Inspiring Teachers

I'm sure that we all had a few teachers in school who really made a difference in our lives.  The first teacher I had who really turned the tide of my life was Mrs. B.  She was my math teacher in 8th grade.    I was retaking the class I had taken the year before on recommendation of my 7th grade teacher.

As I watched everyone file into the classroom on the first day of class, I realized that I was one of two 8th graders in the class.  The rest were the high and mighty ninth graders.  I was sure that I had inadvertently been put in the wrong class.  When Mrs. B. handed out a placement exam to see where we all were, my hands were sweaty and so I just answered the questions to the best of my knowledge.  After class, I went up to her and expressed my fears about being in the wrong class.  She said she'd look over my test and then decide what to do.  Sounded good to me.

The next day, the school counselor came to get me out of another class.  He said that Mrs. B. wanted to speak with me.  I breathed a sigh of relief as we walked to her classroom.  Finally, I would be put where I belonged.

"Sandra," she said as we entered the classroom.  "I want to move you up a class." 

I'm sure my jaw flew open.

"You were the top scorer in the class on the placement test.  You already know this stuff." 

That was news to me.  But I agreed to move up to the next level and that was really the pivotal point in how I ended up with a college degree in math.

As an unrelated side note: my mother-in-law did her student teaching with Mrs. B.  How coincidental is that?

Another teacher I liked was Dr. U.  He was my chemistry/engineering professor at the Junior College I attended.  He was, for lack of a better term, strange.  I was always attracted to the professors who were off the beaten path.  He wasn't well liked because he was strict, but I learned to really like him.  He even called my parents house over the Christmas Break to talk to me about retaking his chemistry class.  There's a story there for another day.

One last professor I liked was Dr. M.  He was like Dr. U. in a lot of ways.  He was strange and eccentric, and not a lot of the students liked him.  At first, I didn't.  I found him to be abrasive and obnoxious.  But, over time, I really came to like him.  I had him for a class that I refer to as a "weed-out class".  In the undergrad system, there are certain classes that serve as "weed-out classes" for popular programs like engineering and medical school.  These classes are, I believe, purposefully made harder than they need to be so that it will deter a greater number of students from pursuing degrees in those fields.  I was lucky enough to take at least two of these such classes.

So, Dr. M was mean and crass and a little unorthodox, but he had the best stories.  He was an adjunct professor and so teaching wasn't his main occupation.  In fact, he was director of a state-run mental health institute where the sickest of the sick go.  You can imagine what kind of stories he had for us.  He was also a lawyer and was always being called away to testify in trials.  Out of all of my professors, he was definitely the most fascinating, even if I wasn't learning as much as I could have been.

By the time the middle of the semester rolled around, the class had dwindled from 30 students to about 15.  On the day after the last day to drop classes, he announced that the last test would be cancelled and we would all get 100% and the final would be take home.  He did a complete 180 degree turn in personality and was actually quite pleasant.  In the end, I thought he was pure genius for it.  I figured he was a nice guy all along, he was just weeding students out with his antics.  I have even told this story many times over the years as an example of a professor's unorthodox teaching style and how much I ended up enjoying his class.

So you can imagine my surprise when I turned on 20/20 the other night and realized that the man who is accused of killing his wife is, in fact, the same man who taught my organic chemistry class 8 years ago.  How he wasn't really a doctor and lied to get into law school and how he had gotten discharged from the army for being mentally ill.  There are a host of other things that went terribly, terribly wrong as well.

Eek.  What a small world.