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Teacher of the year

Discussion in 'General Discussion' started by Dcc001, Jun 13, 2012.

  1. Dcc001

    Dcc001
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    New Bitch On Top

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    <a class="postlink" href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/montreal-teacher-shows-class-purported-lin-dismemberment-video/article4255606/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/nat ... le4255606/</a>

    Focus: Tell us about your best teacher. Anyone really make a difference in your life?

    Alt. Focus: Tell us about your worst teacher. Anyone you wished would die in a fire when you were a kid?
     
  2. guernica

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    Our Year 9 religion substitute teacher would often just book out a computer classroom for our lessons, and let us do whatever we wanted. Sometimes that often included informing us of a good strip poker website he was using at the time, and challenging us to see who could make the most money/see the most of certain playboy playmates.

    We really enjoyed those lessons until one student inexplicably decided to brag about it to another teacher one day. We didn't see the substitute after that.
     
  3. iczorro

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    As part of our Western Civ. class, we watched Monty Python and the Holy Grail. I brought the movie, my buddy who worked at a theater brought in a garbage bag full of popcorn, and it was good.

    Then, in Biology, we spent a week and a half learning about and then disecting fetal pigs. And then the last two days of the second week watching the movie Babe.

    Mr. Weissjohn and Mr. Beaver. Excellent.
     
  4. Kubla Kahn

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    Focus: Tell us about your best teacher. Anyone really make a difference in your life?

    I actually started off knowing the best teacher on a bad note. I cut in front of him in the school lunch line. Something I did all the time since most kids milled around holding up the line trying to decide on what they wanted, while I jimmied in and out in a flash. He didn't take kindly to it and started yelling at me and saying he didn't need to put up with this shit, "because he had a masters degree." Later that day he had the vice principal pull me out of class to continue his tirade. He must have been having a rough day but I didn't budge on my not giving a shit about cutting line and I wound up in detention.

    I had never taken any class from him and it turned out he was the beloved English and Fantasy Science Fiction teacher. I took Fantasy/Sci-Fi the next year and found out why he was one of the two teachers that won best teacher perpetually. One, the class was amazing, most of the lessons revolved around thinking outside of the box and questioning all aspects of your life. He really had a knack for presenting information in mind blowing ways. Plus we got to watch some of the best sci-fi movies in the class. Second, he was about as laid back as any teacher could exist and as relatable a person you could ever meet (he also looked like a dead on Ned Flanders). He had a recliner chair in front of the class that was first come first serve. During one lesson he went around the class and asked us the worst experience we had ever had at school. Like a twerp I told the story of a teacher flipping shit on me for cutting in a lunch line. He had sort of forgotten it and had never placed me to the situation. He apologized and said his reaction was way out of line for the petty infraction.

    Basically, the lessons and how he presented them shaped a whole lot of how I go about perceiving our world.

    Alt. Focus: Tell us about your worst teacher. Anyone you wished would die in a fire when you were a kid?


    I've had a few terrible teachers, most are skipping my mind at the moment. I'd have to say a lot of them were concentrated in middle school. I don't know about everyone else's middle school experience but it just felt like the teachers were the ones who couldn't hack handling high schoolers but shouldn't be around elementary school aged human beings. I had a math teacher in seventh grade who was a complete psycho. Long story short, he had such a short temper and was prone to such violent outburst, it is a wonder he made it through a single interview to get the fucking job in the first place.
     
  5. audreymonroe

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    The most powerful cervix... in the world...

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    I've been lucky enough to have a lot of incredible teachers throughout my life. Of course, since it's me, most of these have sad endings but hey. These are just a few.

    My third and fourth grade teacher, Mrs. Van Damm, was the person that first started really encouraging me to pursue writing as something other than a hobby. She created an after-school program, The Literary Society, so that me and a few other students could workshop each other's writing. (Yes, I've been doing writing workshops since I was in third grade. I never thought I'd miss them until it has been a few years since college.) She would give me all the information about submitting to different contests and magazines and offer to edit the stories that I wrote for fun. I credit her almost 100% with me actually going forward with wanting to write. She was also just an awesome teacher all around, who had a very Ms. Frizzle-esque way of teaching. We once turned our whole classroom into a rainforest, and we had high tea once for a reason I don't remember. Then, halfway through fourth grade, she got really sick with Lupus (House, sometimes it is Lupus) and we had to get a substitute for the rest of the year. She wrote me a few letters for the next year or two, but then she died.

