I’m talking mostly from an academic standpoint, but if you wish to throw a family member’s name into the ring, feel free to do so. Much like the book thread, if you can put a reason why, that’d be fun too.
Good teachers deserve recognition in some form or another. This is primarily the reason for opening this thread. Most teachers don’t know about the impact they’ve had, and they quite possibly never will. But this is where you can change that at least on a small scale.
The best teacher I ever had was the track coach that wasn’t even my track coach. He quit track to be the x-country coach the year before I started HS. But Coach P was always my go-to guy. The one I went to for training tips that motivated me, and got me from a failiing 2-miler as a sophomore, to a state finalist in the half-mile by my senior yesr.
Nothing I ever did was a failure to Coach. They were “steps on the raod to success”, even the ones that sure as shit felt like failure at the time.
My best teacher was not a teacher, but a friend, who I travelled Mexico and Guatemala with.
He was, however, older and more experienced, and I learned a number of important things from him. Not from any sort of “lectures” mind you, but from simply spending time with, and observing him.
I learned it’s O.K. to be ignorant. There’s greater power in knowing you do not know and striving to find out, than there is in putting on the ruse that you know something, when in reality, it’s B.S. That’s one of the great things about the Dope: that you can admit your ignorance and rather than ridicule (generally), others will help to enlighten you.
I learned we are not so important as we think we are, and embarrasment, more than anything, is the best way to destroy the ego. It can be extremely liberating (as long as you acknowledge it).
I learned if you can visualize it, you can do it, but that there’s none of this creeping up to the edge and convincing yourself you’re still gonna do it. Either you do it, or you don’t.
And I also learned how to cook. I didn’t know how to cook anything but mac and cheese before, and now I know how to cook. That was cool too.
The best teacher I ever had was Mr Duffy, my 6th grade English teacher at B.A.M.S.
(just incase he is here…he was smart enough to be 
) Mr. Duffy wore squeekie shoes, wild WILD ties, and showed me the world that is a good story, be it in book form, audio or movie.
I think of him often and wonder what he is doing now. If any teacher should get the “golden apple” it is that man!
Mrs. McNab, teacher of English and my sixth-grade class at the Linden School. Wherever she is, God bless.
Mr. Center, my 5th grade teacher, who inspired me with a single sentence, believed in me despite his exasperation with my failure to live up to my abilities, and was probably the first person to treat me as a real person rather than “just some kid”. I’ll never forget him, he is easily my favorite teacher of them all.
Mr. Reed, 11th-grade history teacher. An brilliant ex-hippy Unitarian Buddhist, who every year took a vacation somewhere in the third world (as an example, when he got married, he and his wife originally intended to honeymoon in Vietnam, but wound up going to central Africa instead) and had pictures of such plastered all over his classroom, and once a month would show slideshows of places he’d been.
He tried his best, with the limited materials available in public school, to provide a useful elucidation of world history (i.e. not just random unconnected facts), and always tried to engage his students and challenge them to think. Current events were always a big focus in the classroom, especially as they were influenced by the history of the place they were happening in; quite often a xeroxed newspaper article would be passed around, and would serve as the springboard for a class discussion about some aspect of that place’s history. Plus he loved classic rock, and would frequently play it in the background.
Honorable mention must go to Mr. Scotty Johnson, the best computer science teacher ever. He influenced generations of students at my high school, and remains a legend to all who ever met him.
Mr. Lee, my grade ten English teacher - and later, my Writing teacher. Twice. I took his Writing class twice.
We started off as enemies. We were always at each other’s throats, we exasperated each other, snarled at each other, ignored each other; until we discovered we were in love with the same “woman”: words.
I began slipping out of classes and going to visit him, with my dictionary open in my hands. At first he was suspicious that I was bringing my homework from another English class to him, until I assured him (and he double checked with my other teacher!) that I really just wanted to learn more with him. We’d discuss the words I’d bring to the table, and he began to expect my little visits, and he would bring new words of his own to our discussions. We’d peruse the thesaurus together, and try to use our newfound words in the most grandiose way possible whenever we bumped into each other in the halls.
