In Praise Of Teachers: Who Was Your Favorite, And Why?

I am a teacher, and would like to know your stories.

For me, it was my math teacher in college.
Sadly, I don’t remember her name, but the course was for people like me who had failed Math 101 and had to re-take it again. Although I was very good in math in high school, I sucked when it came time to remember everything I had leaned over four years and do it again in one college course.

She was from India and although I learned math from her and actually got a “B” in her class, what I really learned from her is how to teach.

She wrote something on the board and then turned to us and asked if we understood. She would go around the room to verify our nods, and realizing we were lying, she would do it again and explain it differently. Then we got used to admitting we didn’t understand and after a few classes, we were all brave enough to raise our hands when it was unclear.

She was the first real teacher I had had that really stopped and made sure that every student understood everything she was teaching. The class started to help each other out and pretty soon, we were really working as a group.

This might sound lame, but it showed me that as a teacher, I really have to make sure everyone is following along; that the best, and the worst, students really need to keep up together as best as possible.

I have been teaching for many years now, and one thing I pride myself in knowing is that I too have been able to get my students to stop my class and say they don’t understand. I remember what she told us, and I tell it to all of my students, “If you don’t understand, I can guarantee you that several other students in this class don’t understand either. Stop me and ask me to explain it again.”

So, with school starting this week, who was your favorite teacher, and why?

Miss Floyd was my first and second grade teacher in Nashville TN. I’m not sure how it was she moved to second grade with us but she did and I was glad because she was just wonderful.

In my six year old mind, I remember her as tall, thin, young and lovely. In fact we may have been her first or second group of children. She was experienced enough to get a student teacher when I was in second grade (hi Miss. Starr!), although she looked very young. Best of all, she helped me learn to read. I took my time about it too. Right before Christmas break when I was in first grade, I was waiting for my mother to pick me up. Once she arrived, she and Miss Floyd started chatting and I tuned them out. But the I realized Miss Floyd was talking about me, and I heard her tell my mother that I was absolutely capable of reading, I just needed to know that too.

Something about how she expressed confidence in me gave me the confidence to master reading almost immediately. I became the best reader in first grade, and have remained an avid reader to this day. One added bonus of getting the reading habit was that the following year when I missed six weeks of school due to mono, I was able to keep up.

I have no idea whatever happened to Miss Floyd, we moved from Nashville at the end of my second grade and really never went back. But I remember her quiet confidence in me, and I did my best to do the same thing with my children–who are themselves avid readers.

I had a lot of great teachers in high school and middle school. At least five extremely wise, entertaining, and engaging men played a very large part in my intellectual development and my attitude towards life. I owe a tremendous debt to these phenomenal teachers.

Well, it’s been more than five years, and I have emailed all of these guys telling them how much I liked their classes, how much they influenced me, et cetera. With some rare exceptions, I never heard back from any of them.

I took it as a personal affront and I am very upset and insulted that none of these guys took the time to get back to me. If I ever publish a book in the future - and it’s a virtual certainty, with the contacts that my family has in the publishing industry - the acknowledgements page at the beginning of the book will not be a gracious thank-you to anyone, but a blunt and straightforward statement of my distaste at the fact that my teachers never made the time to respond to me, and a message urging all teachers in the future to not forget about former students who were inspired by them.

Dr. Gerberding, University of Alabama in Huntsville. He taught me an awful lot of medieval history, but also showed me how to teach: lots of carrot and lots of stick. He never failed to notice when you did well, and he never failed to notice when you did less than you were capable off, and people worked as hard to avoid the latter as they did to earn the former.

Basically, Dr. Gerberding taught me that there is no limit to how hard people will work if they want to work for you. A lot of my techniques are different–high school is not college–but that underlying philosophy is the same.

I’ve been blessed with a lot of wonderful teachers, but sixth grade, with Mr. Bradbury, stands out. I even wrote a letter to the editor about him, several years ago, when The Fellowship of the Ring debuted. (letter explains)

http://www.cjonline.com/stories/010202/opi_letters.shtml

As I said in the letter, he was young, enthusiastic, and he indulged with us his taste for science fiction and fantasy. He even encouraged us to write our own sci-fi stories. And he did invite us to his wedding the following summer. Eight of us, all girls of course, showed up. I remember I wore stockings for the first time, and felt so grown up when I was ushered into a place in the church.

Later that same year that I wrote the letter Mr. Bradbury retired, after 35th years of teaching. He was a principal then, at another school in town, and I went to the reception held for him, taking our class picture.

My life would have been different if I hadn’t had him for a teacher.

Only one?

