Today is World Teachers' Day, 2011. Anybody got a teacher story they want to tell?

Just would like to say:

“Thanks Mrs. Anderson, wherever you are…”

Mr. Zabo… 7th grade history teacher. It would take me all day to describe him and tell stories about him and his life (he was a Nam vet, former principle, and just one of the best overall communicators/educators I ever had)...

Died my Freshmen year in high school, sudden onset alzheimers and some kind of seizure. He won teacher of the year award from my class when we graduated high school, 3 years after his death.

In the interest of “balance” I would also like to say:

Mr. Niera, I hope you returned to your home country, were conscripted by Ecuadorian rebels, and died a slow and painful death in the jungle.

Mr. Jeff Torbush: former Biology teacher at Forest Hills School District and self-proclaimed badass. He liked to play around with the physics lab equipment. One of his favorites (and ours) was this large, metal ball that conducted electricity.

Well, during a pretty unproductive Friday afternoon a bunch of us Biology kids got together and decided to see how many of us the electric current would pass through. We gathered in a circle, holding hands and Mr Torbush put his palm on the electric ball sending volts of electricity through all 26 of his students. We all thought that since people conduct electricity that we’d get a little shock out of it, but we felt nothing! The only way to make a spark was to hold hands in a line and have the last person, at the end of the line, touch something. Or someone.

So Torbush has us make a human chain into the hallway after the bell rings. Seizing the opportunity to mess with people and have a little fun, we waited until the hallway got crowded and started shocking random passerby’s lol.

During exam week, we spent class time just playing Guitar Hero.

And yet I still learned more in his class then any other (including University classes). He always saw potential in his students, even when they didn’t.

To a Mrs. Lomheim (though I know you married recently, I do not know whether you changed your last name): Though I was never a student in your literature courses in high school, our conversations have had a profound impact on me. I interviewed you once about becoming a teacher—the process, the joys of it, your reasons for pursuing such a career, etc. In turn, you asked why I was interested in becoming a teacher and I replied, vaguely, “Well, I didn’t used to want to teach… I’ve always wanted to write, but…” And you replied with one question that still dances on my brain: “So why don’t you?”

I promise I will.

Mr. Tripp – grade 5 teacher. Tall, looked like Andre the Giant. Used to walk around with a metre stick and would thack it down on your desk, if you weren’t behaving. Interesting, and he cared about his students (even though the metre stick). My favorite teacher.

My Psych teacher in High School.

He was a very kind man who with an over the top sense of humor. He actually played a character all day long as an obnoxious teacher, it was just his sense of humor.

On a day when a mild hurricane was due to arrive at the school, he requested that none of us go out to the smoking section, because “The wind whipping through any one of your ears and out the other will sound like an air raid siren going off and I don’t want to hear any damn complaints about scared children”.

I was blessed with a bunch of great teachers. And they let me get away with a lot as well. Sorry about the water balloon Phil, the fake wound in shop Al (it was Tom’s fault. He gave us the kit), and the brandy substitute guy. Thanks for the great education.

@Imadethisupwithnoforethought Wow, just as I was going to talk about my Psych teacher.

My favorite teacher of all time was Mrs. Weissman, my High School Psychology teacher. She was a fellow chocolate lover, with a great sense of humor. And everyday, I would bring her a milk chocolate Hershey bar. I would always go to school early, just to hang out in her class room during the extra help no one went to every morning. We would talk about this and that, and while she didn’t support my views when the topics of religion came up, she respected my choice as an athiest, and that was pretty cool.
At the end of the school year, she called me up to the front at the beginning of class, and handed me a box from within the recesses of her locked cabinet. I then saw it was a large case, of 36 Hersey bars. She whispered, “These are for you to eat, so don’t go giving them to me.” I then walked back to my seat, and sat down with this big brick of tastiness on my desk. They all stared. Then, someone asked, “Why does he get chocolate?”

She just shrugged.

(Also, she’s the only teacher I’ve known to make the class eat gummy worms, while one female student at the front of the class was wearing a contractor bag and spinning around, while Weissman shot her with a water gun.)

Not inspired by him, in fact he was a bit of a tw@, but I always remember one of my English teachers. Why? Oh i’m so glad you asked. Only because his name was William Shakespeare, that’s all.

I had a cool teacher in grade four. He had a bad back, was always walking around like a hunchback, and he had this cane with him at all times to help him get around. He made stuff fun, and always thought up cool art related activities. He liked drawing, and I remember being awed when he showed me his drawings.
Of course, being a teacher, he had to teach us the usual boring stuff, but he just knew how to put a twist to things. He was strict sometimes, but always fair. He also had this mad stamp collection with an actual Bluenose stamp lol. He was also pretty old, I’m wondering if he’s even still alive by now…:/ But I’ll always remember that guy, he fuckin rocked.

Mr. Z, our junior high school science teacher.

He was showing us some chemical reactions one day, including baking soda and vinegar and other high-visibility, low danger reactions. Then he set up some beakers with a couple of solutions, a flask that he heated over a Bunsen burner, and some coiled tubing. Essentially it looked like a still.

He had us all put on safety glasses (which wasn’t at all common in the late 1960s – it just wasn’t part of our reality then) and stand at the very back of the room with our hands in front of our faces. He warned us that “this apparatus could explode”. Then he lit the burner under one of the flasks and started pouring very slowly from the beaker into the flask as it heated. As I recall, he had a limp balloon attached to the top of one of the flasks in the apparatus. The intent was that the balloon would fill from the gas created by the reaction. He himself ducked down behind the solid pedestal table as he poured from the beaker into the flask. He looked very nervous as he did it, and he was very careful as he made the pour.

All of a sudden, and with no warning at all, the flask with the balloon on it actually did “explode”, throwing glass halfway across the room. We, who had been prepped and warned to expect this possibility, were nonplussed, waiting for “what’s next”. Mr. Z emerged from behind his table white as a sheet. He was terribly concerned that the explosion had occurred and afraid that one of us might have been hurt. He was also very shaken by the fact of the explosion because… it should never have happened.

He admitted to us later in the class that all of the dramatics, the warnings, the safety glasses, the “stand at the back of the room and shield yourselves” was all just a buildup to… “the balloon was supposed to inflate, and then I was going to pop it and ‘scare’ everyone”. We saw something that wasn’t supposed to happen, and we weren’t surprised by it because we expected it. He saw something that also wasn’t suppose to happen, but did because of an accident in his own preparation, and scared the piss out of him.

I learned to expect the unexpected, and not to be too comfortable with predictions.