P.Z. Myers has a great post about high school biology teachers, and how uniformly awful they seemed to be, and what a better experience most people have in college.
I, by contrast, had exceptional biology teachers in high school: Craig MacGowan and Mr. Morrison (can’t remember his first name), at Garfield High School in Seattle. MacGowan was a Seattle legend, a great teacher who taught biology with a passion, and every year took his successful Marine Science students to an exotic local — Hawaii, Florida, even Australia (I never went-I didn’t want to sell the requisite number of candy bars, or whatever our fundraiser was). Morrison was a quirkier, more soft-spoken fellow, except when he threw formadehyde-soaked frogs at misbehaving students. In fact, my college biology experience was much worse: dull, dry lectures and boring, irrelevant labs.
English, on the other hand, went the other way around. I did have a few good high school English teachers, but none that excited me as much as MacGowan/Morrison. I’ve already mentioned my pathetic journalism advisor (who shall remain unnamed). When I had him for 10th grade honors English, I hated him so much that I dropped down into the “regular” English class, just so I could have a better teacher.
But in college, I found my true calling in a course on Edmund Spenser, taught by Michael Murrin. Anyone who can make Spenser exciting is a truly great teacher, and Murrin convinced me to be an English major. Unfortunately, my grad school teachers weren’t nearly as inspiring, so now instead of an English professor I’m a part-time litblogger and full-time psychology blogger. Things could be worse, I suppose….
So I wonder if it all comes down to this: we pick careers based on what kind of teachers we had in college, and especially as they compare to the teachers we had in high school. If we had great high school teachers in a particular subject, then our college experience is likely to be disappointing. If we had crummy high school teachers in a subject, then college courses in that subject will be a treat by comparison.