My favorite teacher, or I should say the one that had the most positive effect on me was my high school French, Mrs. Martin. It's sort of hard to say exactly what made her such a good teacher, but I think it was her ability to relate to the students. She was pretty young, I'd say late twenties, so she was a lot closer to a peer than she was to what we considered a stereotypical teacher. She liked a lot of the same music, movies, and televison we did so it was really easy to talk to her about things. She was also really nice and made French fun. Even in high school, playing a game in french was a lot better than having someone sit in front of the room and dictate vocabulary to you. I wasn't really into the language but I took the class until my senior year, just because she made learning fun. The homework was really to help comprehension and the tests were really to see what was learned. She never gave us any busy work or tried to trick us on any exam. After I finished having her as a teacher, she was always there to give me advice about college or just to chat. She was a wonderful teacher when it seemed like a lot of my other teachers were just going through the motions.
-- Matt Merry, American University