Micaela, grades 9 and 10, English as Second Language. We’d been slowly ploughing through English for five years, so slowly that, due to the addition of a bunch of transfer students in 5th grade (one of the local schools only went up to 4th), we had done exactly the same things for the first two years.

On the first day, she asked whether we liked English. We said no (shy? we didn’t do shy), she asked why, we explained that it was all memory and no logic, and no relationship to Spanish.

She wrote on the blackboard: to go to = ir a and said “what do you mean, no relationship to Spanish?” :eek: :smack: :o Oh. My. God! Same words… and they mean the same thing… and you use them in the same way… so why had none of our previous teachers pointed out those things, requiring instead that we learn everything by rote and squashing any attempts at comparative grammar?

Those of my classmates who liked the old-fashioned methods hated her, but my class group (over 75% of which ended up with engineering or architecture degrees) loved the hell out of her and then some.

In 10th grade, my class was 50% French as SL, 50% English; the French students were there bidding their time until they were 16 and could leave school; the English students had been handpicked for our ability to keep similar grades irregardless of our environment. She taught us stuff we would have been expected to learn if we majored in Philology: Germanics, for example phonetics.
Mr Cebollada, 9th grade, Universal History. A lawyer and history buff, he’d been asked to cover for a sick teacher years before and stayed. He said that he didn’t care about us remembering what day of the week did Caesar cross the Rubicon, he wanted to make us curious about History. We went very, very slowly; when he went on sick leave in April, his replacement expected us to be in the French Revolution (like the groups that had the other History teacher) but we’d just left Ancient Egypt and, after a stop in the beaches of Crete, were about to start with Ancient Greece. We’d spent three weeks just on Egyptian Religion, we’d talked about Akhenaton’s attempt at monotheism - the book barely mentioned “Ancient Egyptians were polytheistic.” In one exam, one of my classmates, claiming that he didn’t really read the exams, wrote the recipe for baked salmon and got an 8; in the next exam, her recipe for potato omelette got a 6 and a note “you forgot the salt, the salmon was a lot better.” Yeah, a lot of us ended up, if not History buffs, at least buffish.
Nacho, called “Bogart”, who’d been my neighbor (I’ve babysat his two eldest); Chemistry and Physics, 10th and 11th; Chemistry 12th. He’s so good that people travel from as much as 6 hours away for his tutoring. In theory he should be retiring any year now, but nobody is in a hurry to remind him.

Father Victory, the Divine, Head of Organic Chemistry; Orgo I, 3rd grade in College, plus Reaction Design, 5th grade. From Madrid and a Real Madrid fan. Not to be mistaken with Father Victori, the Humane, Head of Inorganic Chemistry, from Barcelona and a Barça fan (who was also kickass, but their styles couldn’t have been more different). Prone to quoting authors in their native language, some times we had to ask him to please translate as only one of us understood German :stuck_out_tongue: Since he was bad at knowing when he had to wind down the class, he asked the people in the first rows to give him the basket “time out” sign about five minutes before the bell rang. His office was large and airy; he collected stones and gems and his favourite item was a quartz item, intended as an ashtray but with no indentations: it was hexagonal with a round depression, so a picture of benzene. He called it “a perfect meld of organic and inorganic chemistry.” He died a year after retiring; Godspeed, Father!

Chen Min, who taught me Tai Chi.

He was a recent immigrant to the US, and I was his first student. He spoke barely any English when I first started learning from him, but I learned more from him than from any other single person in my life.

I’ve got lots of poignant stories I could tell, but I will just mention one of the greatest things about him as a teacher: he would tell me what I was doing right as well as what I needed to do differently.

For that, and for reminding me to breathe, thank you, Min.

I’ve never really had a teacher that I thought was amazing as far as my learning was concerned. Mr. Cygan for AP calculus was pretty fun though. He wasn’t the greatest teacher. About half the class didn’t have a clue as to what was going on and the other half breezed through it. So he let us play chess, risk, stratego, etc. as long as we didn’t interrupt him teaching the other half. That and he’d bring in some awesome pastries, that I can’t remember the name of, for Mardi Gras. He was demoted from the AP calc class after I graduated even though all the students that decided to take it passed.

Mine is also a remedial math teacher in college.

I dropped out of school after junior high, and while I’d liked math okay, I went 15 years without really using it. I finally got into university, took placement tests, and tested into basic algebra, 111. I felt uncomfortable jumping straight back in, and signed up for intro to algebra, 001, the beginner class mostly geared to incoming freshmen who had done poorly in their high-school career. The lecturer was a woman named Mrs. Meshulam, who turned out to also head the on-campus math assistance center, and who was completely focused on making sure people understood what was going on, not just able to crank out calculations. We derived the quadratic formula by hand instead of just memorizing it, for example. I loved the class and decided I’d keep taking math classes until I proved incapable of understanding the material. Six years later, I’m finishing up a BS in math.

