My most memorable teacher is our grade 3 teacher named Miss Canlas. She is a small woman with fair skin and a smiling face. What we loved in her was her treatment of her pupils as if we were her friends. We could feel her genuine concern when someone is absent. But the best quality of Miss Canlas is her knack for telling stories. In the afternoon, one hour before dismissal, she would be engaging us in a story hour where some of my classmates would tell theirs, of course some short anecdotes only. But when it is time for Miss Canlas to tell her story, we were all ears. Sometimes her stories are her anecdotes but most of the times she tells of fiction like the local werewolf and other folklore. I remember one story about her relative who had a meat shop, she dreamed she was chopping meat and woke up with blood all over because she was chopping her legs already. So whenever I would read a good fiction story, I would always remember Miss Canlas.
I can't, in all; honesty, have any great fondness for my teachers at school. I did, though, have an excellent lecturer at university. I was studying 19th-century literature and our tutor was a middle-aged American woman who was hugely enthusiastic about her subject. She was a huge fan of the Gothic novel and her zeal undoubtedly transmitted itself to her students. She used to do mad things like going to Dracula conventions and I got into her good books after I had a visit to Romania. We had a long discussion about that and I could do no wrong after I brought her back some stuff from a Charles Dickens museum in London. One of the biggest lessons I learned from that - apart from being a good crawler - was when I spent time training people. If you are enthusiastic about your subject, you might just get a decent response from your students.
I've been trying to think of a teacher who didn't slap or throw something at me since this thread was started. I still ain't got nothin.
@Tom Locke and @Ike Willis it seems that you didn't have a good time in grade school. But anyway, I also have a share of what we call terror teachers. There was this Miss Ambrosio, our high school English teacher who is not good looking, I mean, she is quite ugly, hahahaaaa. But to hide her deficiency in beauty, she dresses so well with matching makeup (but no lipstick because that is forbidden in our school). And when someone would make a mistake, Miss Ambrosio would shout as if to scare all of us. After her classes, we would all be talking about her and use Ambo for her moniker. One time it was raining hard and the school grounds was slightly flooded with 2 inches of water. There came our terror teacher in her usual high heels, running from the gate to the building to avoid the rain. She was quite late for her class so you can imagine that we in her class were waiting for her, monitoring her arrival. Miss Ambrosio faltered a bit then continued with a brisk walk until she reached the shade of our building. One of her shoe's heels gave way. We had a good time with a big laugh all throughout the week.
It's not that there was anything terribly bad about any of my teachers at school, it's just that they were rather uninspiring. Learning became something of a mechanical process and it strikes me now that everything seemed something of a chore for both pupils and teachers.
I don't really remember any of my teachers either. It has been some time now. I do remember my two french teachers, they were very good and inspired me to continue my education in french. I wish I had followed thru.
Let me share the experience of my husband during his college studies. One of their professor would be reading the book to the class as if he was reading a fairy tale. No recitation whatsoever. The subject is Finance. And when the exams come, the type of test is true or false, only 10 numbers. But no one could get a perfect score. In one of their exams, a classmate smuggled a test paper and consulted another professor in the same subject. What do you know? That answers of that other professor got a failing mark, huh. In another subject, the professor would arrive and immediately would light a cigarette. In his 40 minutes in the classroom, that smoking professor could finish 3 sticks of cigarette. But my husband and his male classmates enjoyed that subject because the students were also allowed to smoke. What a smoking classroom they had.
Good morning everyone, I have one teacher who come to mind. He was my 6th grade teacher, Mr. Fox, what I liked about him was that he actually helped me when I didn't understand. I've always being horrible in math and we were learning hot to round off to the near 100th, I didn't understand how it was done, so I asked him if he could explain it to me, so we both stayed after class and he explained step by step until I understood it. He would test me on it and I would get the answer was right. I thought I was slick, we had an assignment due, and we had to write a report on anything we wanted. Me being the slick person, copied everything from a book, there were words that I couldn't pronounce, so what Mr. Fox did, was to ask me to ready my report, as I try to read it I came across one of the words that I couldn't pronounce, as I try to say it, he said it for me. He didn't embarrass me in front of the class, he just said thank you Rachel. I knew then that my paper was not so good. How can you fool a teacher like him. Now that I think about, wow, how dumb can I be, trying to get away with coping everything. . We had an hour where we would sing, he always made everyone participate with the instruments, everyone would take a turn. Anyway, he will always be my favorite teacher.
