xtcian

You guys are WIMPS!

Just got online. :-P

Who was your most memorable teacher? Explain.

Mine: Mr. Roberts, whom I had for both sophomore and senior English in high school. This was the late 60s. He was middle-aged and a dad, but a subversive teacher in the best sense. We lived in a sleepy little town on the Massachusetts shore. Mr. R shook us up! We actually had to THINK about what we read and wrote. One day we took our seats to find Mr. R writing in 3-foot high chalk letters on the blackboard: S E X (What the heck were we reading then? Maybe The Scarlet Letter?) He was rigorous and didn't let anyone get away with sitting inert in class. As a shy but smart kid, I was both fascinated and terrified every single day. He wrote the best recommendation ever for my college applications - not the usual pap, but a paean to my potential with a fervent wish that I'd "find my footing" and open up to share my insights with the world.

Hey, I do that now, online! :-) Anyway, God bless you, and RIP, Mr. Roberts. You truly prepared me for college English courses at an Ivy school where I was pretty much the country mouse among the sophisticates.

If we could avoid attacking the politician or his plan, Anthony Weiner posed an interesting question on MSNBC recently.
http://tinyurl.com/whatdo

If Medicare works O.K., what do HEALTH Insurance companies bring to the table?

My priorities are:
1. Attainable Care = Affordable
2. Quality Care = Well Paid Medical Professionals

Again, I ask, what do HEALTH Insurance companies bring to the table?

Anne- O.K.your question is both fascinating and revealing. I yield the floor. It posted while I was typing.

My most memorable teacher was Mrs. Smith, my high school English teacher. She was memorable for two things she said to me:

1. When I was named valedictorian of my class, she said, "You are not the smartest student I have ever had, but you are the hardest-working student."

2. When I proudly told her that I was attending UNC, she hesitated and said, "That is a party school."

In short, she was most memorable because her two comments cut me to the quick and really hurt my feelings. Then again, I have always been too sensitive.

Since I work for a health insurance company, I would like to answer Salem's question . . . insurers offer a diverse offering of products -- medical, vision, dental -- which allow the policyholders to pick and choose what kind of coverage they want. Do you want a basic plan with low premiums? Or, a more comprehensive plan with higher premiums? Do you prefer indemnity or HMO plans? In short, they offer a choice.

Also, since Medicare does not cover everything, insurers offer Medigap plans to supplement your Medicare coverage.

Most memorable... Crabby Abby ( Mrs. Abernathy) HS Physics teacher. She had little patience for stupid remarks, but if you did your work she was nothing like her nickname.
I am telling my age a bit, but during our senior year we got an electronic calculator to help us do calculations in the class to many decimel points. The calculator was at least as large as a medium size notebook of today. Anyway, she could do division and multiplication out to about 5- decimel points before we could enter the numbers in the machine. She was one of the most delightful teachers i ever had.

I think it's funny that it seems like three out of four people, when asked this question, respond with the name of an English teacher. My mother was a high school English teacher for thirty years and I was always amazed at the number of people that came up to her in random places and told her what a difference she made in their lives. This was in a small farming community in the western part of the state where higher education for many was high school, but here were these people who never left home and moved into the house between their parents' house and their grandparents' house coming up to my mother in WalMart waxing rhapsodic about how she forced them to read and appreciate Love's Labour's Lost in 1979. It makes me really appreciate those who are truly gifted in the process of imparting knowledge to children, including my mother.

And, for the record, my most memorable teacher was Mrs. Rucker, a 4'10" pit bull of a Chemistry teacher, dressed to the nines, who made her classes do more work "while they were resting" than many of the college professors that her students would meet later in their lives. I was in the last class of students she taught before she moved on to become a principal and even though I understand that she was a tremendous principal, I can't help but feel that there is a fairly large subset of people just north of Statesville who missed out when she left the classroom.

The teacher question is hard. There is an obvious answer - Mrs. Simpson, who was the catalyst of my emergence from a cautious, unsure middle schooler to a confident young man that could no longer see limits. There is a less obvious answer - a math teacher whose name I forget who challenged me as I was underperforming in her class to be passionate about something. She later acknowledged that I was passionate about something, but that it just wasn't math. But the commitment to be passionate about something is a recurring theme in my life ever since then. There is my law school professor, who was absolutely insane, but made me think in ways that still affect me (and probably make me a better lawyer).

The longer I ponder the question, the more I realize that the term "teacher" means more to me than merely schoolteachers. I suppose once you are working, those who are deemed teachers are called mentors. If they were called teachers, then I have had two in my professional life that probably exceed in influence any that I had during my formal education.

I guess I have been blessed with many good teachers, but cannot point to one as rising above the others.

Commandant Max DuCharme (Linton Hall Military School, 7-8th grade): He taught us about responsibility by putting us in positions of great responsibility. He taught us about honor and integrity, by trusting us first. He didn’t wait for an arbitrary age or evaluation, he saw us as the young men he inspired us to be.

Sister Gertrude: My 7th grade teacher, who gave me her collection of Edgar Allen Poe stories, when she saw my reaction to “The Tell Tale Heart”. She knew those stories would get me hooked on literature. Also, for doing my First Communion classes after school (everyone else has done it together when they were younger).

Charlie Orr: 11th Grade English at Latin. Mr. Orr made poetry cool. He was available, accessible, dedicated to his students. I would have been sleeping in anyone else’s class whan that Aprill with his shoures soote. He died my senior year. I think he left Latin for Baylor. The year he left, he was hit by a car on his bicycle.

LFMD-
I do feel a little queasy about how many people's careers are being turned upside down already in this economy. As the result of what I see as a humanitarian crisis in health care, and my feeling that it is our moral imperative to fix it, it might be time for the health insurance industry to offer great careers, without being an industry that offers billion dollar bonuses ala UHC. I know of many industries that serve their markets well, without individual financial incentives in the hundreds of millions. Industries that serve their markets well, and are not at the center of a humanitarian crisis.