Every once in a while I’ll run into her on campus, and she’s always in the know about how I’m doing in classes, who my latest professor is, etc. Whenever I get asked about why I do well in school-- awards speeches, student profiles in magazines-- I always hold her up as the reason.

Interesingly, when I began doing student teaching a few years ago, I started taking classes on teaching, handling specific types of problem students, etc. I recognized myself as one of those problem students, specifically the type of student I’d been in Mrs. Meshulam’s class. She had handled me with aplomb, the ideal way as noted in those classes, and was able to steer my energy into being useful without making me feel like a bad student-- I’ve had plenty of bad teachers over the years, and I realize that having her as my first teacher in university is the reason I stuck around. If I’d had a bad teacher who would have dealt with me in another way, I’d probably have quit out of frustration.

(There are a few other good ones over the years. I’m always surprised when someone I had for one semester 5 years ago will call me by name when we run into each other, ask specific questions about classes, etc. It shows a level of caring that always stuns me.)

Mrs. Hibbs, 10th grade English. My father had transferred from Georgia to Texas a month or so into the school year. In Georgia my school had levels for each class, and I was in the highest levels in all my classes. But when we moved to Texas, they just sort of stuffed me into whatever classes had the room for me. My English class had been hastily created at the beginning of the school year, when they had more students than they’d expected. Mrs. Hibbs told me that the other teachers were supposed to just take a random sampling of students to send to the new class, but actually picked the worst students or the troublemakers or what-have-you.

I was incredibly shy and quiet, and being in that class was really hard for me. Plus it ended up being more remedial work than new work, and I was way ahead of it. So Mrs. Hibbs let me do whatever I wanted to during the grammar units, provided I passed the exams. I usually sat in class and read. When we were doing the unit on diagramming sentences, she made extra complicated sentences for me to work on, to keep my interest up. I appreciated it then, but not how I do now, knowing how much time and effort she put into taking care of a shy kid from Georgia. I adored her.

Two, I claim two! (With apologies to all the other perfectly good teachers I’ve had.)

First, in high school, was Mr. Merle Marine. Yep, real name. Mr. Marine was hated by a good bunch of the students and most of the administration. He taught debate (which taught me more about good writing than any writing class I took) and theater and, my freshman year, ran the speech team and directed plays. Well, he was shitcanned of all his extracurriculars after my freshman year (rumor had it that it was retaliation for kicking the principal’s daughter off the team for not showing up to rehearsals). So I had a phenomenal freshman year, a very dull sophomore and junior years with some truly amateurish directors, and then my senior year I finally had room in my schedule for his intro to theater class. After the first day of class, he came up to me and offered to coach me on the sly for speech team. I came within 2 points of taking State that year, and it was just phenomenal. He was mean, he yelled, he threw a chair at my head once, he wouldn’t take my bullshit, and he brought out talent, dedication and energy I didn’t know I had. My mom actually brought me in to see him once after school hours when I was being a screw up and left me in his classroom to face his Disappointed Father Figure act. It was brutal, but I never doubted that he honestly cared for me as a person, as well as a student.

More recently, last year in college was Mrs. Ludmila Kogan, Intro to Chemistry. Fan-freaking-tastic, and for many of the same reasons. Man, she could be MEAN! She’d call on people she knew didn’t know the answer! If you knew the answer, you’d *never *get called on! Of course, it was brilliant, because she could then directly tutor those who weren’t getting it up at the board and, through them, those in their seats who weren’t getting it. She’s this little old Russian lady with a thick accent and dictatorial attitude, but she is also funny as hell. She had us laughing while teaching us algebra.

I guess the thing that stands out for me with both of these teachers is that they were older than all my other teachers, of an older generation and pedagogy of teaching, and not terribly interested in the exterior trappings of “building self-esteem” and being liked. I’m sure, like any people, they *wanted *to be liked, but they didn’t make it important in their jobs. They were two of the harshest teachers I’ve ever had, but also the two I wasn’t able to bullshit. I couldn’t slide by on prior knowledge and a good rapport, I had to learn new stuff. The fact that some students finished knowing what I did when I started - and got decent grades for it - didn’t change the fact that I was also expected to know more than when I started. I couldn’t just beat the test, I had to learn. They were onto me and my tricks, and they pushed me to be better than I wanted to be alone.

Wow! I can hardly believe that. I’m not calling you a lier; I simply find it hard to believe that any teacher would not even respond to someone coming back and thanking them. This is one of the things that my colleagues and I cherish. It’s news for a week at the lunch table.

