Favorite Teachers

[jeffrey_pdx]

I have two:

Mr. Tarasawa: He was the toughest teacher in our school. You couldn't show up late or skip class. He often would challenge the biggest guy in class to arm wrestle. If they won, we could work with a partner for quizzes. He never lost. The best thing about him, he knew what he was teaching. He taught AP Calculus, I went to college knowing and understanding more than most of my college freshmen classmates. On a personal level, he knew I didn't necessarily have to be listening to him if I knew what he was teaching so he left me alone, but he also knew if I didn't understand a concept, I would pay attention. Most of the time, I was working on the homework for the week while he was teaching the rest of the class. He passed away, I would have gone to the funeral if I was in town at the time.

Ms. Peters: She taught English and Literature. I had her for Modern American Literature my junior year of high school... "Catcher in the Rye", etc... What I remember about her was two-fold: "role-call": she'd come up with some random question you had to answer, ie, "what period in time would you most like to live?" (sometimes that was the entire class). I think I wasn't really on her radar until I lost my temper and defended my answer vehemently. Secondly: her taking her attendance sheets and hitting our vice principal in the chest with them in the middle of the hall during my lunch period. "If they're so important to you, then you fill them out." She was great, and the next year I was her classroom assistant/TA. She gave me her Grateful Dead tickets, which she usually had an essay contest for, and that pissed a lot of people off. But Ms. Peters never minded pissing someone off, me included.

[gejohnston]

1. I have two

Mr. Farrelly, high school English and was school newspaper advisor, and Mr. Smith who taught seventh grade math and electronics.

[jeffrey_pdx]

3. Great teachers stay with you forever

[Smarmie Doofus]

2. Both would be rated "ineffective" according to the Danielson teacher observation rubric.

That's the "reform" instrument being pushed on local districts by Obama, Duncan, Gates and assorted numbskulls. Two consecutive years of 'ineffective" ( arm-wrestling in case 1, failure to differentiate for different "learning styles" in case #2) and you are outta there.

Ta-ta, Ms Peters. Sayonara, Mr. Tarasawa.

That's the NYS protocol, anyway. Most other states are installing something similar. Local Ed bureaucrats just can't resist the RTTP $$$$ coming from DC.

Now I wonder who's going to be keeping an eye on how that cash is actually, y'know, spent.

Hmmm.........

[jeffrey_pdx]

4. I don't know what to say

a) I don't what you mean by "ineffective". I saw people who didn't care get all excited going to Ms. Peters' class.

b) NYS?

c) RTTP?

I admit I don't know what current educators face.

[Smarmie Doofus]

6. Sorry. I'm all thumbs when it comes to acronyms.

( I'll give myself an "ineffective" on that one).

I meant "Race to the Top" ( Actually RTTT). That's the Obama-Duncan scheme to use billions of fed. tax-dollars to entice local districts to enact alleged "reforms" such as Danielson-style teacher observation and the resultant micromanaged, stilted , boring, mindlessly conformist pedagogy.

NYS = simply "New York State".

"ineffective" is the lowest of 4 categories that Danielson ( and spinoff methodologies) are employing. It's "ineffective" "developing" "effective" "highly effective". All of the states are adopting this scale more or less verbatim.

[LWolf]

8. This calls for a round of

"Danielson, Oh Danielson."

[Smarmie Doofus]

9. " I became a '1', when I met Danielson."

Whoa... that's pure *gold*. I didn't think I'd ever laugh at this miserable nonsense but I guess I was wrong.

Thanks for posting.

(Aside to OPer: "1" means "ineffective". )

[LWolf]

10. When I first found it

on the BAT group at FB, I couldn't get it out of my head. It was stuck for a few days.

[TlalocW]

5. In high school

It would have to be Mr. Meeker who taught biology. Not my favorite science, but I got an A in it. He had a Colbert-esque sense of humor. He would describe DNA as imagining his taking a large, metal ladder and hitting it against a telephone pole at an angle so it would wrap it in a spiral. And then he would crush the pole in his hands just leaving the ladder. He would be happy to demonstrate, but he forgot to put his ladder in his beloved truck, "Trigger." When I was a freshman in college, I ran into some former classmates still in high school in a mall, and they told me that Trigger had finally given up the ghost. We were right next to a Hallmark store so we went in and bought a Sympathy card and told him how sorry we were for his loss. They later told me he thought it was great.

He would buy a piranha every year and have small goldfish in a smaller tank and every day it was a different class' turn to feed "Dr. Death." When we were working on in-class assignments, he would be working as well, and often, he would rip out a sheet of paper from a notebook, crumple it up, and throw it at the trash can on the other side of the room. Whether he made it or not, he would then start taking bets of Snickers on making the next shot. I was never fast enough to be the kid who bet him, but inevitably he would play on the greed of the kid he was betting on, constantly doing double or nothing until he finally made it, rarely having to pay out. One time I went up to ask him a question, and as a joke, I picked up three very breakable items on his desk - two small glass globes (one with a spider in it, the other with a cobra head in it) and a calculator - and said, "And now for my next juggling trick. He looked at me, smiled, reached into his desk and came out with a package of eight full-sized Snickers bar and said, "Those are yours if you can do it." I left that desk rich in Snickers (juggling was a hobby - could do six in high school). I know he became vice-principal and possibly principal after I had graduated.

He and the principal at the time loved to play practical jokes on each other. One day, Mr. Meeker was talking about going to a sporting store to get a new rifle for hunting so the principal left early and got there before him and just walked around the store browsing. When Mr. Meeker walked in he exclaimed, "Steven Meeker! When did you get out of jail! Great to see you again!" and left the store.

TlalocW

[mbperrin]

7. I actually heard this comment from an administrator the other day:

It is acceptable to document failure to perform a task, but it is unacceptable to perform it without documenting it.

(The task referred to here was following up on the most commonly-missed questions on a district-wide benchmark type exam.)

Made my eyes pop, and that ain't easy after all these years.

[petson]

11. Favorite teacher

Your post has made me reminded my school days I remember my geometry teacher, she was very good with all of them, and I want to tell you that I was not good in geometry she used to teach me in polite manner and somewhere she understands the students personally because she was my class teacher.

[gopiscrap]

12. Welcome to DU

[gopiscrap]

13. Hey I know you've got a 100+ posts already but welcome to DU

also I LOVE!!!! Portland, I have spent over a year there and would love to live there!