I am grateful for Ronald Webb, my English teacher at Dearborn High School.
He taught me to write.
I didn’t really have anything to say yet. But I learned grammar, structure, passion, and the value of just getting words on the page from Mr. Webb.
I draw on those skills in everything I do professionally; whether it is curriculum writing, blogging or conversing.
My words flow more easily. My ideas are more clear. My thinking is better. I owe these things to him.
Thank you for that, Mr. Webb.
Overthinking my teaching 
Your post has encouraged me to thank a teacher from long ago. I would like to thank Mrs. Bailey, who taught me 8th Grade English in 1967. I’m sure she’s long gone to the big classroom in the sky and no doubt is helping the angels (or the opposite) to conjugate verbs. I can’t say that I liked her when she was my teacher. She resembled the Wicked Witch of the West and we dubbed her Battle-axe Bailey. At the time, I didn’t know that the foundation that she instilled in me about sentence structure would last me a lifetime. We diagrammed the hell out of sentence after sentence. I never met a sentence I couldn’t untangle.
I can’t name one math teacher or math course that I liked. In fact, I never wanted to take any math beyond the required 11th grade. By a fluke of twists and turns I ended up majoring in math in college. I also accidentally became a math teacher and slowly grew passionate about the subject. I now work as an independent consultant to math educators and never tire of learning more. I think that my love of math is based on the love of the STRUCTURE of math. (This could be why my favorite CCSSM Practice Standard is # 7: Look for and make sense of structure.) Learning the structure of English grammar from Mrs. Bailey gave me a firm foundation for finding the structure in other abstractions.
My hat goes off to Battle-axe Bailey, the best math teacher I ever had…even though she taught 8th grade English!
Thanks for reminding me how important it is to acknowledge those teachers who have made a difference in our lives. I’ve followed your lead over at my blog:
exit10a.blogspot.com
Good to appreciate your teachers dear.learning is the best experience ever.
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Thanks, Christopher. You’ve reminded me to thank Dr. Michael Shaughnessy who showed me the superiority of rectangles over all 3-sided polygons.
it,s good