great kid. He also told me I’d be beautiful, if I could just wait a little while, I’d see. And I did. He was right.

Unlike most teachers, he didn’t fall all over the popular kids. You earned your keep in his class and you earned his respect. He didn’t give a crap who your Daddy was, he cared who YOU were and he made sure we all understood that.

I credit a lot of my sense of self to him. Taking what I knew to be true about myself, not just basing my opinion of me on what other people saw/said.

Dean/Coach Jesse Heard: Had him in Middle and High school. Hell of a man. Kind, understanding and could connect with a kid with a look. I was on a kick to change myself and I stopped wearing jeans. One day, I had a migraine, came to school in jeans. Coach Heard threatened to suspend me for it. I told him he couldn’t suspend me for THAT. He made it clear he could and he would. He respected what I was doing and I needed to understand that when you are working that hard, you don’t get to slack off. It is every single day. Rain or Shine.

Yes, I went back to visit him. He did tell me “I told ya so.” And I still remember the Preamble to the Constitution, even if we learned it to the tune of Schoolhouse Rock.

I’m also convinced he was right, that the Deans at our school only had one pair of shoes, and they swapped them whenever one wanted to go walking down the halls.

I try soooo hard to be mindful of this as a teacher. High school sucked even worse when the teachers sucked up to the popular crowd, let alone the other kids.

Everyone that I consider to have been one of my great teachers had two common characteristics:

  1. treated everyone fairly and like adults
  2. varied the lessons with a multitiude of activities
    Sadly, these are a lot harder to do than I ever thought…:frowning:

Mr. Wynn, 9th grade English. Great sense of humor, and taught us in a way that made us understand. We were reading this awful, boring book – something about London and Paris, and these two guys that looked alike, and this crazy old shoemaker – and none of us were really getting it. Then he explained it to us, and it just clicked in the class that this was a truly awesome story. Oh, and he loved Monty Python.

Mrs. Mitchell, Kindergarten. The nicest lady in the whole wide world.

Gary Solt, College. Had many of Mr. Wynn’s qualities. Very hip dude.

I’ve been lucky enough to have had a few great teachers. The two I remember most:

  1. Mrs. Hook, Ft. Stockton, TX, 1st Grade: She managed to see a bright, inquisitive seven year old, even though I wore the same ragged clothes most of the time because I had a psychotically ill mother and absentee father. For some reason, she insisted on a home visit (can you imagine that now?). It was a couple of weeks after that that I and my brothers were shipped off to my grandparents. I’m not sure exactly what happened, but I know that if it hadn’t been for Mrs. Hook, I’d have turned out a hell of a lot differently, and not for the better.

  2. Mr. Burton, High School, History: He was the basketball and tennis coach, but didn’t act like most of the other coaches. For instance, he treated all of us with respect – jocks, heads, everyone. And he didn’t insist that everyone call him “Coach.” Gah, I hate that in the classroom. And he was a fascinating teacher. I remember him telling us about an event during the Civil War, the class bell ringing, and the class letting out a moan of disappointment because we wouldn’t hear the rest of the story until the next day. I can’t remember any other time that ever happened in high school.

Eunice Adams, Ed.D.

Chair of the English department of my high school. I looked forward to being her student for three long years. But then, when I finally made it to AP English in my senior year, she was nowhere to be seen.

Her daughter had been murdered. By the daughter’s husband.

Leaving a child behind.

Dr. Adams had to juggle work, childcare for her grandchild, and being at the trial to make sure her bastard son-in-law was punished for his crime. (He was.)

When she came back, through the vagaries and random coincidences that make life so crazy, the first book she oversaw our reading of was Crime and Punishment. Somehow, she remained level-headed through it, but I never again looked at literature as something that had nothing to do with real life.

You had AP classes in middle school? :dubious:

Sure did. Maybe in your neck of the woods they were called Honors classes. Ironically, I only ended up with him as my teacher because our first teacher got very sick and they had to shuffle around her students. I lucked out for life on that one.

Mrs. Hartman, 1st Grade, Lincoln Elementary, Pottstown, PA. After a disastrous kindergarten year, Mrs. Hartman saw my potential and allowed me to flourish. In some ways I think I owe everything to her.

Ed

Margaret Maple. Art History teacher in high school.

As I recall, in addition to teaching she was also a professional artist. Her passion for the many eras and varieties of art rubbed off on me and left me much more appreciative of art generally.

Mrs. McCarty, 7th-grade math, Horace Mann Junior High School. I was a straight-A student until I hit 6th-grade math. I didn’t get it and was frustrated (and ashamed - it was Catholic school) that I didn’t. Mom and Dad switched me to public school for 7th grade. Mrs. McCarty was 90 years older than God when I had her, and my husband had had her 13 years before and he thought she was 90 years older than God then. And she was HARSH! Give a wrong answer? Her reply: “You haven’t got the sense God gave a rabbit!” But she made math make sense for me, and I went on to finish the AP math sequence in high school.

Mrs. Maddox, senior English, Charleston High School – That perfect pairing of relaxed personality and academic rigor. She taught me how to write. And as a college prof I knew once said, “If you can’t write, you can’t think.” So she taught me how to think, too.