By the time graduation rolled around, he asked me to call him by his first name; an honour he bestowed only upon students he considered his friends. However, to this day, I can’t bring myself to do it. Not because I don’t consider him a friend (though we haven’t spoken for years, perhaps my honour has expired!), but because I learned to respect him. You see, I kept trying to call him by his first name when we were enemies. By the time we were friends, I had more respect. I was such a punkass kid. :smack:
He signed my yearbook. He was the only teacher who did. Many people signed, but his is the only one I’m really glad I got. It’s the only one I remember:
“Well, I’m not Graham [Coxon, my idol at the time - A.], but I’m probably as memorable… need I say more. Remember me when you become famous and the influence I had on your success.”
It’s a promise, Mr. Lee. 
My AP European History/Classical Philosophy teacher/debate coach. A uniquely funny, relaxed and open-minded teacher who also plays the hurdy-gurdy at Rennaissance Faires. I guess I mostly went to debate to hang out with him, and I never did better in any class than I did in European History. Now that I’m back in New York, I think about looking him up almost every weekend. I don’t know why I haven’t gotten around to it.
Jack O’Connel, formerly of the Seattle Academy of Arts and Sciences was an evil, evil man. And he knew how to weld that tool to get his students to care about, to enjoy, and damn well remember their lessons.
Principally I studied French under him, and it was there that he taught us how to say such wonderful things as:
Jack is an hermaphrodite.
He keeps porn and whips in his drawers.
Scott is a hideous cretin with lice, who lives in a cave and has sex with his pet giraffe.
Scott est un cretin horible avec des poux, qui vit dans une cave et a le sexe avec son giraffe. (Unfortunately I haven’t used French for many a moon, so that may be off. (Though I cheated and let the babel fish help.))
Ah yes, we scoured the dictionaries. You can’t properly commit a good verbal bashing when you can’t get just the word you need for that extra oomph. And to live up to Jack, one couldn’t go with anything less. And though it forced him to make thousands and thousands of copies, and go through to correct them all, no word we learned was ever left behind as we would be quized and requized to make sure that our vocabulary didn’t rely on the popular words of the week. And he required that we never take any notes, so that all knowledge was in our head and we were involved in the task. To be certan, a harsh task master, but the funnest and most effective teacher I have ever met.
Our courses on literature under him were full of debate as tense as any in GD. Our research on impressionist painters leaving me able to critique fully any work from that period.
Of course there was always the fear of getting pegged with a piece of chalk, but so it goes.
Doh. Jack O’Connell.
Mr Palmer. He was old, overweight and with eyebrows that grew up in the corners, making him resemble a horned owl. Those were some serious eyebrows.
He was a substitute, called in while our regular teacher left after first term on pregnancy leave. He made us watch Aliens, made lewd jokes and told us stories about his aging mother and adult daughter. He liked Lord Nelson and HR Giger and was an admirably unyielding grammar nazi.
At the end of term three our regular teacher’s baby was born. Sadly, she suffered from neural defects and passed away shortly after birth. In term four we returned to class to see Mrs Smith back at work. Although we knew of the baby’s death, I don’t think anyone knew when she would be coming back to work. Her return was unexpected. If we’d known, we’d have said goodbye to Mr Palmer. As it was, we never got a chance.
Mr. McGuire - 9th grade general science. His was the most hands-on class I ever took, including all college lab courses. Over the course of the year, we:
built and launched rockets
took apart and rebuilt lawnmower engines
threw eggs (after packaging them so they wouldn’t break)
distilled almost pure alcohol (oh, yeah, that would happen today)
drove go-carts
There was more that I don’t recall. Plus his was the first and only class where I entered a science fair (I built an electromagnet.) He didn’t cut the girls any slack - we were expected to do the same as the boys. Bear in mind, this was school year 1968-69 - it was a slightly different world then. He’s got to be part of the reason I realized I could be an engineer.
All of this is very true, and pretty important. People get “success” drilled into their noggins, but sometimes “failure” or “embarrassment” are just as powerful/important.
Mr. Dejneha, Grade 11 chemistry. Just a phenomenal teacher. The class was brilliantly executed in every way. I still remember everything I learned.
Honorable mention: Mr. Murphy, Grade 9 gym. Everything you’ve ever heard about bad phys ed teachers is exactly what Mr. Murphy was not. A genius of instruction; I learned as much in that class as any other I ever took.
I had three, but I’m posting about the most unlikely of the three.
