From your list of wonderful influences in your earliest classrooms, to mine (Mrs. Bloom in Homeroom, Mr. Martin and Mr. Foggianno in Math, Miss Jones in American History, Tim Paggard with English Lit) the obvious takeaway is that we need more of these influencers in our schools today. The next step might be the question that Amanda Ripley asks for the Atlantic magazine in their latest issue: What Makes a Great Teacher?"One outfit in America has been systematically pursuing this mystery for more than a decade-tracking hundreds of thousands of kids, and analyzing why some teachers can move those kids (1 comments)