    My first Hebrew school teacher, Dorothy, was the first mentor I ever had. Again, it mostly had to do with writing, but she also totally shaped by whole concept and idea of Judaism. She was the only one who talked about it in a way that I liked, and it just took a few years for me to start appreciating it again. She was really old and retired a few years after I had her as a teacher, but I would go over to her house and bring her groceries or make her dinner and we would talk about writing and art and feminism and Judaism and Israel and New York. She would always give me books of poetry and stories by female writers, and then we'd talk about them after I read them. She'd do things like send me postcards and letters even though we lived in the same town. One postcard had a Picasso painting on it and she just sent it to me because the eyes of the portrait reminded her of my eyes. She was like this mythical grandma figure. We started to lose touch after I graduated high school. I wrote her a few letters every now and then, especially after I went to Israel and was reminded of her everywhere. Then this very strange thing happened last year where I couldn't fall asleep until I wrote a eulogy for her. I found out soon afterwards that she had died a day later. She was in her 90s, so it's not very sad, but it made me wish she could've been a bigger part of my life for longer than high school when I could've appreciated her more.

    There were a couple of English teachers in high school that I became good friends with. They weren't as influential exactly as the others, but they were great teachers. I went to one of their weddings and babysat her kid. The way we hang out now and just shoot the shit is like they were never my teachers.

    The summer before my senior year of high school, I was hired on the spot of my audition for this new dance troupe that this lady was starting. It ended up being a group of only four women, and we got really, really close. I spent most of my week at her house at practice, and she kind of favored me and was polishing me to be "the star" of the group. She asked me to choreograph one of our dances, so I'd spend extra time there on my own, and she'd videotape me and sent the videos to the people who had actually created the type of dance that we were doing. I wasn't planning on dance being my primary career or anything (nor was I good enough for that to happen), but I had been fully planning on minoring in dance and maybe looking into it as a side job. Thanks to how often we were practicing and with all the encouragement and focused attention, I was getting pretty damn good. In the meantime, it still felt awesome to get paid for something that I loved and to have this wonderful experience. We had our photos taken for advertising material, bought our costumes and makeup and new shoes. We scheduled our first performance. Then, she went absofuckinglutely nuts, and with one phone call the morning of the day of our dress rehearsal, she single-handedly ruined my dance career. And now I kind of hate her. But, I can't deny that she was one of the most influential and important teachers that I've had, while it was good.
     
  6. RCGT

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    Absolutely. My middle-school English teachers were shit - they were psycho bitches who would flip out for the most minor infractions, they only wanted to hear one interpretation of any text, they hated dissent, and the assigned reading was... not my interest. (You have to try pretty damn hard to get a middle school boy to read chick lit.) Half the reason I love my high school English teachers is that they rehabilitated me from my hatred of the subject. They were also all guys, and didn't assign stupid bullshit like The Secret Life of Bees.
     
  7. lust4life

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    Pretty much, pick any of the nuns I had in grade in school. Sr. Theodosia, Sr. John-Catherine, Sr. Charles-Angela...Nazi Inquisitionists, the lot of them. Eternal salvation required flawless penmanship and a perpetual feeling of guilt.
     
  8. JWags

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    I unfortunately can't remember alot of "great" teachers I had later in my education. My second grade teacher, Mrs. Gullick, was fantastic. Our room was basically a zoo and my mother still raves about her attentiveness and ability to keep my "gifted" rambunctiousness in order. I also had an English teacher in HS, Mrs. Johnson, who thought the world of me and really made me enjoy writing for the first time. She went out of her way to compliment my unorthodox style, which in the past had drawn me criticism and attempted correction, and still spoke highly of me almost a decade later when my younger sisters had her.

    The professor for me that stands out was a finance professor I had in college. He was fairly polarizing mainly because he was crude, brutally honest, and had a habit of blowing people up in class for being morons. He was a successful trader for a few years in Chicago, decided he didn't get out of the Army to deal with that much stress day to day, went to work at the Fed for a bit, then went back and got a doctorate and taught ever since. He was a refreshing break from the egghead academics I had in the Econ department who had never worked outside the protective cocoon of a university before. He gave most of the class arbitrary nicknames and constantly mocked his peers in the department, but below all of that, the dude intensely cared. It took one trip to his office for extra clarification to realize that he wasn't going to baby you cause he felt you wouldn't learn that way. I took him both semesters of my final year and I had grown tired of grade mongering up to that point, so I was aiming for B/B+ cause my GPA was crippled from a rough freshman year. But I was so motivated that I kicked ass, worked really hard, and got A's in both of his courses, which were arguably 2 of the toughest classes I've ever taken, grad school included. The grade distributions usually hovered around 2.5. I sent him an email shortly before graduation thanking him and he basically responded that he was pleased and actually expected it cause I took his ribbings in class more in stride than others. And he also gave me a great bit of advice..."In the real world, "tough love" like this doesn't exist. Alot of people are just assholes. But if you can get used to dealing with criticism and praise that aren't wrapped in niceties, you're gonna be just fine."

