Three Good Teachers on Teacher Appreciation Day

Today is National Teacher Appreciation Day...I discovered that this morning while watching The Weather Channel...my main source of news this days.  Although I've been critical in general of the educational system I lived through during my childhood and early adult years, there were three teachers who stood out at different stages.  When I first went to school in September, 1962 at Boulevard Heights Elementary School in West Hollywood, Florida, I had skipped the kindergarten year that seems to be such a heavily-stressed requirement for kids nowadays. No problem, for Mrs. Parsons, my first-grade teacher, made sure that we kids covered the basics of reading, writing, counting and elementary arithmetic.  There's no doubt in my mind that I was fortunate to be blessed with this great teacher who got everyone on the right track in their educational "careers".  Years later, in my senior year of high school at Nova in 1973-74, I had what in retrospect was my only truly effective math teacher since the early elementary school years, Mr. Buttles, who introduced us to calculus.  For some reason, schools...at least the ones I went to...had a major problem with teaching mathematics on any level.  In some classes they just sat you down and you went through the textbooks on your own with teachers present only if you needed special help with a problem or concepts while others had the teacher standing up front...not actually teaching anything...letting the students pretty much run the class: these were the so-called "advance level" math classes I regret ever having taken.  But Mr. Buttles stuck to the good old traditional way of teaching, going chapter by chapter and writing on the chalkboard each new concept and patiently explaining them to us...sometimes good teaching is being simple and plain with the presentation.  Finally, in my first year at Broward Community College the very next year, Mr. Hill was the teacher lecturing in general chemistry.  Much of the material we covered there I had already studied in high school, but he presented things in such an organized, deliberate manner that I was able to pick up things that I missed in the previous years.  He was very respectful of the students, pausing several times each lecture to allow for students' questions, which he strongly encouraged.  To this day I hold Mr. Hill as the supreme model of how a teacher should conduct a class and relate to the students...

Parsons, Buttles, and Hill...I appreciate you and remember you for standing out high above the often-mediocre teachers I had to suffer throughout my school years.  I know, that doesn't sound very much like a ringing endorsement of teachers in general, but I do know a good teacher when I see one.  By the way, I never saw any teacher as a replacement for my own parents...even in the first grade...and in turn they never acted like they were personally involved in my welfare (nor did I ever expect them to).  Yet the best of the best conducted themselves in a professional manner and actually taught...