In my neck of the woods, only classes that ended with an AP test at the end of the year were called AP classes. Surely 8th graders aren’t taking AP tests, are they?

Richard Lloyd in H.S., a.k.a., Mr. Lloyd. I’m using his full name because I have a strong suspicion that he uses these boards. I think I remember him passing out one of Cecil’s articles about how astronauts go to the bathroom in space. He gave out a lot of sheet. He called himself the teacher that was full of sheets.

His physics class was a turning point for me. Before his class I didn’t see how school or knowledge could be useful. My days were spent playing video games and watching VH1. After his class, I wanted to learn. I took AP physics with him and that AP physics class was the only high school class that I ever studied for.

He would teach the principles of physics and would then tell us how they explained real live events. I wasn’t learning trivia anymore. I was learning stuff that explained what was happening in the real world. I can’t believe how different my life turned out because one guy decided to teach kids something useful.

Shoot, kids, wish I’d known about AP classes in middle school–would’ve made college loans unnecessary.

I’ve had two.

Ronnie Whitson, college American History teacher. I was a late bloomer in education, so to speak. I was very smart but I hated school because I didn’t know how to learn. He taught me the joy of learning in a class that I was dreading to attend because I had had such negative experiences with history classes before. He had Santayana’s quote written across the top of the blackboard; it stayed there all year long: Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it. His classes were not dates and places, they were about people. Yes, we had a revolution in 1776, but why did it happen? What was going on in American and Great Britain that led to the conflict, that sort of thing.
Grand Master Haeng Ung Lee, Taekwondo instructor. He came over to the USA in 1963, taught himself to speak English, developed new teaching methodologies for martial arts and founded the largest centrally-administered Taekwondo organization in the world, the American Taekwondo Association. He was a gentleman in the truest sense of the word: a gentle man. He led by example: perseverance, courtesy, respect, honor, integrity and a true belief that his job was to teach students to become better than he was.

Mr. Plante - Grade 4 teacher. I was a new student in a new school returning to French Immersion, he was excellent and made it fun.

Mrs. Fitz-John - grade eight English teacher - she encouraged my writing and actually saw past all my teenage angst.

Mrs. Stovall - AP English, grade 12 - I will never forget her reading one of my short stories and then going into depth with me on a particular scene (sexual in nature). She sat there and talked to me like I was an adult - which in age I almost was, I respected her for it.

Finally -

Mr. Semotauk (Sp?) - Grade 11 History - I was DREADING taking history, but he made it interesting, fun and relevant. We all loved him. I will always remember him pretending to tally insults - “One for you Sunshine.”

Diana Hensley- taught the gifted 2nd grade class at Woodland Elementary in SoCal. I can still remember actual lessons she presented in that class (I was 7- I am 41 now). She was and is an empathetic, brilliant, creative and caring teacher. She let us excel when we could and made sure we didn’t fall behind, even when we wanted to. She never accepted “I don’t DO math because I’m bad at it” from me, and she let me read the 6th grade reading book because she knew I could.

She and I became friends that year, and we have been friends ever since. We say that I have an old soul, and she has a young one. She was my teacher, my therapist, my mentor and my friend. I am proud that she is my friend, and I only wish that she had stayed a teacher, even though her career as a psychologist was long, fruitful and brought love, peace, understanding and joy to hundreds, if not thousands, of lives.

Mrs. Parmenter - 4th grade. Really drilled history into us - made me appreciate the value of historical sites and items.

Mrs. Edgecomb - 5th grade. New teacher, only her 2nd year teaching. Not yet stepped all over by the bureaucracy. Very good teacher - made you want to learn.

AND…

Mr. Schoenberg - High School Geometry and Computer Programming. I was lucky enough to be invited out to dinner with him and his wife back a few years ago. I asked him how much he really knew in 1973 about computer programming. His response: “Are you kidding? I knew nothing! You guys were all over this new stuff and it was all I could do to point you in the right directions!” One hell of a great man and a wonderful teacher.

One I forgot to mention in my earlier post on this thread:

Mr. Mescon, Computers, North Hollywood High School.

I had just moved from Montreal to Los Angeles two months into tenth grade, and was completely bewildered by my new situation. The two environments were just so utterly different.

The counselor put my into one schedule my first day based on what classes I had been taking in Montreal, but that didn’t work out well. So the next day she switched me around and put me into Mr. Mescon’s introductory computer class (actually, back in 1977 it was the ONLY computer class offered at the high school – Mr. Mescon was otherwise a math teacher) because I had a hole in my schedule and nothing else would fit.

Well it turned out that Mr. Mescon was a great teacher and an empathetic listener, and I had a terrific talent for programming.

Ms. Rust - She taught an advanced studies class for elementary school kids. It was full of science-type stuff like paleontology, astronomy and zoology. One of the most memorable things she did was purchase a full cow skeleton and had it buried. The class got to excavate it with brushes and spades. We even got to make plaster casts of some of the bones.

I still love science and I’m pretty sure I have her to thank for it.