teachers

semi-ripping off a topic from lj's question of the day: what teacher(s) did you have that inspired you and why?

i have three.
1) mrs. willing, my 7th grade science / homeroom teacher. she realized early on that i had no business being there, so she let me fuck around for the entire class period, and read / do whatever i wanted so long as i wasn't disrupting the rest of the class. i am sure that the fact that i'd read and learned most of the text by the end of the first week of class had something to do with this. i didn't find out until a couple years later when my mom got drunk and let it slip, but she was also the teacher that told my parents it would be a good idea for me to skip 5th and 6th grade. (small grade school, all teachers knew almost all the students.) she let me read this book instead of doing my math homework for a couple weeks, sleep in class, got me into the nerd science & math olympiads, etc. basically, she let me go at my own pace, and introduced me to a lot of much more interesting stuff when the rest of the class was spending a week learning why whales are mammals.

2) mr. z, highschool english / writing teacher.
z was the opposite of mrs. willing and spent most of the semesters i had with him undoing my incredibly shitty schoolwork habits. z knew how well i could do if i decided to put some effort into it, and didn't let me coast or half-ass my way through anything. if i put in enough effort to get a c, even if that would have been an 'a' paper for anyone else, i got a fucking c. he raked me over the coals in grading, taunted me in class, and made me work harder than any other teacher i'd ever had. when i took my placement tests for college, i tested out of english. spent the next couple years taking 400 and 500 level college language and english courses that looked interesting as filler. thanks z.

3) dr. susan haller. computer science professor in college.
spent 4 years telling me to drop out of the major and basically go fuck myself. was completely correct to do so. turned me into the fucking dr. doom of writing code. laugh at me will they? i will DESTROY THEM ALL.
for what it's worth, i'm still not great as a programmer, but i will be damned if i'm going to stop working on something until i get it right.