I still remember him standing on a desk in high school during class and doing his Diana Ross impersonation.

I am not talking about some student.

This was the teacher.

He was probably the best teacher I ever had. His name was Wayne Brasler and he taught journalism — they had such a teacher at my high school. He’s probably why I chose the profession I continue in to this day.

When I sat down to write this, it was going to be a different kind of column.

I’d just finished reading that teachers down in Tiverton are still in a nasty contract dispute. Earlier, they had a brief strike. Teachers in other communities had strikes too this fall. I’m not a big fan of teachers’ strikes.

But I am a fan of teachers, and I decided I wanted to write about that more.

Admittedly, doing a Diana Ross impersonation isn’t a standard way of imparting knowledge. But Mr. Brasler understood that high school can be deadly for students. Teenagers just aren’t meant to sit still at desks for hours every day taking notes on subjects they aren’t that interested in. Yet somehow, we’ve created an educational system that asks them to do exactly that for most of the year.

You learn a lot more when a teacher wakes you up with antics that catch your attention. That’s what Mr. Brasler did. He always seemed to be doing impersonations and goofy voices. He was the opposite of the classic portrayal by Ben Stein in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, who put his class — and almost himself — to sleep as he droned on in a monotone: “In 1930, the House of Representatives, in an effort to alleviate the effects of the ... Anyone? Anyone? ... the Great Depression, passed the ... Anyone? Anyone …?”

Everyone has had that teacher, probably several times, maybe even dozens.

It was a changing experience to have a few who fully engaged me, like Mr. Brasler.

He wasn’t always fun and games. I remember writing one of the best stories I’d ever done for the school newspaper. It was an official class assignment and I worked hard on it for days. He gave me an F.

I was incredulous. He explained I’d handed it in after deadline — the ultimate journalistic sin. I still thought that was unreasonable, but it wasn’t, and I learned from that, too.

I went to college in Vermont, and one of the most memorable months was January of my freshman year. They’d structured the semesters so that you took just one subject each January. I took a writing course from Professor David Price. It was a liberal arts college — Middlebury — and usually such schools teach academic writing. You’re almost encouraged to write things like, “He was optimized in a posture of essential preparedness,” instead of, “He was ready.” Mr. Price liked the second way better. We had to do an essay every day and soon, he made us see it’s better to write like writers than academics.

To be honest, I picked that course because it met early in the morning, which would free me to go skiing the rest of the day. But I came to look forward more to the class than the slopes.

If I had room, there’s another half dozen teachers I’d talk about here, but I don’t, so I’ll mention one more. His name was Murray Dry, a political science professor.

He taught me something else important: You can’t hide.

He used the Socratic Method. He often taught big classes, more than 50 students, and instead of straight lectures, he’d throw out questions, then randomly pick a name, whether or not your hand was up. You never knew when you’d be the next one to be shot. Perhaps even more than Wayne Brasler’s impersonations, that got my attention. Fear will do that. But you learned that if you were prepared, it wasn’t that scary after all.

Prof. Dry offered one other thing you only find in the best of teachers. I wasn’t that interested in the subject of one of his courses — Plato. But Prof. Dry was as pumped up about Plato as local football fans are about the Patriots. At first, we found this merely amusing. Then it became infectious.

Most teachers don’t convey that they really care about their own subject, but when they do, students can sense it, and then we care, too.

And you take that with you.

And you never forget where you got it.

mpatinkin@projo.com