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
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!