His name was Jack Oliver, and he taught English at my high school. He was very unpopular with the students, for a couple of reasons: first, he was strict and graded hard and expected the kids to actually learn something in his class, and second…well…he was a serious nerd. Late fifties or so, grungy, had some weird personal habits, always had dandruff flakes on his shoulders, wore old weird Birkenstocks with socks and glasses with big black frames–basically, a physically unappealing guy. I started out, like everybody else, not liking him very much. “Jolly Olly’s Happy Hour,” one kid dubbed his class. “You’ll laugh till you cry, and cry till you die.”
Something soon happened, though: I realized I was learning stuff from him. That if I could get past his appearance and his weird quirks, the guy was smart and funny and dedicated to his subject. I was already a good English student, and got nothing but better in his classes. He gave us bizarre topics for themes to write, and always graded on a scale of 1.0 to 5.0 on several criteria, with the final score being the average of all these. He always wrote little smiley faces with halos and the words “Smile. Enjoy.” on the theme papers. When I scored a 5.0 on one of his essays, I felt good for weeks–because I think he only awarded one or two of them the entire two years I was in his classes.
I and a friend started to visit him during lunch periods–we’d just sit around and talk about whatever, and it was then I discovered his love for science fiction and Sherlock Holmes. He teased me about my attraction for Ayn Rand’s novels, but he also gave me a whole stack of SF books to read, recommending ones he liked particularly.
Even after I left his class (to move into 12th grade English with the second of my two greatest teachers) I still went in to talk to him. I’d really like to talk to him again and tell him how much he influenced me, but I think he died several years ago. I’m not sure, but I think so. I learned a lot from him–including that people who look weird and act strange can still end up being good and valuable friends if you let yourself get past the surface stuff.
I’m very lucky: I had two very good teachers whom I’ve never forgotten.
The first was Mr. Ditch, for 5th and 6th grades. He helped us learn, using real life and not just workbooks and textbooks. When we studied Japan, one of the things we did was prepare an entire Japanese meal in our classroom. Everybody brought in electric frying pans (okay, so it wasn’t a real authentic Japanese meal, but hey) and we made a meal. There were other “projects” as well that helped bring home the lessons.
The other great teacher was my high school Russian teacher. I also had him for German a couple of years. Mr. Basansky was a stickler for knowing the material, and emphasized memorization and translation exercises. To this day I can recite far more Pushkin than Shakespeare. But the best thing about Mr B. was his stories. He had the most amazing background (born in the Ukraine, survived the Communist annexation, survived a Nazi concentration camp, lived a hand-to-mouth existence in post-war Europe as a teenager, etc.) and his anecdotes were not only fascinating, but very good object lessons for a bunch of middle-class American kids whose worst hardship in life was having to do (gasp) homework.
I can still hear the dread words (in Russian, of course, but I don’t have a Cyrillic character set): Tomorrow we have test!
A few years after I graduated I was flipping through the channels one Sunday morning and recognized Mr. B. on one of those PTL-Christian-type shows. Apparently he’s nowfairly well known as a TV evangelist kinda guy.
The best teacher I ever had was a two-day substitute in our 10th grade English class.
At the beginning of class, she put a bunch of pictures along the wall and said, “pick one and write a story.”
The second day, we read them. It started me as a writer (my regular English teacher sure wasn’t going to).
First one who comes to mind for me is Miss Maple. I took her Art History class in 11th grade.
Prior to that class I had at best a very basic and minimal appreciation for art. She really opened up the world of art for me. I learned about art that I had not been aware of that had occurred through various eras; I learned to see photography as art and architecture as art.
The class went on a field trip to Malibu to see what was then the J. Paul Getty Art Museum, which throughly dazzled me. (This was in the late 1970’s, before construction of the present, much bigger, Getty Museum in Los Angeles began.)
That class left me with a much larger and more active love for art that has stayed in place since then.
Just last year, my class distilled 98% pure ethanol. My teacher also had a fondness of filling up balloons with hydrogen, letting them float over the class, then with a lighted flint attached to a yard stick, with the lights off, igniting them. You’d be amazed at what has and hasn’t gotten kid friendly these days.
As for me, I can’t really think of any particulary noteworthy teachers. I’ve had quite a few outstanding ones, but at that level none really seem higher than the others.