Male Teachers in My Own Life

In today's America, I am considered lucky when it comes to my education. In first and second grade, I not only had a male teacher but I had the same male teacher both years. Mr. J, that is not a fake name that is what he actually wanted us to call him after he was no longer our teacher, was perhaps the greatest teacher I ever had. There are others who had a profound impact on me. My fourth grade teacher who taught me how to learn and gave me a friend who is still my best friend to this day. My high school computer science teacher who taught me to love problem solving and really embrase that feeling of helping others. Even my high school JV baseball coach, who I never had as a teacher, taught me many things about baseball and being a man. Yet, none of these individuals would have even had a chance to meet the boy I would become if it was not for Mr. J. I can still remember being in his class while he would strum away on his guitar, and the whole class would sing songs like "Jolly Man". He always had invative and creative ways to learn material that I thought I would never get. He taught us the presidents, in order of their presidency, by creating a tune to go along with words that I still reemeber. "There was George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and Madison." i could go on and on until I hit about Glover Cleveland then the tune and the words start to get a little blurry. It is an amazing thing that I after sitting through year after year of having information shoved into my brain that I can still remember this song. How many other people can say they remember something they learned, actually learned, in first or second grade. His methods began to shape me into liking learning and enjoying learning. I remember sitting in his class thinking how cool this guy is. That here is another male who has embrassed this idea of learning. That learning doesn't have to be just boring worksheets and struggled memorization. That we can have fun while learning and in that he made learning fun. (Although I didn't have that exact thought it was more probably like, "Gee, this guy is a hoot." but looking back I can put together the true meaning of that thought.) I honestly believe that this one teacher set me in the direction I needed to go in order to succeed as I have done today. I will not say that having a Male Teacher is the only reason I succeed now and have gone off to college while more and more male students don't make it past high school, if they even reach the end of high school. However, I am an unsure if I will be where I am, without that strong base from that male who showed me that learning can be fun and that learning is for everyone, I could have been just another statstics.