Doomeye\'s life stories : Teachers

Due to the nature of my environment, I've had many good teachers throughout my life. However, I feel that only two of them truly stand out as an influence on my life. Not a personal influence, as I didn't really have any significant personal interactions with them, but they were the only two teachers who I felt that "this is what a teacher should be".

The first of these teachers is my first high school literature teacher. She was the first to impress upon us the importance of critical thought both in and outside of academia. She was very passionate and professional when teaching the subject, and regardless of my lack of interest in many aspects of the subject, I was quite inspired by her strength of personality and motivated by her treatment of students as adults rather than "kids". Many other teachers in high school were passionate about their subject and good at retaining student attention, but I always remember feeling miffed at not being taken seriously. I particularly remember when I read my Pysch teacher's graduation thesis and was attempting to start a conversation about it during lunch (people hung out in her class at lunch and sometimes we talk to her as well), I was pretty much brushed aside with that ever so slight parental condescension. It's understandable because I was even younger than her son (he was in the same school), but it's still frustratingly stifling to be treated like that. In contrast, my first lit teacher always at the very least tried to give a basic amount of respect to us students as people by calling us Mr/Ms. [last name] and never dismissed our questions out of hand. This always made me feel like wanting to live up to her expectations of us as mature adults who can think for ourselves.

The second teacher was my college philosophy 101 teacher. Despite him literally being a card carrying American Communist Party member, he successfully prevented his personal views from affecting the class and he did an amazing job stimulating thought with his Socratic lectures. He always played the devil's advocate after instigating a discussion on the topics by creating a discussion where the students recreate philosophies from the ground up. He also encouraged participation by never denigrating a student no matter how silly their train of thought was and through the promise of grade buffering dependent on the level of participation. I was quite star-struck by his ability to prevent his biases from influencing the class as I had previously had a teacher who wasn't even aware how much he was pushing his views onto his class(he also played teacher's pet and was in general not a great teacher). I was inspired by my philo101 teacher's ability to put aside his personal views for the sake of giving students the tools to properly develop their own opinions, as that itself was more important than spreading his own ideals.

Anyways, I made this blog because of an animation I watched recently :

I didn't really have a teacher who affected me personally in the same way as the video, but that made me think about which teachers, looking back, do I admire the most.