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

In My Humble Opinion
21

I wouldn’t be too hard on them. I was one of those kids who always related better to adults then my peers and so felt a kinship with many of my teachers. But both during school and after I graduated I know that I would occasionally be a little too informal with one of them and have to back off a bit. I’m sure teachers appreciate being appreciated, but it’s still a profession, and furthermore a profession dealing with children. Some teachers want to keep things professional between them and their students, and many that would love to be more casual may be frightened away from it by administrative policies that are overbearing in the name of propriety. Granted, no response at all when you’ve already graduated is probably being too careful, but I doubt their intention was such that you should take it personally. And hey, even if they have all since turned into murdering rapists, that doesn’t change the impact they made on you back then.

My favs:

3rd grade teacher: she was female and overweight and sweet without being a push over. Can’t remember much else but she was my favorite teacher until junior high. Just a lovely lady.

JHS: Mr Klump! Physical sciences teacher. Drove a beat up VW Beetle. Was very very tall. Very funny like a tv character and did some of the most fun science demonstrations ever. I drew a picture of him on my science test and he drew something for me in return. He used to do this “pretending to walk down stairs” while behind the lab bench routine that was hilarious. All around nice guy. And I forgive him for laughing at me when I yelped at getting liquid nitrogen on my arm :rolleyes:

HS: Mrs NauRitter! Bio teacher. Had lots of long talks with her after class. She got me to do lots of special science projects. I made her a huge color pencil drawing. Wonder if she still has it.

HS: Mr Polchinski! He was actually a substitute teacher but he was really friendly and cool (another tall one too). He was in a band (Blotto) that had a video hit on MTV “I Wanna Be A Lifeguard”. We’d also see him in commercials on tv selling fences or pretending to be a drug addict in a recovery program. But in addition to the substituting he became for awhile the advisor to the HS newspaper which was my primary after school activity. I also managed to find a copy of his yearbook and discovered he was a male cheerleader, back when such things existed in our school! Interestingly when I was 17 and my Mom had my brother, he had a son too, so my brother went to school with his son.

College: Actually technically before college - in my pre senior year in HS took a summer course on Moral Reasoning at the local university. Was a neat course and had a nice and competent teacher. It was nice to be in an academic setting without all the teenage BS and authority crap. Also took a night course at the local college my HS senior year on “math art” taught by a math professor (a friend of my step father) and an art teacher. That was also an awesome class. Had to miss the end though because I was in the hospital with pneumonia.

College: I always forget her name, but the History professor who tended to teach women’s studies type classes. She would spend at least 25% of each class telling anecdotes about her fairly messy but interesting personal life. We also got to have dinner at her house as part of one of our specialize seminars.

College: Another name I forget, David S-something. Theater professor, but specialized in interactive media. I took a lot of courses with him and they were all amazing. Culminated in a theater production of 9 Beckett short plays that were conducted simultaneously in various parts of of a large theater space, all enhanced with various technologies. I got to program a motion activated dance space which had different areas for each character that played lines from Waiting For Godot when moved in. His wife was cool too!

There were others but those stick out in my mind…

22

OOh and of course Mr Basset and Ms Brucia! Mr Basset was my 6th grade English teacher. When we were good as a treat he would tell us the “good parts version” of various Shakespeare plays. He would always claim to be the same age as whatever year it was (86 in 1986). And he’d also tell us stories from when he was in the war. Except for one story, which he called “War Story X” which he could not tell anyone until they came of age. Alas, I never went back to find out about War Story X and I think he has since passed on…

Ms Brucia was my high school Latin teacher. She was cool in all sorts of ways both as a teacher and as a person. We used to play “umbra” (ghost), a Latin word game. She used to say things in such an interesting way that would sound odd out of context that we came up with a “quotesbook” for her. Every Friday she’d read about the origin of something modern (an invention, a word phrase, a holiday, etc) that came from Roman times. She had two kids who were like me also into turtles. She and her family didn’t watch tv though she kept a small one in the closet for the babysitter. She’d been working on her PhD and one summer completed the research for her thesis digging up old Roman artifacts in some tiny island in a Roman river. Later that year we started calling her “Dr Brucia”. My only regret is that every year there was a trip to Rome, and when it got to be my turn the school cancelled it out of fears of plane hijackings (around 1989ish).

In general the teachers I liked treated me as their peer, and were interested in their own subject. They would discipline students if necessary but wouldn’t go out of their way to assert their authoritative dominance over the class with silly rules and zero tolerance. Often they did something a little fun once a week to break the routine. They were friendly, kind, professional, mature, reasonable adults, who treated their students as the same until proven otherwise. And they exuded confidence about the ability and potential of their students without putting any pressure on them.

23

I may have told this story before: It was my senior year in high school, and Catherine Hume was trying to teach us about Shakespeare. We were reading Macbeth, and Mrs. Hume told us plays were not meant to be analyzed as text but enjoyed as plays (contrary to what my grad school profs say; I tend to side with Mrs. Hume.) Anyway, in order to impress on us the beauty of Shakespeare as acted literature, Mrs. Hume played out Lady Macbeth’s soliloquy (“Out, out, damn spot!”) She had us pull our desks into a circle, then she pulled down the window shades and turned out the lights. She donned a shawl and lit a candle and, in the dim light of the classroom, she stepped into the center of that circle of high school seniors and delivered the soliloquy. At first we were stunned at her antics, but soon we were enthralled, and when she was finished, there was applause. I trace my love of Shakespeare back to that day.

In retrospect, what Catherine Hume did took a lot of courage and self-confidence. She was no dummy – she’d taught for 45 years at that point, and retired at the end of that year. She knew exactly what she was doing. I’ve seen many, many performances of Shakespeare since then, but none as passionate or gripping as that one.

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Ms. Stevens. Sixth grade. She was really overweight before overweight was uncool. She was a great teacher and seemed to love everyone.
I’m not being biased at all by being the teachers pet at all of course.

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I’ve had plenty of good professors in college, though no one stands out as exceptional.

I never had a K-12 teacher that inspired me in any way, and I actively disliked the vast majority of them.

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Quite a few come to mind:

  • Fr McEvoy for Latin at school. He really made the ancient Roman world come alive.
  • Sr Elizabeth for final maths. A brilliant woman who was able to explain any concept.
  • Penelope Watson, my lecturer for torts and remedies. She really knew her stuff.
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OK, I’ll have to give a shout out to the one teacher who rose above the rest. That would be Capt. Pat Carroll, (Army, retired,) former tank commander in Gulf War I and then defense contractor to Saudi Arabia. He helped the Saudis maintain their army’s tanks. He was by far the richest high school American History teacher I ever had. He drove a fully-loaded Chevy 3500 super-extended-cab, fire engine red, and he had a Porsche too. He looked like Hunter Thompson and he blasted the Ramones and the Clash on a boom box every day before class started. He chewed tobacco and smoked cigarettes and was completely unashamed of it, at a time when these things were looked on as being only slightly less evil than child molesting, especially for a teacher (2003-2004.)

He would cheerfully debate any hot-headed idealistic hippie brat who piped up with some anti-American jive, and own him. You could not defeat this guy in a debate. He was sharp as a razor. It was he who inspired my political outlook.

It’s not like he’s dead or anything…I saw him walking his dog recently.

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In a major known for being an effete old boy’s club, my favorite professor was a shining beacon of bawdy humor and approachability, despite the fact that she is the most highly educated member of the faculty (Princeton undergrad, MA and PhD from Yale). My half-hour long scheduled appointments with her usually ended up being 2 hour discussions, for which she would obligingly stay late. Every office trip I made, she gifted me with at least one or two books.

Every class I ever had from her, she assigned books written by scholars she disagreed with, and always presented her own arguments in a balanced manner, owning up to the fact that her own views are seen by the academy as unpopular to say the least. She doesn’t dismiss the works of others in an effort to make herself look better, something I think many (lesser) academics do. She simply stands on her own excellence. She was the hardest professor I ever had, and she made it worse by both tailoring assignments to my own interests and by expecting more of me than the other students for that reason. She solidified a lot of my own current views and was a chief instrument in shaping where I am headed in my life career-wise.

