The influence of teachers on students can be immense and run the gamut from extremely influential to uninspiring but ultimately harmless to completely turning a student off of the subject.

I've had a countless number of the uninspiring, mediocre breed. Such is the nature of public school, I think. But I also had a few really good teachers mixed in that have really influenced me and my education:

Mr. Hawkins 5th grade: I respected this man simply because he helped me, a mediocre student, better understand the importance of education and with a little application, I could be better than I was. Up until that point I was a solid C average student with nothing particularly remarkable about me. All my teachers up until that point had been in the uninspiring group and generally set low standards for their students, and if you do that, they generally achieve that level. Mr. Hawkins had none of that and he challenged his students in ways that most of them never had been challenged before. I realized that all I needed was simply higher expectations to be better than I was.

Mr. George 12th grade: Pretty long time, eh? I thought as hard as I could to find somebody in middle school to fill the gap but I simply couldn't. Even in most of high school the vast majority of my teachers were really nothing special. Mr. George, however, was different. At Farmington High School, he was a rather well known guy, an unashamed liberal freely expressing his views at a fairly conservative high school in one of New Mexico's great Republican strongholds. He injected his politics into his class frequently, but it wasn't so much about indoctrination as it was simply getting high school kids to think outside their rather narrow world view. I rarely agreed with his views, but I certainly appreciated what he tried to do..

That aside, his most important quality, however, was that he cared about his job and took it seriously. It seems like a trivial point, but it was not at all common in the teacher's I've had through the years. He actually gave lectures and cared if the student understood the material, rather than simply plow through a text book. I took him for an AP class and it was the only one I actually passed.

I'm running a bit long, but I'm going to write a separate entry for influential college professors...