I sincerely hope that your messages simply didn’t get through. If they got through, and your former teachers haven’t responded, then shame on them. However, I can easily see emails being bounced by an overactive spam watcher or (depending on the technological savvy of the teacher) them simply not reading their emails. (Our email system is notoriously bad, and we have “young” teachers who are known for having never once checked their email.)

Give them another chance; send something via snail mail and add a line like, “I’d love to hear how things are with you. Here’s my snail mail and email addresses.”

My favorite teacher had one of my favorite names ever … William Alyosius Francis Gilmartin III. He was a tiny little black Irish man who taught Latin and loved it. I was the only student who chose to take it for four years, so I ended up being scheduled at the same time as one of his first year classes. I sat at a table in the back of the room and translated Cicero by myself until he had a chance to help me. I also stayed after school two days a week to get more one-on-one time. He was a real character and made sure his students were involved and interested in what he was teaching. Most importantly, I’ll never forget the college recommendation letter he wrote for me. Since we spent a lot of time together, we also talked about what was going on in my life outside of school. He knew that my parents were divorced and I was living with my dad, who was self-employed and often gone from Sunday night to Friday afternoon. So I was in school, working part-time, attending drama rehearsals, and looking after myself and the pets most days. He went beyond my academic and extracurricular achievements in his letters and put in everything he knew about how hard I had to work each and every day.

I never realized how much he had really been listening and empathizing with my situation until he wrote that letter, and I was really touched by the fact that he paid attention and cared.

Thanks, Mr. G!

My favourite teacher? My mom! Because she’s my mom… you gotta love your mom more than the rest, right? (I had her for grade 2 French class… I actually don’t remember much though!)

Other than her… there are too many! I’ve had some fantastic teachers over the years, and continue to have great ones as I start a second bachelor’s degree. I guess the ones that stand out might be Miss Keeley, for grade 3, Mr Perkins, High school physics (who half-taught our chemistry course since we didn’t have a clue what the actual chem prof was teaching!) Dr. Draper, for cégep Org Chem I and II, Adrian Schwann, university Org Chem II, III and Organic Reactivity, Dr. Humphries, university Ordinary Differential Equations… ok, there really are too many to list! All of them made their teaching subjects interesting; I always preferred classes where it was more of a discussion than a lecture, and where you felt you got to know the teacher a little.

It would be easier for me to list the teachers I didn’t like, since there are, at most, only a handful of those!

Dr. Randall Holcombe . Economics professor. I absolutely did not agree with everything he said. However, he was the perfect college professor. Outstanding lecturer and I loved his grading system. 2 exams and a paper made up your grade. I took 3 of his classes at Florida State in the early 1990s.

Dr. Jack Scisson
I’ll put it this way. When The Karate Kid came out, everyone said Mr Miyagi was based on Dr. Scisson.

He taught me how to play the sax.

Almost all the teachers I had were good – one of the benefits of growing up in university towns – but the one that stands out most is Mr. Day, 8th grade English. He was one of those who noticed everything you did, good and bad, but the best thing he did was never condescend. He simply expected everyone to work and to think. Everyone did, even the kids who later dropped out of high school. He got the kids who usually did well without trying to try anyway. He was sharp, fast, sarcastic and witty, sometimes at our expense, but never made anyone feel put down or singled out (how did he DO that?). He read *Lord of the Flies *cover to cover out loud in installments.

It was common wisdom (and therefore probably not entirely true) that he was really a high school teacher, and that he got sent down to 8th grade because he pissed off someone in the high school administration. Even if that wasn’t the case, he treated us the way we thought high school students would be treated, as if we were all worth listening to.

He was morbidly obese back then, but not one of his students ever made a joke about his weight. *He *did, though: he was explaining what the word “corpulent” means…

Yeah, if I ever publish a book, it’ll be dedicated to “Dutch” Day.

First and foremost, my AP English teacher. Very smart, very tough and demanding (“Did anyone ever get an A in his class?” one of my other high school teachers asked. I had. I just smiled.) He had thick glasses and a cop mustache, and he thought it was his job to instill every student who came through his classroom with a foolproof bullshit detector. On one occasion, he handed us a very plausible-sounding spoof essay about Macbeth, which argued that the Key To It All was that Lady Macbeth was having an affair with Banquo, and waited for us to catch all of the arguments that sounded good but fell apart under scrutiny. (This was, I think, a lesson that got me through grad school.) He liked his literature dark and twisty, preferably involving family curses. That was the year we read the Oresteia and Hamlet and Absalom, Absalom, and I wrote a paper about Blood Wedding over winter break that was really my first college-level paper, because he was one of those rare AP teachers who really do demand college work.

