Top Five Teachers

I've had many teachers and professors over my 2o-plus-year educational career. While most of them were good and some of them were great, I wanted to highlight five who left lasting impressions I carry with me to this day. Here they are, from most to least recent.

1. David Barron (Property, Harvard Law School)
Every first-year law student needs one of those professors who just challenges you time and again, forcing you to take your mental abilities to a whole new level. For me, David Barron was that professor. While more casual than the traditional buttoned-down crusty old-school law instructor, Professor Barron was just as demanding. He forced you to wrap your mind around an issue and examine it every which way. Where most professors will be satisfied and move on after one answer to a question, Professor Barron won't stop until you give five or six answers. I avoided being grilled for three-quarters of a semester, but when I got it, I got it good -- 15 minutes at the end of one class (I thought I had gotten off easy), then followed by 45 at the start of the next. Our final exam was an eight-hour "take home." The lack of a word limit meant that I wrote feverishly for virtually the full eight hours, churning out 25 type-written pages -- the longest paper I've ever written.

2. Amy Remensnyder (History, Brown University)
Professor Remensnyder had an amazing way of bringing history to life. Her lectures were centered around slideshows which enabled us to see what she was talking about. While many have attempted multimedia presentations, few have mastered it. Furthermore, Professor Remensnyder harped on the need to contextualize your sources. For everything we read, we had to ask who wrote it, why he wrote it, what ulterior motives he may have had, etc. Nothing could be taken at face value. While she was not particularly cynical, everything she dealt with was treated with a healthy dose of skepticism -- an incredibly important life skill.

3. Mary Leonhardt (English, Concord-Carlisle HS)
Mrs. Leonhardt's teaching techniques involved granting students a liberal amount of choice in what they read and wrote about for out-of-class assignments. Her theory was that students would be excited about the material only if they chose to explore it themselves and not if they were told to do so. While I feel such a technique caused me to miss out on many of the so-called classics (because I thought they were lame and boring), it did allow me to experiment and hone my writing ability. In particular, I developed a whole collection of brief op-ed-style pieces. It's A Magical World is a direct result of the passion for expressing my opinion through the written word that I developed under Mrs. Leonhardt.

4. Peter Atlas (Calculus, Concord-Carlisle HS)
Mr. Atlas was an incredibly bright and funny man (not to mention very openly gay). His class, first thing in the morning, was a 52-minute stand-up routine. However, he was also a very demanding teacher, forcing students to come to terms with the difficult-to-grasp subject that was BC Calculus. On the first test I took in his class, I got a 50. A phone call home soon followed, in which Mr. Atlas told my parents about my score but explained that he was willing to do everything he could to help me improve. Failure was not an option. I soon turned the corner and brought my grades up to the A-minus level. Mr. Atlas' goal was to get us so confident with the material that we could go outside and play freeze tag on the morning of the AP exam because we wouldn't feel the need for any last-minute studying. I got the top grade of 5 on the exam and carried my confidence with calculus into college, where I was able to take (and ace) special mathematical-based economics classes.

5. Rina Scharf (Third Grade, Temple Beth El Hebrew School)
Mrs. Scharf was a strict but incredibly kind-hearted disciplinarian who presided over a classroom of a half-dozen students, teaching them how to read and write Hebrew and all about the basics of Jewish ritual. The drills were intensive and relentless. We would also learn how to sing the prayers and holiday songs. At first, I was too shy to sing, at which point she told me, "It's not Hollywood, it's just Hebrew school!" Her lessons on the laws of kashruth and halacha came across as a horrible guilt trip, resulting in her students going home and telling their parents what unsatisfactory Jews they were. We insisted that Passover foods be served to us on special plates, and we refused gifts during Hanukkah, since we were told that Hanukkah gift-giving was only instituted recently, so that Jewish children wouldn't feel marginalized during the Christmas season. To this day, though, I carry a strong knowledge of Jewish ritual (which I may or may not choose to follow, though at least I know the rules) and a great command of prayer melodies, for which I owe Mrs. Scharf a huge debt of gratitude. The songs my brother, my cousins, and I sing together at Passover seders, to this day, 20 years later, were taught to us by Mrs. Scharf.