My most rewarding classes:
High School Creative Writing my senior year with my teacher Norman Yonce. Norm was also my Advanced English Teacher my senior year and probably did more to prepare me for college than any other teacher I had. It's not that the things I wrote in that class were so brilliant, but rather just all the interesting stuff and literature Norm exposed us to. He would spend an entire class playing one of those Rod McKuen/Anita Kerr collaborations. We'd dissect the poetry of the Beatles as well as T.S. Eliot. He was also just funny, witty, and unorthodox.
Chorus with Robert Knauf was also fun, because he was remarkably funny as well as being brilliant at his job. The first fifteen minutes of class was like a stand-up routine with him reading and riffing on little gossipy notes students left on his music stand and just him cracking wise. But he had great connection with the music world...we sang at the May Festival with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra under Robert Shaw's direction. And the Cincy Symphony under conductor Max Rudolf, as well as a very young Erich Kunzel, would come and perform a concert in our high school gym each year and we would sing a few numbers with them. Knauf and Kunzel became good friends.
In college, I had a great Shakespeare class under Dr. Ben Black, who also spurred my interest in the historical Richard III.
What made all these classes great, of course, was not the class...but, in each case, the teacher.
