Editor's Note

Think back on your scholastic career.What experiences leap out at you? No, I'm not talking about the time you learned that, yes, there is such a thing as drinking too much soda-pop-flavored wine. Focus on a teacher, technique or lesson that broke through the fog and stayed bright in your imagination years into the future.

My shortlist:

• The college American history prof who lectured with the cadence and passion of a Southern preacher. For him, the devil was in the assumptions about America that we had been spoon-fed since kindergarten. His point, which he proved many times over, was that whatever novel ideas we thought we had about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness all came down, in every detail, from the men and women who came before us. The hippies never had a thought that Thomas Jefferson or Ralph Waldo Emerson hadn't had first, and better.
• The semester-long, role-playing simulation of Third World political intrigue that consumed an undergrad poli-sci class. As representative of the nearly powerless peasants, I helped my comrades seize control of the government by slyly allying with the intellectuals, represented by the hottest girl in the class. Her beauty won power, but we kept power by cracking the complex math involved in the government's distribution of scarce resources. The result was a utopia where we were able to ensure that no one group advanced at another's expense. This kept our classmates satisfied and put an end to weekly coups d'etat.
• Dissecting a cow's eyeball in seventh-grade biology. It was nearly as big as a golf ball and was covered in bloody, viscous slime, but the most shocking thing about it was how quickly you got past the gag reflex once you comprehended the beauty of the machine inside: the exquisite curve and flexibility of the gel-like lens; the liquid purity of the vitreous humor; the complex layering of the surrounding membranes. I could have studied a thousand diagrams and never grasped what I got instantly here -- I was holding a miracle in my hands.

The common threads? Teaching that lasts is delivered with passion and hands-on experience. Turn to Page 16, and you'll see an ample supply of both in the story of Emmet Rosenfeld, a master educator who still somehow failed to pass a test that supposedly identifies superior teaching. There's an irony there, in our test-obsessed culture. As Rosenfeld discovered, sometimes success on a test has little to do with success in the classroom.

Tom Shroder can be reached at shrodert@washpost.com.