The idea of the government regulating salaries makes me physically ill. The idea of the government creating competition to resuscitate the free market forces that this industry seems to have paralyzed, seems more reasonable.

Great question. Two of my high school English teachers changed my life, were wonderful people and always concerned about us students despite their own personal problems. I still don't know how anyone gets up and inspires kids to learn all day whether they (the teachers) are in a good mood or bad. I couldn't do it. I am glad I have an office to hide in when I am going through person sh**.

They were so real and human and smart! I've always tried to be as good a person as they were. Plus, of course I am a writer and loved literature, and they made it all real for me. To do them justice would take way too much time now.

LFMD, those two comments that teacher made WERE mean and insensitive.

Have a lovely day everyone!

I cherish my memories memories of Miss Lafave. She would always go out of her way to make new students, like me, feel comfortable as we were going through that "akward stage."

After spending so many years in school, it's hard for me to look back and single out a particular teacher. There have been several that really influenced me in different ways and that I consider special. I can't really point to one that deserves to be labeled "best." But on a slightly different note, I'm sometimes amazed at how many commencements I've sat through - and yet I cannot tell you a single thing that was actually said at any of them. Which seems pretty common - does anyone ever actually remember what someone says during a commencement speech? I can pretty much recall who the speakers were at my various graduations, but their supposed "words of wisdom" were completely forgettable.

The one exception though is JK Rowling. As Harvard Med School faculty, I don't normally get to participate in commencement on the undergrad campus. But I had an undergrad who did an honors thesis with me, and when she graduated I was able to walk with her. I was so excited that it was the year Rowling was invited to give the Class Day Address. It was such a wonderfully smart, funny, moving and at times political speech... I can still quote lines from it. The full address is on youtube in three parts for anyone interested.

2 come to mind immediately. first was Brother Raymond who as our 6th grade math teacher went and hand carved cribbage boards for each of us to teach us about probability in a fun way. he was ultimately run out of the class by parents, probably carrying pitchforks and torches, who got pissed at him trying to teach algebra to the rest of the morons in the class at such a ridiculously *early* age. so i just signed up for advanced tutoring with him after school instead. but instead of working we would actually just play cribbage and have snacks and he would teach me calligraphy. even as an old monk he definitely rocked. and those cribbage boards he made were fresh.

then there was Sr. Anastasia who taught advanced algebra and she liked to use these sylvan mind control techniques which were like combination self hypnosis - self affirmations. "every day and every way i'm getting better, better, and better. negative thoughts and negative ideas have no influence over me at any level of mind. whenever i put my fingers like this...blah blah" but you have to imagine it from a tiny frail nun with a thick filipina accent. she was crazy in a cool way and used to like to test our ability to remember long formulas using this finger memory technique. it was pretty fun.

basically i think i liked teachers who went way outside the box as they taught us stuff. doesn't everybody?

OH, and then there was also the extremely hott Mr. Nathan, another math teacher, i think i crushed so hard on him i could barely speak the first few weeks of class and for me that is highly unusual. he was great also because he was tough and smart and also highly irreverent and had a wicked sense of humor - along with a thick irish accent, and a hella cute kind of latin look. he gave me tons of coaching and some special St. Anthony or whatnot good luck charm from his childhood when i went into this big math competition and then he was totally nice about it when i choked, even though i completely wanted to die of humiliation, bawling and clutching the little St. Anthony totem thing.

Usually when asked about teachers, my initial response is to go on and on about my high school English and Journalism teacher, Mr. Ferrell. And he deserves it - teaching us the difference between lie and lay, giving us in AP English individual novel assignments (since there were just six of us in the class), introducing me to Strunk and White. I could go on and on.

Often left out is my amazing math teacher, Mrs. Hassell. She was my 7th grade pre-alg and 8th grade algebra teacher. In 9th grade, she moved to the high school, so I didn't have her as a teacher that year, but that meant that she was my teacher in 10, 11th and 12th grade also. She made math fun. We had to gobble in 7th grade before she would dismiss the class for Thanksgiving break. In high school, she played "Cheeseburger in Paradise" for us and for extra credit, we had to figure out how many different combinations of hamburgers you could make with the ingredients in "CIP". And then, in 12th grade, the only time Calculus was taught was the same period French 2 was taught. I was on track to take Calculus, but I needed French 2 to graduate. She saw the dilemma and agreed to teach me Calculus during her planning period. She gave up her planning period to teach me Calculus. She could teach "one-on-one" in about half the time it took to teach a roomful of students, so I would help her make copies after we were done and was officially her student aid. At least once a week, we would venture to the local bakery during the "planning period" once we got all our work done. Four years later, I graduated from UNC with a BA in Mathematics. In hindsight, it probably was not the best choice of majors for me, but goes to show you the impact she had on me.

Mr. Glover, my 10th grade biology teacher, planted live worms in my purse. He was a heavy man and he laughed with us when his pants split in front of the class. When I burst into tears over my first boyfriend, he followed me out of the class, abandoning the class, sat in the stairwell with me and comforted me, assuring me that I would have no problem with men when I grew up. He told me royal blue was my color. It still is. He entertained us with stories of a girl in his college cafeteria who could sexually torment boys by eating a banana. He told us how terribly he had failed his first family and how committed he was to the family he started as a mature adult. And none of this felt inappropriate. The only line he seemed to cross was the one so many teachers had established, the one that marked us as children rather than the young adults we’d become.

Wow, Emma. Mrs. Hassell came in second? What does Mr. Ferrell's resume look like?

I sincerely hope that my kids have teachers like the ones that we've described in this thread.