A favourite math teacher of mine was the teaching assistant for an advanced calculus course I took as an undergraduate. The class was challenging, made even more so because I had recently decided to try to understand subjects, especially math, more deeply than I had previously. This teacher was supportive of me in this, and I remember spending many hours working with him between classes, asking him deeper questions than he would generally receive during class. Probably the best part of working with this teacher is that he knew exactly when to intervene to provide help and when to allow me to struggle to find the solution myself (something I have trouble with a lot as an educator). I think by the end of that course, I really started making the connections needed for fluency in calculus.
I don’t think I had a bad teacher in high school, but I wasn’t paying a lot of attention to their quality. I only remember one name among them, and don’t have strong memories associated with it, which is likely a sign that these teachers didn’t leave impressions, either good or bad. I don’t recall a specific lesson or moment from the entire four years. Much of this is my fault as a student: math was not a passion for me at the time, and I was only interested in receiving good grades. Contrasting my experience in high school and college makes me wonder how much of finding a “good” or “bad” teacher depends on the student and where they are in their intellectual development.
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