The Four Types of Favorite Teachers

Identifying a plain old good teacher is pretty straightforward: he or she understands things, and teaches you about those things, and then later, you remember them. Favorite teachers are harder to describe, because everyone defines "favorite teacher" differently. Some students like to be challenged, others like to be coddled, and still others like to rack up as many A's as possible while snoring in the back of the room. Here are four types of favorite teachers:

1) The Inspirational Teacher
Sample Quote: "Each of you is the single best person in the world! I know this because of poetry."
Typically an English or art teacher, this person (usually female) introduces you to the greatest book, the awesomest artist, or an activity involving beads that sounds dumb but is actually very cute. Her father was a struggling poet and her mother was a rainbow. While many teachers are so uninvolved that they could be seamlessly replaced with department store mannequins, this teacher treats every day like a heartwarming adventure. When you approach her after class, she greets you in a tone normally reserved for exclaiming that you've just won a lifetime supply of puppies.

2) The Accomplished Supergenius Teacher
Sample Quote: "Special relativity is not difficult to understand. I used to discuss it over waffles with my close personal friend, Albert Einstein."
The Supergenius often works in science or math, but she can be any teacher who clearly knows absolutely everything about absolutely everything. She is not an easy grader. This isn't because she's mean; she just has a brain the size of a continent, and the only thing she can't understand is being unable to understand things. When she says anything brilliant, which is always, she pauses briefly so all of the humans can catch up. She uses these pauses to perform advanced calculus problems in her head.

3.) The Incredibly Easy Teacher
Sample Quote: "I went to the zoo this weekend and a monkey stole my briefcase! All your tests were in there, so everyone gets an A."
If life were a movie, the Easy Teacher would be its comic relief, always getting his tongue stuck to frozen surfaces and forgetting where his classroom is. On the upside, because he's constantly confused about where he is at any given moment, he often gives up and resorts to an "I'll just give all these kids A's" policy. On the downside, any actual learning that happens in his class is purely accidental.

4.) The Incredibly Fun Teacher
Sample Quote: "Instead of taking this test, let's go outside and catch butterflies, then let them go and watch cartoons!"
This teacher doesn't just try to make school fun, because that would be boring. He just tries to make everything fun, all the time, and then, if there are some minutes left over, to work in some school edgewise. He spent his textbook budget on video games and silly hats, but somehow, through an educational mystery, you wind up learning things in his class anyway. If you ever ask him about how this happened, he'll just chuckle and tell you a funny story, and you'll discover that you suddenly know three new things about the American Revolution.

Which type is your favorite teacher? Did we leave any types out?

Related Post: The Four Types of Foreign Language Teachers