berkeley high had two advanced placement chemistry teachers. one of them, mr. brand, drew the adoration of his students by being an enthusiastic and capable educator. he'd put on goofy costumes to do dumb skits, take them to the park across the street to blow stuff up, and generally be a fun, lovable dork. his students absolutely loved him.

the other teacher was mr. glimme. he mocked students to our faces and spent most class time on his computer ignoring us. we loved him more than mr. brand.

the year i took chemistry, berkeley high operated on a block schedule, which meant that we had two ninety minute chemistry classes per week. (plus maybe half of one on friday? i have no idea how fridays worked.) ninety minutes is a great length of time for chemistry labs, but not every class is a lab. sometimes you gotta just buckle down and learn how many electrons all the elements have or whatever. what's the best way to spend 90 minutes of class time on that?

here's how aaron glimme spent them: he gave us a summary of the material, told us the the relevant textbook section, passed out a problem set that's due next week, announced that he'd be around if anyone has questions, and then ignored us for the next hour unless we come up to ask him something. there wasn't even an expectation that we'd do the problem set in class - if we didn't want to take advantage of the teacher being right there to answer specific questions we had, he didn't care. (personally, i made $1.10 playing in a blackjack game run by saul "oy caramba, haven't you ever seen a mexican jew before?" flores.)

glimme wasn't checked out of teaching. he was super helpful if you did ask him questions, and before every exam, he'd organize and attend a study session at a local pizza and pool joint, which was a brilliant way to erase the conflict between hanging out with your friends and studying for a boring old test. you'd shoot a round, work through a few questions together while having a slice, and repeat until you felt done with both pool and chemistry. (and i'm sure it helped that the place is directly adjacent to the uc berkeley campus and was typically patronized by college students. we weren't studying for a test like dorks, we were acting like college kids!)

glimme concluded that he couldn't make us learn - that was up to us. his obligation was to provide us the opportunity to do it. he's not the only berkeley high teacher who thought this way, and the philosophy led to a great education - if you sought one out. it was received wisdom at the school that glimme's classes typically scored slightly higher on the AP test than brand's did, which we loved to repeat to mr. brand's students when they bragged about each weird new gimmick he was up to.

but we didn't denigrate mr. brand out of bitterness. our love for glimme was genuine, because he respected us. he respected our decisions about how to manage our own time (possibly unjustifiably), and he respected us enough to make fun of us - and accept getting made fun of in return. some examples:

• there was a whiteboard in the classroom on which glimme wrote each week's schedule. we were scheduled to take the AP exam on the same day as the release of Attack of the Clones. glimme, a big Star Sars fan, wrote for that day on the schedule: "YOU: AP test. ME: Star Wars." within a day or two, some enterprising student had changed it to "YOU: AP test. ME: big dork." he took it with good cheer.
• before passing out exams, he'd play the imperial march from Star Wars - but he didn't actually check for sabatoge before hitting "play", and so his usual pre-exam cackling was once replaced by frantic fumbling to stop the playback of "spanish flea" while the class lost it.
• one day he showed up to class hunched over and unable to move around much, and he told us that he'd be sitting down becuase he hurt his back. naturally, someone asked him how he hurt it, and i have never seen a more sheepish man than aaron glimme telling a class of high school sophomores "i hurt it...playing computer games." we never let him hear the end of that one.

most of us got 5s on the AP test, so i guess he did something right.