Today I'm grateful for teachers who are passionate and knowledgeable about what they do. You need to have both of course. Teachers with only one or the other come off as foolish or inaccessible. The first kind can't teach you, and you won't learn from the second.
But you occasionally get a teacher who has both of those things, and those are the teachers you remember. For instance my seventh grade English teacher was like that. I always liked her, and I remember complaining the next year to her about how I disliked my eighth grade English teacher. I had a variety of hard-hitting criticism for her (as only a teenager can have) and specifically mentioned that I hated the books we were studying. We weren't even doing a Shakespeare that year. She then said that if I were interested, she would be happy to discuss a Shakespeare of my choosing with me during some of her lunch breaks. I took her up on that and had a great time reading and talking about Hamlet with her.
Another example, of all the classes that I have ever taken in school, I consider my organic chemistry classes in college to be easily one of the top three best courses I could have taken. My teacher had such an innovative way of presenting the material that I still retain much of what I learned in that class. He focused on making sure that we understood the concepts that we needed, not on memorization. Often he actively discouraged memorization saying that if we learned and internalized the concept then we would be able to figure out the specifics of a problem. He practiced this philosophy on his tests; on the last page of the exam there would be a large, intricate problem using the concepts that we were taught, but often applying them in a totally new way. You would have to spend the bulk of the time in the test just trying to understand and apply what you'd learned to the new content you were looking at. Now, this may sound like he's being too hard or cruel, after the test on his own time, he would meet with each student in the class personally (offering to give you some bonus points if you came to see him so that nearly everyone did) and go over the test question by question making sure that you had the concepts firmly in your mind. That is why he was a great teacher, he expected a lot out of you, but he did everything in his power to make sure that you could achieve that.
Finally for the last example (there are many more, but this post is getting to be too long already), we have my Song Literature teacher. I would consider him both a mentor and a colleague at this point in my studies, but just today I was standing around on campus and he walked by. He stopped and we had an excellent discussion on performance and style in Neapolitan song, as well as the use of portamento and appoggiatura in Mozart. You may or may not care about these things, but the fact that he was willing to spend time with me out of class and talk about a subject that I am interested in was very meaningful to me and got me thinking about some of my other favorite teachers.
So today I am grateful for the teachers who have had an impact on me.
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