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Mrs. Skilling, grade two. Taught me how to write cursive nicely, let me read books in class, and was endlessly patient with my hysterical outburst that led to me stuffing myself in a nearby locker (story for another thread). When I came into school one morning with a gigantic puffy black-and-blue shiner–the result of running into a railing suspended over a slide–she consoled me: in some cultures, bruises like that were considered beautiful! (Which is really weird, in retrospect, but it cheered me up.) She was the first one to convince me that it was okay to be smart and like reading books all the time.

Susan, grade six. She was more like our sweet, gentle, snuggly grandmother than our teacher, and there are days where I still think about her and miss her.

Marguerite, grades seven and eight. An accomplished French-language writer herself, she put up long-sufferingly with my wretched attempts at speaking French, encouraged and prodded me to write it, and ended up giving me a book that I still have on my shelves.

Mr. Butler, grades 10 to 12. He was an incredible high-school teacher–funny as hell, while still poised and intelligent–and he’s the reason I got interested in history, but one incident always comes to mind. I’d signed up for the Amsterdam trip with the rest of our class, happy and excited. We were going to look at war sites, tour the city, [del]get high and visit the red-light district,[/del] it was going to be awesome.

Please note: I am really, really, really afraid of flying.

I managed to successfully ignore the squirm of panic in my stomach right until the morning of–with my bags packed and my boarding pass ready–and, just when we were due to leave, had a full meltdown and hid somewhere in the Drama room to curl up in a tight ball and cry inconsolably, shivering the whole time.

They left without me. My parents were not amused about the plane ticket. And Mr. Butler, when they came back, took me aside and put something in my hand: nestled in a little cardboard box, a tulip bulb.

Ms. Bleviss, also grades 10 to 12. A witty and wise woman, now retired, who led our English class with grace; she gave me a pass on an overdue project, tore apart my writing and helped me put it back together, and ordered me to go into English after high school (I obeyed).

Mr. McLatchie, head of our film class in high school, because he loved film noir and made us watch Touch of Evil, Some Like It Hot, Psycho, and Night and the City, and just because he was so damn cool.

Professor Kenneth Bartlett. All the stories about him captivating students are absolutely true, and I feel privileged to have been in his classes (even if I did miserably).

Professor Sam Solecki. He’s fiercely intelligent, and dry and snarky and cynical, and all-around awesome.

Professor Chris Warley, because he was hilarious (he actually used the “Jane, you ignorant slut!” line in class), and Professor Elizabeth Harvey, because she was cheerful and bright and knew Chaucer inside-out.

These guys are all why I want to be a professor myself. All of them were and are inspirations.

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Ms. Wilder. She fueled my need for books of all kinds and on all subjects.
Ms. Perez, Ms. Mabry, Ms. Ellis, and Mr. Gray, all high school teachers that shaped me in very particular ways. I wish I could tell them how much I appreciate what they did for me and the rest of the kids in their charge, but I don’t know if it’s weird and creepy to be contacted by former students. I think I tried leaving messages with them by phone at their current schools, one day years ago, and only got a return call from one of them.

I really, really wish I could have a relationship with my former art teacher, who was a real mentor to me and to whom I feel I owe a very great deal in terms of credit for who I am as an adult. He was a true mentor to me in my life as a young artist; I wish sometimes I could strike up a professional friendship and chat about my current work with him, but I feel like the advance would seem totally inappropriate to someone, like maybe his wife. :frowning:

31

Senora Casiano, all four years of high school Spanish. She, like just about all my teachers, saw I wasn’t “working up to my full potential”. Unlike the other teachers, she also got that calling my parents and telling them I was a slacker who shouldn’t be in honors-level classes wasn’t going to achieve anything. Instead she found a way to make me want to do better. When that failed, she knew when to call in the big gun: “You haven’t memorized these verb conjugations. Have you been studying them at home?” “No.” “Okay. If you don’t learn them you’re going to fail and I don’t want to fail you, so you’re going to come see me every day after school until you memorize them. I’m going to make you fill out these worksheets conjugating about fifty verbs in several tenses, and if you so much as miss one accent mark, you do it over.” “That really sucks.” “Or I can call your parents and tell them you’re in danger of failing again.” “I guess I’ll see you after school.”

