I sat at my desk at home some time ago and made a careful list of the truly great teachers I’ve had in my life, the teachers I wish I could sit with again right now.

 
Three stand out as having wowed me right from the start, traditional classroom teachers facing me in the fourth grade, in college and in graduate school: Shirley Spielman, Milton Kessler, and Bob Oprandy. Part of their magic is that you’ve probably never heard of them. They were not famous, merely great at what they did.

 
Spielman taught at P.S. 195 in Brooklyn, New York. She was a regal woman in her own way, probably not yet 40 when I was in her fourth-grade class, though she seemed eternally wise and fixed like a monument of steady knowledge. And she liked me. She seemed, in fact, to understand me. Her pace was measured. She’d look at me and think for a moment before continuing on to whatever else might have been on her mind. At the time, I thought she was unaccountably drawn to something going on inside me, but no doubt this was her way with most boys and girls in her class.

 
Milton Kessler was a professor at my college, though I never had him as a classroom teacher. Many of my friends did, including my girlfriend at the time (now my wife), and my two closest buddies. We were all aspiring writers; Kessler taught literature and poetry. He was a big, deep-throated man who had once been an apprentice opera singer. He was unafraid of emotion, smiled often, and seemed bewildered by the competitive intellectual games many of his students and colleagues played.

 
After I’d come back from a summer writing program at a notably indulgent college in Colorado and sought to arrange for academic credit at my home school, the first of two advisors I spoke with about the program grudgingly agreed to accept the credits so long as the other advisor – Milton Kessler – agreed as well. “That program,” advisor number-one had said, “makes me nervous. It’s more summer camp than academia.” With my head down, expecting trouble, I found Kessler and gave him the same pitch for the credits, adding sheepishly that I knew, alas, that the program was pretty summer camp-like. Kessler lit up. “Summer camp!” he said, with real enthusiasm. “I love summer camp!”

 
Bob Oprandy taught a graduate class called TESOL Classroom Practices at Columbia University’s Teachers College. He was a gentle man, a clear speaker, and an active but thoughtful presence in his classroom. I was in a Ph.D. program in literature at the time, and I’d quickly become used to teachers who dazzled – who displayed genius, wit and insight even when teaching very little, even when in fact students walked out of the seminar room feeling unattended, upstaged and (often) proven wrong.

 
Oprandy was the opposite. I found every sentence he spoke full of new information and new ways of understanding how people learn languages. He’d been the head of training for Peace Corps English teachers in West Africa for a time, and more than once mimed paddling a bark canoe around our classroom to help us understand the cadence of songs fishermen there sang to share important news about the river and its fish.

 
He seemed, simply, to have vital and interesting things to say all the time, though he said it all simply and without much fanfare. (He shared with the class once that he’d been asked by a student how much time he spend preparing for his classes. He said he counted for the first time after being asked – about eight hours, per class session. It was his first year teaching that course, just as he was finishing his own doctoral studies. We’ve kept in touch, and he puts a lot less time in prep these days, though I suspect he’s just as captivating in class).

 
Others teachers – teachers less likely to be found in classrooms – wound up on my list of great teachers too. Tom Wessels, a colleague at Antioch University who prefers to teach by walking through the woods with his students; a young woman named Anja, my student at Emerson College many years ago, who unfailingly added a joyous spirit to every lesson and every text we encountered; my father, who would answer my questions as he drove up and down the highways near New York City with the detailed precision of the engineer, the patience of a classroom veteran, and the casual intensity that a father brings to serious talks with his teenage son. All revealed ways of teaching beyond the classroom and beyond the school, and all inspired me to try to fit the magic of those paths, somehow, into my own work as a teacher.

 
I added more names to the list: colleagues whom I’ve admired. Todd Palmer; my wife Judy Temes; Denise Ahlquist; Bill Siegel; Jeff Guzman; many others.

 
After awhile I looked the list over and found a big surprise. The people on it had almost nothing in common. Some were highly structured and highly-prepared, using notes and diagrams to guide their classes. These were the teachers on my list who were not rebels by nature. They appreciate the benefit of other people’s experience and look for the good to be found in the received wisdom of veterans. Others on the list were happier making it up as they went, using finely-honed instinct, zigging and zagging as they followed the scent of real learning and the chance to make their students feel the big aha! moment. These were the skeptics and the trail-blazers, the teachers who want to make new things happen in their classrooms, who assume that the usual ways of doing things are, if not a trap, then perhaps a set of boundaries crying out to be crossed.

 
Some of the great teachers on my list you watched and right away you saw greatness. Others, not so much – though their students might one day tell you how these teachers had quietly changed their lives.

 
Some would end a class with students walking away glowing with new knowledge and purpose. Other would get notes from former students ten or twenty years later, describing how suddenly, all that time having passed, they’d come to realize how deeply they’d been affected by a question their teacher had asked them, a book she’d assigned, or just the sense of working with someone who cared so much – about the student and about the work.