The Best Teachers I Ever Had

By the time your formal education is over you, like me, will have had dozens and dozens of teachers.  Some of them will be funny, others will be boring or seem bored themselves, and some will seem like they're trying too hard to be liked.  The best of them will keep your attention, fascinate you and inspire you.  On this Day of the Teacher, I got to reminiscing about some of the teachers I had.

Among the teachers I had was a creepy middle school English teacher who used to flick his tongue, like a snake, whenever he was asked a difficult question. 

Then there was the high school Chemistry teacher who used the analogy of boys asking girls to a dance as a way of explaining chemical reactions.  It didn't always work.  Whenever a student asked for further explanation, this teacher would simply repeat the same analogy again.

In college, I had an Economics teachers who use to come to class in costumes in an effort to make a very dry subject interesting.  It didn't work.

I remember those teachers for their idiosyncrasies, but don't remember much about what they taught.  Memorable personalities perhaps, but not particularly good teachers.

The best teachers I had all shared a common trait; passion.  Passion not only for the subject they taught, but for teaching itself.  Their passion was contagious and inspired me to change the way I looked at the world and the way I thought.  I feel their influence to this day.

In high school I had Physiology teacher named Mr. Hawks.  He wore his hair in a crew cut and drove a Jeep.  He had obviously once been in the military. 

His classroom consisted of rows of lab tables.  On the first day of class, I sat in the back row.  The first thing Mr. Hawks said to us, as he pointed successively to each row of tables, was:

"In my experience, this is where the A students sit (pointing to the front row), the B students (the second row), the C students (the third row), and everybody else (gesturing to the rest of the room)."

"If you want to change your seat," he concluded, "now would be the time to do so."

I didn't move, but thought, "Whoa, this guy is going to be tough"

And he was.  He was very demanding and very particular about the quality of our work.  He allowed no talking in class and his demeanor was such that he only had to tell us once.  But, he was also a fascinating lecturer and a great story teller who always managed to keep our interest.  It turned out that talking in class wasn't a problem, because none of us wanted to miss what he had to say.

As the semester went on, Mr Hawks began to loosen up.  When we did experiments, we got to see a different side of him, because he went from table to table, patiently answering questions and even making jokes when somebody got an unexpected result.

During winter break, Mr. Hawks took a trip to the Amazon.  He returned with several native artifacts, including a blow gun, a bow and a mortar and pestle.  He put them on display for the class.  We students excitedly approached the display.

One of my classmates picked up the bow and pulled back on its string.  The bow snapped.  The class went dead silent.

Mr. Hawks gave a death stare to the student and took the bow from his hand.

"No wonder I got it so cheap," he said.

I took Mr. Hawk's class when I was a junior.  His inspiration was such that I chose to go to college at U.C Davis as a Biology major and created in me a lifelong interest in the natural world around us.

As a graduate student in college, I signed up for a class called "Theories of Criticism".  I like to write and thought that this class was going to be about how to write movie and book reviews.  It was about anything but that.

The teacher for this class was a Mr. Jenkins.  The class was small, with only about 15 students.   We all sat around in a circle.  On the first day of class, Mr. Jenkins sat down, look each of us in the eye in turn and declared:  "in order to be an effective critic, the first thing you need to do is kill your ego."

This was my introduction to the single most interesting and thought provoking class I ever took.  It was way too complicated to explain here, but it turned out to have nothing to do with writing criticism at all.  Instead, this class made me take a look at our society as a whole and the hidden forces that encourage us to make the choices we do.  This was a 90 minute class in which Mr Jenkins did almost all of the talking and it was never, never boring.   If there was a theme to this class it was Socrates' writing that "the unexamined life is not worth living".  Mr. Jenkins had a profound influence on how I see the world and the people in it.  Just as Mr. Jenkins intended.

Mr. Hawks and Mr. Jenkins couldn't have been more different.  Hawks was very fit with an upright, military bearing and liked complete order in class.  Jenkins was overweight with long hair and liked to sit, informally, in a circle with us students.  Both, however, shared two great loves:  love for the subjects they taught and the love of teaching that subject to their students.  This is what made them the two best teachers I ever had.

 

Another Oceanic Garbage Patch

A gyre is a place where oceanic currents meet and combine to rotate in a circular motion, like an enormous whirlpool.  It is in one such gyre that the great Pacific Garbage Patch can be found.

There are 5 gyres in the world's oceans.  Researchers suspect that all of these gyres may serve as collection points for oceanic garbage.  Last month, they were able to confirm that there is, in fact, a huge garbage patch in the Atlantic gyre.

Both the Pacific and Atlantic garbage patches are composed primarily of plastic.  That's because, as you may know, plastic is not biodegradable - it doesn't rot.  That means that, as long as people continue to use plastic without recycling it or disposing of it properly, the garbage patches will get bigger and bigger.

While plastic isn't biodegradable is it, photodegradable.  This means that ultraviolet rays from the sun makes the plastic brittle, causing it to break into small pieces, yet doesn't make it go away.  Just makes it harder to see and easier to eat.  The garbage patches look like "synthetic soup".

The result is that while these garbage patches are immense (the Pacific garbage patch is said to be the size of Texas), they are hard to see.   Add that to the fact that they are out in the middle of the ocean and it is easy to understand why most people aren't concerned about, or even aware of, the garbage patches.

Should we be concerned?  How much impact does plastic pollution have on the environment?

Right now, we know that marine animals frequently mistake plastic for food and that some of the chemicals in plastic cause cancer in humans, but nobody really knows what the long term consequences of plastic pollution are because there are so many variables to consider.   Scientists suspect that plastic pollution will cause long lasting and far reaching difficulties.  Most will agree that plastic pollution is a problem that needs to be addressed as quickly as possible.

A plastic bottle showing bite marks

For more information on the garbage patches and their impact, click on the 5 Gyres link to the right.

For photos of the consequences of birds mistaking plastic for food, click on the Chris Jordan link, then on "Midway, Message from the Gyre".  Be sure to read the introduction (warning:  the photos are graphic and are not for the squeamish).  Some examples of his work are below:

Made from 2.4 million pieces of plastic, equal to the estimated number of pounds of plastic pollution that enter the world's oceans every hour. All of the plastic in this image was collected from the Pacific Ocean.

Closeups of the above image: