The Rarest Breed

Years ago, my father told me that if one is lucky, they wind up having had just a couple really good teachers during their life. "Really good" should be understood to mean that they teach you about far more than the subject they're employed to teach, and are good enough to make a whole lot more money in other endeavors. Perhaps two or three are not unreasonable to hope for, and one might get lucky with even one or two more among the dozens of teachers each person has. Reader, I think that you will be inclined to agree with that based on your own personal experiences. Isn't it interesting how at odds that is economically with the value of a teacher's services as established by tangible financial compensation? It's well known that the good ones don't do it for the money.

I'd say that I had something like three or four really special teachers. In grade school, the administrators set up a kind of shadow school for the best students. It was what would just be called a gifted program. For part of the day, the rest of the kids would be doing regular things, and we would be singing in circles, learning metric and making hot air balloons the size of moving vans out of tissue paper and glue. Those teachers we had in that program were very much of an elite caliber. They fostered in me- and I presume in us- a feeling of actually being special, and not the mediocre kind of special that gets doled out like tic tacs.