    Worst teachers/professors? Oh lord. 1st and 3rd grade, according to my mother, were terrible to the point that I got transferred to private school for 4th-6th grade, the final straw being my 3rd grade teacher telling me to stop begging for attention when I was knocked out and concussed on the playground and went up to her cause I had blood in my hair.

    I had a HS chemistry teacher who busted me for cheating on a final when the girl behind me was craning her neck over my shoulder and copying my work, which he saw creepily peering in from outside the classroom. He completely disregarded that the same girl had been busted before earlier in the year doing a similar move and I was given then choice of a 0 or being reported to the office, where it was my word against his. My grade dropped from an A- to a C, in the last semester before grades got sent to colleges. He and his polos he tucked into MOTHERFUCKING WINDPANTS that he wore every day can go fuck himself. I wish he would attempt some Breaking Bad style meth creation cause he'd blow his ratface off.

    Finally, Professor Issacson, my biology professor freshman year. His course was horrific, a weed out class of the highest order, meant to find out who really cared and wanted it enough to work and who just needed a kick to choose a different path. Initially I cared. I went to office hours cause I was struggling. Then I heard this bearded bookfucker tell a girl I knew who wanted to be a biologist more than anything, but was struggling with some of the material when she asked what she could be doing differently to improve next test..."Looking at your first test, nothing. I see no way you're gonna get better than a C. I'll be pleasantly surprised if you pass to be honest." After the first test of first semester FRESHMAN YEAR. He also more or less threatened that students who poorly reviewed him at semester end would somehow be discovered and life in the Bio department would be difficult moving forward. Fuck that guy, and fuck tenure that allows douchebags like that to be continually employed when job performance would say otherwise. He was like the jackass professor from Finding Forrester but fatter and greyer, and even more smug.
     
  9. Crown Royal

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    The greatest teacher of all time is Deborah LaFave. End of story.

    That kid she turned into the most popular high school freshman on earth did well in her class, too. The only thing he ever had to read was a home pregnancy test.
     
  10. Czechvodkabaron

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    Focus: I have two teachers that stand out as the best.

    The first one was my Latin I teacher who I had in my junior year of high school. He was 24 and fresh out of graduate school. At first he kind of came off as arrogant, but it didn't take long to find out that he was cool. I was on the quiz bowl team at school and he took over as the coach of the JV team that year, then coached me on the varsity team the next year. He was a lot of fun to hang out with and talk to on the weekends when we went to tournaments. In class he let us review for tests by reading us questions and letting us use the buzzers. He would also give us random trivia questions during class and on tests. But beyond that he was very good at explaining the material and making himself available to help anyone who was struggling. He and I are also big fans of The Simpsons, and during senior year we used to go to a bar together on Monday nights with some of his friends and play Simpsons trivia.

    He became one of the most popular teachers in our school and a lot of students quit taking Spanish and French just to take his class. A handful went on to major or minor in the Classics in college. I was in Latin club and went to the state convention both years. I don't have the heart to tell him that I hate Latin now, after taking three semesters of it in college and discovering that it is actually hard once you get past the introductory level.


    The second teacher is the World Geography instructor who I had for the first semester of my freshman year at FSU. He was American but had lived in Egypt for most of the previous ten years. As a result he had become very anti-American. In most cases this would infuriate me, but he made it funny. He constantly took jabs at both Democrats and Republicans, and referred to almost all American politicians by some kind of nickname. He also told us about some of his world travels, like the time that he was arrested in Djibouti for getting into a fight with a guy who turned out to be a high ranking politician in their country. His class was one of the few that was an easy A for me, so I can't really comment on his teaching style, but I think that he did a good job of explaining the material.
     
  11. Omegaham

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    My biology teacher, Dr. Langdon.

    Dude went to Cornell for undergrad, went to med school, and then got his Phd in microbiology from Harvard. He taught med school for a while and decided that he hated med school students... so he started teaching high school.