My father didn't believe girls should be educated, and so I only went to school two & 1/2 years in a classroom. I left school at the age of ten, with a fifth grade education. Learning about free libraries was how I was able to continue my education, although it was a very jumbled mess. When I turned 35, I got the chance to return to school. I took the local junior college's entrance exams, and I passed with ease, to my great surprise. I took two academics and my first Horticulture class in my first semester. By mid-term exams I was only pulling a C average. I went to one of my teachers and asked what I needed to do to earn better grades. That teacher asked me why I was there. Did I need a few courses for a job? Did I want a degree in any particular field? What kind of education did I want, and most of all, why did I want it. All good questions, so I explained my educational background. My teacher's advice was that I drop all classes while I still could without penalty, and to go back to the basic academic courses I had never recieved. I listened to this advice, and I studied all the basics I could find. So I worked fulltime, and took at least three courses each semester, including summer semesters. I ended up going to college for 19 years. I have studied Horticulture, Business, Accounting, Pottery, Psychology, Portrait Art, and honors Mathmatics, and English. But I never took a degree, as it turned out, I just wanted to learn for myself. In my fourth year I became part of the Phi Theta Kappa Sorority. So that is the teacher I remember, the one that taught me to see just what I wanted out of an education.
When I was in grade school we lived out in the country for a time and I attended a two room school. I was in the 2nd or 3rd grade and we had a teacher named Mrs. Anderson who taught 1st through 3rd grade. She was a large woman with the sweetest voice. I was really sad when we moved into a little town named Boerne where I attended a large grade school. When we moved into San Antonio, I attended John Marshal High School and surprise!! There was Mrs. Anderson teaching art!! I was so surprised that she remembered me after all those years. She must have had hundreds of students over the years, but for some reason, she remembered me.
First, where have all these people gone, these folks who responded long ago to this thread? Second, smallish world -- I had a Mr Ambrosius for 6th grade. We called him Mr Am. Tall, thin, balding, glasses, rumored to be having a fling with the other 6th grade teacher, Mrs Neece, whose most outstanding feature was that her bra straps could never stay on her shoulders, and that she lived in a big two story house in my subdivision. Mr Am was a strict teacher, not at all an empathetic one. The one thing I remember learning from him was a love of a dictionary. He ran a word of the week contest in which his students had to find a new and interesting word, learn to spell and pronounce it correctly and use it in a sentence. He made us write that on a 3x5 card, then made us stand and read the card. Then he decided which word was the best contribution to our 6th grade vocabulary each week and the card got posted on the wall for the week. One of my winner words was verdant. I chose it because part of its meaning was of the countryside, and my address at the time was on Countryside Lane.
Thank you for bringing up an excellent old thread, @D'Ellyn Dottir. Although it may not have gone far, it has possibilities. When this thread was started, this forum was only a few months old and there weren't very many of us here. Although there were others in college, two memorable teachers come to mind from high school. Ron Nordin taught all of the English and literature courses in Stephenson High School, as well as speech, drama, and related classes. He was one of only a few teachers I had in high school who seemed to really have an interest in what he was teaching, and that carried over to his students. I still have a couple of books that he bought me while I was in high school, and I know that I wasn't the only student he was buying books for. By the time I finished eleventh grade, I had all of the credits that I needed to graduate, except for Government, which they wouldn't allow me to take before my senior year, which was seemingly their way of keeping people from graduating early. Because the only class that I needed in my senior year was Government, I signed up to retake a couple of Ron Nordin's classes that I had already passed with A's. A couple of friends of mine from Menominee High School, south of Stephenson, would skip school in the afternoons and sit in on Nordin's classes in Stephenson. He was a good teacher, but he wasn't one who dragged everyone along. When he had a student who clearly wasn't interested in the class, and was taking it only because it was required, he would tell them to sit in the back of the room and be quiet, and they'd pass with a C. The other was Mr. Voelker. While students addressed Ron Nordin by his first name, I don't know that I ever knew Mr. Voelker's first name, and wouldn't have used it if I had. He was Mr. Voelker, and he taught all of the history and government courses at Stephenson High School. It seemed not to matter what subject he was teaching at the time, he knew everything about it and if it was a country or a city, he would have artifacts to prove it. He spent every summer traveling, and his house must have looked like a museum. Mr. Voelker had a way of teaching without anyone catching on that this is what he was doing. Over and over, someone would ask him a question that would prompt him to digress into a story that seemed like he had been taken off track, only to realize later that he had used that story to teach the very thing that was on his schedule to teach that day. He taught through stories and was very good at letting others believe that they controlled the direction. One day, some kids in the class were acting up. I'm not sure what it was all about but Mr. Voelker suddenly went off, opened the window, and threw his books out into the snow, saying he wasn't coming back until he had a class of people who wanted to learn. He didn't come back the rest of the day. Later, I learned that he did that once a year.
I loved and learned so much from my 3rd and 1st grade teachers, Mrs. Packer and Mrs. Ronald they had different personalities one was sweet and one was strict but both had the true teaching vocation. I’ll always be thankful to both of them.