🍎 Back to School | Badge of the Month | September 2022

My favorite teacher is my mother Dr. Swaran Anil - who has taught me all I know from being a good human being, to being a great mentor (she is a teacher who has made thousands of fans through opening young minds using her factual and grounded teaching - to learning and adapting). She is a cancer survivor and is my inspiration (having broken conventional stereotypes by receiving her linguistic research PHD at 50+). She is an avid historian, writer, learning evangelist, passionate teacher, technologist, and world's best mother to me and my brother despite her multitude of challenges dealing with life and its many situations. Her curiosity, grit, determination, and zest for life have continued to inspire me throughout my professional journey and life's ups and downs. Now approaching a new decade (70), she is still ever active with her students through her volunteer work post retirement, and is on cue to release her latest series of books. She still advises me when I hit a difficult stakeholder in business or face a daunting project at work. Her fitting reward is her friendship with that my 13 year old daughter now looks up to her as a role model :)

I've got to mention Alexander Valentinovich Riasanovsky, who taught three of the four members of my family Russian history at Penn. (I knew him at a very different time in Russian-American relations, needless to say.) He was an historian, painter, poet, gourmand, and dog lover who was an institution at the university and is probably the reason why I carry a love for history, culture, and creativity with me to this day. He was a larger-than-life figure who was born in Manchuria, China where his family had fled during the Russian Civil War, and emigrated to the U.S. where he played football in high school and eventually became a Rhodes scholar and got his doctorate, teaching in the history department for more than thirty years. Here is is obituary: Alexander Riasanovsky, History | University of Pennsylvania Almanac (upenn.edu)

My favourite teacher was my Grade 3 teacher in junior school. I had her in Grade 2, but since the class grew with some new students coming in so, they had to divide up the class into two separate classes. I was one of a few unfortunate students who had to move to a new class with mostly new students - it was the most miserable year for me because I don't even remember anything in Grade 2. My parents must have fought, and I was moved back to the other class in Grade 3 (I went to a small province-run school - each class has a maximum of 6 students). At that time, cabbage patch kids were a fad (mid-1980's). A few students in the class were not from well-off families, so she bought all students a cabbage patch doll.
Mrs. Butty had a cottage on an island up north in Ontario, and she would invite the whole class to stay with her for a week in the summer. It was a magical time and we had a lot of fun. Then I moved on and had other teachers. In Grade 8, she decided to take my best friend and me to an outing in a big city for the day. She was such a good teacher, and she had high expectations and would not accept any work that did not show our best effort.
She was invited to my wedding and baby shower 20 years after I left her classroom.

My favourite teacher is a tie between two maths teachers. Mr B took my 6th grade maths class, and structured a lot of our learning around fun real-world projects, like creating our own games and making a website for a retail store.
Ms Chen took maths in 10th grade, and was the first one to really get me to push myself. I remember handing in my work one day, having done the bare minimum - she handed it back and said "I know you can do better". You couldn't argue with Ms Chen. She called a spade a spade and you'd feel pretty stupid to try and challenge that! Without her I probably wouldn't have pushed myself to take specialist maths in my final years or found my way to my current vocation!

MSIE professor teaching a technology class. Most of the class, including myself, pigeonholed technology as something with IT, circuits, and programming which he quickly identified and forced us to do projects using technology but not computer related. It forced us to think outside of our industry and expand our understanding of technology, something I still force myself to do many years later solving daily issues at work.
For those that are curious, I did my final project on the wine industry, specifically the various bottle closure systems and the fail rate of each. Natural cork was far and away the worst and screw top was the best. Gave those results to the marketing MBA group and that was their final project...

Hello Everyone!!
Happy Teacher's month! :)
My mother is a teacher, and she is my favorite. When i was in school, it was always a mixed feeling whenever she came to take the Geography sessions as the whole class's attention used to be dropped on me.
In my college, my Microprocessor professor was my favorite. Because of her, my interest in microprocessors developed and the class was never boring.

I love seeing all of this appreciation for teachers!
Both of my parents were public school teachers growing up and they worked tirelessly on behalf of their students. My dad taught special education and instilled in me that everyone deserves to be seen, respected and heard. My mom went back to complete her education to become a kindergarten teacher when I was in elementary school - instilling the importance of education from both a personal and professional standpoint.

I've had a few teachers, but I don't know if I have a favorite. For high school my Trig teacher embraced my love and knowledge of math and kept it light with his dry humor. I know this is weird, but I miss the problem solving of trig proofs.

Mine is similar to the last poster - a great history teacher. He would often say "Don't tell me what happened, tell my why.".

His way was to not just understand that people did great or terrible things, but to understand how they go there, why they believed what they did was correct and then understand the events and their significance at a personal level.

My favorite teacher, who instilled in me the passion for sociology, social research and survey design is Vasile Dincu. I'm thankful for his teachings.
Here are a few of his mentions:
https://www.instagram.com/vasile.dancu/
https://twitter.com/vasiledancu?lang=en
Vasile Dîncu - Wikipedia

This is such a difficult question because of all the amazing teachers I've had in the past. My high school physics and chemistry teacher is probably at the top of the list. He had a very unique way of teaching that made difficult concepts more fun to learn and easier to understand.

I'm not sure I have just one favorite teacher. The one that comes to mind today is my high school AP Comparative Government teacher Mr. U-F. He made learning about governments fun and explored more than just what was in the books. I use the knowledge learned yet today and have continued to build upon it.

My favorite teacher was my 5th grade teacher, Mrs. Stull. I don't have an awesome story about how she inspired me or turned my education around, however, she was just the perfect mix of high expectations and warm fuzzies. She was kind, warm, supportive, and more. One thing I do remember is her "curing" my hiccups one day by holding my index finger in front of me and telling me to stare at it. Before I knew it, no more hiccups. I have tried it on my kids and it doesn't work, so it must have been her very own magic - ha ha!