My graduate instructors from Clark Atlanta University continue to mentor me. Their styles of instruction have had a tremendous influence on my efforts to make learning and teaching rewarding experiences for students and me. Senior classmates at CAU warned us not to take classes from some instructors simultaneously. The reading and workload of each was formidable for a single class. To attempt to take a class from more than one of these instructors in a single semester was tantamount to suicide. My students would likely accuse me of mimicking this group of instructors. I could only process such an accusation as the highest compliment.

Obviously, there has been an impressive array of teaching styles among the sizable group of instructors I could easily designate my favorite. There are, however, traits common to the pedagogy of each. All of them held uncompromising standards and expectations for rigorous, thoughtful work. My favorites are a pushy, demanding group of no-nonsense educators whose governing ethos is "excellence, excellence, excellence." Each also possessed a passion for their particular area that infused their teaching with energy and excitement. They were engaging and creative. They modeled their expectations, delivering papers and publishing articles that set standards for excellent scholarship. A sense of humor and casual acceptance of their human frailty allowed all of them to acknowledge they did not have perfect understanding, that they could blow an occasional fact, and that they found learning from their students a common and rewarding perk of the profession. Their caring and concern for, and genuine interest in the lives of their students are additional qualities that have endeared to me my group of favorites. Those teachers who stand out in my memory also possessed a burning commitment to social change. Surely, they wanted to make the world a better place. They conveyed this to me in their critical engagement of conventional ideas, in the books they assigned, and their small acts of defiance. They taught me that the best teachers are, inevitably, subversives.