My favorite teacher

Dr. Mullins asked us to write something about our favorite teacher. I don't even know where to start. With Mrs. McBride, who let a group of us write books in a group in the corner during seconds grade? With Mrs. Bernard, who guided us through our biography projects in fifth grade? Or with Mr. Vadnais, history teacher and soccer coach, who's skills were in his ability to relate to middle school students and make them feel like human, and who helped us reenact Gettysburg, with snowballs on the hill behind the school. Mme. Kahus, who in grades 7-9 taught me all the french I ever learned, enough so that even after two years of horrendous high school french I could still get by and so that now, nine years later, I still can conjugate verbs in the passe compose, imparfait, future, and conditional. Probably not a lot of verbs, but hey. More importantly, she instilled in me a love for and fascination with languages that has never left me. She offered Russian for two years, and I took it, and loved it - I credit her with my majoring in Russian in college. Cramer, my only high school math teacher, taught a mean calculus class, interspersed with strange stories about some hippy named Wavy Gravy, who may or may not have contributed to the campaign to get a pigasaurus elected president. And of course SB, who genuinely loved spending time with us, interacting with her students and engaging with their writing. I can't think of another class that is as conducive to forming a strong bond with a teacher as a creative writing class, and she handled it all so well, with gentle criticism and genuine praise for our attempts at literary art.

And then there was Mahar. Mahar may be my favorite teacher, in a way that I did not expect when I began contemplating this question. Mahar, with his fieldwork on coyotes, his real love for his subject, was not even a great teacher, in some ways. He bungled some questions about cellular biology and his explanations were sometimes indicative of the fact that he himself was not entirely comfortable with everything that was going on in the glycolysis reaction. Yet in others, he was superb. He was weak on cellular and molecular bio, but he knew it, and knew enough to get by. But he found a way to let the things he was really passionate about become the important things in his class. I still remember the Lincoln-Peterson labs, daubing mice with whiteout on the backs of their necks, and going back out to catch them again. The riparian ecosystem lab, measuring trees along the stream, and the statistical analysis that went with it. Mahar asked for t-tests and p-values in high school, and that was huge. Not only that, but we read Song of the Dodo. Mahar did a really solid job of picking books for that class. I was about to bash the one we read about Watson and Crick and Rosalind Franklin, but now that I think about it, that was a great book to read too. Understanding where the biological world was at before the modern synthesis made me finally understand, for the first time, the full importance of genes, DNA, and the forces that modify them over time. The Song of the Dodo, by looking a the stripped down system of island biogeography, really brought to light enormous amounts of evolutionary theory and made it accessible on a wonderful scale. As much as Mme Kahus led me to major in Russian, Mahar was instrumental in my majoring in biology. My greatest, most enduring academic interst, the only thing that I have ever considered going back to grad school for, is evolutionary biology, and a good chunk of credit for that interest has to go to Mahar. As goofy as he sometimes was, and as much as he disliked teaching cellular biology, his passion for ecology and evolution and his ability to share that passion made him a great teacher for me.