My high-school teachers

[ChrisGreaves]

This is a close as you are likely to get to knowing my high-school teachers.

http://www.theodoregray.com/PeriodicTable/Why.html

A quote:
And I also know that there are a lot of kids who never feel this sense of loss, because by the time they are teenagers, they have nothing left to lose. Whatever enthusiasm, creativity, and focus they started with has long since been driven out of them, destroyed by television, video games, horrible schools, horrible opportunities, and horrible role models. The bright flicker of our television screens is the stolen incandescence of a thousand young minds.

One of the first things to go is a sense of mastery. Television, even the supposedly good stuff, is full cues that this is something other people can do, not you. Beyond the ubiquitous "Don't try this at home kids!" there are the slick production values and the fancy props to hammer home the lesson that nothing you could possibly do at home is as interesting or as valid as what you see on TV.

There is a world of difference between watching someone use a special apparatus to make hydrogen in front of the class or on television, and doing it yourself using nothing you don't already have at home right now. Go ahead, try it: I bet you in less than an hour, you can have a bottle full of 99% pure hydrogen gas without leaving the house. (My website, under hydrogen, will tell you exactly how.)

The entire page could be mandatory reading for teachers.

This guy is like a drug to me.
I could spend the rest of this day reading his web pages.

He actually BUILT a periodic table.
A table.

In his Homemade hydrogen (1 9V battery and a beaker of salt water) he points out that: This is also the only simple experiment you can do in which, in a very real sense, you create the atoms you're collecting, rather than just separating and purifying them. Think about what a hydrogen atom is: It's nothing more than a single proton, captured in a cloud of negative charge from the electrons surrounding whatever compound it's part of. When you use electricity to split water, you send an electron from the battery down into the water, where it finds a water molecule, rips off a proton, and the proton and electron combine to form a hydrogen atom. (Technically, two electrons rip off two protons and form a molecule containing two hydrogen atoms, but that's a detail.) The point is that by adding electrons to water, you are creating hydrogen atoms out of two subatomic particles. In virtually every other chemical reaction the atoms already have lots of electrons around them, and you're just making changes around the edges. But here you're making the atoms up pretty much from scratch, no accelerator or nuclear reactor required, just a 9V battery.

He has a database of periodic tables

I kid you not. If you had good high-school teachers, you'll be hooked.

[Goshute]

Math was not my strong point, but I had a great teacher for calculus and probability theory in my last two years inn HS, and he caught me up.

[BobH]

The bright flicker of our television screens is the stolen incandescence of a thousand young minds.

Is this yours, Chris? I plan to steal it for my signature and want to be sure to give proper attribution.

[ChrisGreaves]

Is this yours, Chris?

No.
I'm not that good.
Nowhere near it.
I'll send you his email in a PM.
Do me a favour and tell him you got it by PM via Eileen's Lounge, because I told him I'd posted the quotes here.
Thanks for asking!