It was a good thing he did, because during my first semester in college I had Intro to Shakespeare with another tough, take-no-bullshit teacher. It was really Intro to Shakespeare, Random Anecdotes About Soviet Russia, Musings About the Purpose of Freshman Humanities, and Other Stuff, because Freshman Shakespeare Prof was the sort of person who would wander into class five minutes late and tell you about the book he bought over the weekend or the train of thought that had been distracting him. He was, however, a very sharp and demanding reader of papers, and so generous with his time that he offered to read my dissertation and sent me a lengthy e-mail with his suggestions for revising it for publication, some twelve years after I’d last been his student. I think he was a big part of the reason why I decided I wanted to be an English professor, and I know several other alumni who can tell similar stories.

Finally, my advisor in grad school was not only a terrific scholar, but also a man who modeled patience and tact in every aspect of the way he interacted with grad students. I want to be like him when I grow up.

My favorite of all time was my 4th grade English teacher, Kathy Danko. Thinking back, I don’t even remember why she was my favorite. She just took a special interest in me and my writing and was very encouraging. We kept in touch all through middle school and then some after college.

She moved at some point to West Virginia, but continued to get our local paper delivered to her. So when I bought my house in 2005 she saw the real estate transaction and sent me a congratulatory note. I was really floored! Unfortunately, I was so busy with the new house that I blew off thanking her until…last month. I had read that her mom died and sent her a sympathy card and a letter.

My other favorite teachers were Joe Barrow, who was my 7th and 8th grade Science and Social Studies teacher…and Bob Hoefler who was my band director for many years. I still visit Hoefler. I’ve lost touch with Barrow but he was a totally neat guy. He would have made a PERFECT Doper. Funny and smart and liked to have fun, and made learning fun.

I’d have to pick four: one from grade school, one from junior high, and one from high school.

The first was Mr. Zefferi, my teacher from 4th through 6th grade (I was in a GATE program in the '70s, and there were two classes each of which stayed together for all three of these grades). He was ex-military and didn’t take crap from anybody–you just had to respect him because it was so clear he wanted to help us learn but wasn’t going to coddle us while we did it. He expected the best from us and I think he got it.

Second was Mr. Oliver, 10th and 11th grade English teacher. This guy was probably one of the least popular teachers in school. He was older, very dumpy, had fairly lousy hygiene–not the kind of guy you wanted to get too close to. A lot of the kids teased him and made fun of him behind his back. I’m not sure exactly why my friend and I decided to get to know him better, but we started going into his classroom at lunchtimes to talk. Turned out he was smart (we all knew that, even the ones who made fun of him), funny (in his own quirky way) and kind of the prototypical old-style SF geek. He was also known as one of the hardest teachers in school. I think I tended to gravitate toward that kind of teacher, since I was bored a lot of the time in school because things (especially English) were too easy. He was notorious for giving 5.0s on his essays only very rarely–I got several, and was very proud of all of them because I knew he’d tell me if I was slacking off and grade me accordingly.

Third was Mrs. Kell, my 8th grade English teacher. She was amazing. Another tough teacher, she had an imagination that wouldn’t quit and she encouraged her students to share this trait. She graded hard, but she also applauded innovation or unconventional projects. The only time I ever didn’t like her was when she had us read a play aloud in class and, because the parts in the play were all male characters, only let the boys read. This pissed me off bigtime (I loved reading aloud), but I got over it.

Fourth was Mr. Mohney, 12th grade AP English teacher. He was young (I think he was only 26) and it was his first year at our school. His class was incredible, and completely unlike anything I’d done before. If I thought Mr. Oliver was tough, Mohney was worse. He taught us literature that wasn’t exactly kosher with the school board (things like Lady Chatterley’s Lover–I think he got around it by having us buy our own books, and holding bake sales and such to help out the students who couldn’t afford them), he made us really think, and he graded his essays (on a 9-point scale) very stingily. Most students got 6s. A 7 was considered good, 8s were rare, and 9s were unheard of. I took it as a challenge, and I’m proud to say that I got the only 9 he gave out that year. I also got one of only two 5s (of 5) on the AP exam that year.

I guess the common factor among all my favorite teachers was that they were tough, fair, and expected the best out of their students. I didn’t want to be mollycoddled. I didn’t want my “feelings” to be considered (other than being treated with consideration and basic dignity), and I didn’t want to be allowed to slack off or make excuses. To earn my respect as a teacher, you had to push me to do better and better work, not let me skate by on what was “good enough.”