Mr. Steadman, freshman seminar in college. “You’re not emotionally ready for this school, and at this rate you will not make it past sophomore year. Go take some time off, work, travel, whatever, then come back and try again. I flunked out of college myself the first time around; there’s no great shame in taking your time,” he said at the end of the first of two semesters in his class. I did not listen. He repeated it at the end of the year. I did not listen. At the end of first semester sophomore year, I left because I’d failed a number of classes.

Ms. Chanowitz, seventh grade English, probably did more than anyone else to fuel my love of literature, and also let me use her classroom as a safe refuge from the social unpleasantness of the middle school cafeteria.

Mr. Lee, 10th grade math, who had no qualms about deviating from the curriculum when we were bored in order to show us that sometimes, math is mind-blowingly awesome. He was incredibly dedicated to teaching, and never retired; he passed away one summer a few years after I had him and the school had to scramble to find a replacement. He also told me out of the blue one day that if a friend and I needed a faculty advisor for the Gay-Straight Alliance we were desperately trying to get off the ground, he would do it. He also, despite being very black and not at all asian, was in charge of the Asian Culture Club, because they needed someone to do it. Great man.

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My teacher in 5th and 6th grade, Mr. Carl Ditch, was an excellent teacher. He taught us by having us DO things. So, when we were studying Japan, we cooked an entire Japanese dinner in class. Okay, it probably wasn’t all that authentic, but we all brought electric frying pans (shhh, don’t tell the fire department!) and meat and fish and vegetables and rice and cooked it right there in the classroom. Yeah, we had to do a 25 page paper on Japan too, but he really made the whole subject fascinating for us. Same with California history: we wrote and performed a play based on Cortez, complete with scenery and everything. I still remember painting the temple and conquistadors and stuff.

My high school Russian teacher, Mr. Vasily Basansky was one of the most amazing people I’ve ever met, even now, 40 years later. He was strict, and we had a LOT of work to do, including the study of Russian literature and music. There was a lot of recitation in class and he was a hard grader. To this day I can remember vividly how to say in Russian “tomorrow we’ll have a test” - words that struck fear in us every time. But he was also a really great teacher, and had the best stories and anecdotes that contributed to the learning process. He was the only teacher I told when I got pregnant and had to leave school; he gave me a textbook and workbook for the following term and urged me to study and come back to school after my baby was born. His non-judgmental attitude and encouragement were key in my ultimate return to school and actually graduating with my class.

33

There were sooo many. Of course, the ultimate teachers were my parents. They weren’t always right and they were flawed human beings, and at times they both drove me nuts…but they always cared. I got my curiosity from my father; I got my compassion from my mother.

I had a prof in college whose name eludes me. He made sure there were copies of any texts he wanted to use in the reference section of the library, so we wouldn’t have to buy them. He wouldn’t say, “Read chapters 1 and 2 for next time”—he would list it out: “Read page 3, paragraphs 1 and 2…then page 3, the first three lines and then the last paragraph. Then on page 4…”

You could read just those bits and be prepared for the next discussion. But the information was so compelling that I ended up reading and re-reading the whole thing anyway. He’d give True/False tests…it was like, “What you learned is really the most important thing. Who gives a shit about grades?” I learned a ton and I made an A, though I knew I could have nailed an essay test on the same material.

And when the class ended, I bought the textbook.

34

My college prof for Humans and the Environment was fantastic–completely devoted to the subject, to the earth, to his students, to the field trips, to sharing knowledge, and so on. The class and the lab were the best I ever had because of him.

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Prof. Sastry was a wonderful teacher, and was willing to spend time with his students. i especailly enjoyed his lectures, and thanks to him, I was able to master some difficult topics.