    By far the best teacher I've ever had. His lecture style was to put a Powerpoint up, then pace around the room, point at random kids, and ask questions. If you got it wrong, you were gently mocked and set straight. As a result, there was no sleeping in his class; the entire thing felt like a seminar.

    He's the only teacher that I really keep in touch with.
     
  12. ghettoastronaut

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    One of my favourites was my high school chemistry teacher. She was extremely nice, extremely knowledgeable, and had a great technique. She also had a mean sarcastic streak. One of my encounters with her:

    "Who could possibly hate me?"
    "Do you want to step outside and we'll conduct that test? We'll do it twice for validity."
     
  13. Crown Royal

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    Ms. Evans was my computer teacher in grade ten and eleven and I fucking hated her more than anything. She wore these giant 80's secretary-style square framed glasses and had a high-pitch nasal voice that could open a garage door from a quarter mile away. If she caught you doing ANYTHING but exactly what she told you do in class on the computer, she would read it aloud to the class and do whatever it took to humiliate a student if they got out of line in any way. She never smiled, had no sense of humour whatsoever and was basically the pill to end all pills. If you threw her in a pond you could skim cunt for three days.

    If she knew what I said about her behind her back, she would never stop crying. Die alone, bitch.


    My favourite teacher was my English teacher Mr. Dennhome, because he was one of those cool teachers that didn't take attendance, didn't care where you would sit, and you could say ANYTHING you want in his class, and that means directed right at him:

    STUDENT: Hey, Dennhome!! You grades those quizes for us yet???
    HIM: No, It'll happen when it happens.
    STUDENT: Well, it better happen SOON or I'm gonna kick you in the nuts!
    HIM: Oh, you guys.
    STUDENT: I'm not lying!
     
  14. caseykasem

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    Focus: My 5th and 6th grade teacher, Mrs. Weir. I see her every now and again when I go back home. She really cared about her students, didn't put up with any shit, and really wanted the best for each of us.

    In high school I had an english teacher, Mr. T. He was the shit. He seemed more like a college professor than a high school teacher. We read some basic philosophy stuff and discussed all sorts of crazy stuff. Being in the gifted english was worth it just to have him. He made high school suck just a little bit less.

    My best teacher in college by far was Prof. Morris. He is a crazy Native American and indigenous legal scholar. He said shit that was abrasive, contrary to contemporary society, and true. He was super passionate about federal indian law and race and gender law that his passion kind of rubbed off on all of us. Even if you disagreed with him, he was super respectful and always valued other opinions.

    Alt. Focus: I had a lot of shitty teachers but an adjunct professor during college may be the worst. He didn't teach us shit and basically read to us out of a book for three hours a week in a monotone voice.
     
  15. BL1Y

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    World Trade Center collapsed an hour ago, no one knows what's going on other than the fact that the nation is under attack, and we live in a city that's a pretty high priority target (we have the missile defense command here) and probably 90% of the students have a parent who works on the military base. Shut up about it, we're having a test!

    Absolutely hated my AP English teacher.

    Interpretive exercises were the worst. It was basically a game of guessing what the consensus view she learned in college was. Now, it's important to learn what certain famous works are regularly understood as meaning, but that's different from thinking there's only one right way to read something and every other reading is wrong. It's like she didn't really get what literature and art are.

    And regarding how teachers responded during the WTC attack, last class of the day was AP Biology. My teacher (looks exactly like Jimmy Kimmel) turned on the TV and set it to mute, so that if there was news we could find out, but just carried on teaching a regular class, mostly to make the end of the day go by faster.

    As for my best teacher, it's easily the professor I had in undergrad who taught all of our philosophy of law classes. I had four classes with him, not just because the subject matter was interesting, but because he was also a damn good teacher. Classes were very heavy in student participation, sort of like a seminar, bit of guided debate. His attendance policy was that you didn't have to show up to class, but if you didn't you'd miss so much discussion that you'd never be able to handle the exam. And it was true. I don't know how he got such good discussions out of a bunch of undergrad shithead, but he did.

    He is also one of the most intelligent, kind, and humble people I have ever known. I'm reminded of something Queen Victoria said. Of William Gladstone, she remarked that when he spoke you felt as if you were in the presence of one of the most important people in the world. And when Benjamin Disraeli spoke, she said, you felt as if you were one of the most important people in the world. A lot of smart people are focused on making you think they're smart, but this professor has a way of making you think you were smart.