In the interest of not derailing this already-long-and-awesome thread, here are some more details! (Paging @sparrows-corner and any other interested parties.)
So in my first semester of college, I took an Intro to Psychology class. I didn't expect anything special; it was just one of those general education courses that everybody was supposed to take at some point. But it turned out amazing.
What the general public didn't know at that point was someone in the college administration had screwed up and forgotten to assign a teacher to this class. Until a week before class. When several students emailed to ask why that detail was missing in the online listing.
The administration panicked, scrambled for someone-anyone-omg-who-can-drop-everything-and-teach-this-class. They called recently-graduated owners of Masters Degrees in teaching.
They found Sandy.
She was qualified and available, and much older than the average recent grad, with the confidence to go with it. This was still a daunting task, though, and she agreed on one condition: that she team-teach the class with a friend of hers who was still working on finishing his degree.
Having no other choice and seeing no real problem with this, the administration agreed. And thus was born the most glorious educational comedy act in my entire academic career. The two of them were a delight. They knew all the stuff they needed to teach, and they knew a great deal more, and they delivered lectures in a way that had everyone paying eager attention. It was great.
This friend, by the way, was awesome in his own right. While Sandy was a curly-haired white lady around middle age, Wayne was a black guy who (1) dressed in impeccable suits and (2) had cerebral palsy.
I think a lot of 18-year-old minds were quietly enlightened about a few things just from watching these two banter back and forth, one with joints more wobbly than the other. Wayne told a memorable anecdote at one point about stopping by a grocery store in sweat pants instead of his usual classy wear. The cashier asked some gentle question about what he spent his time on, assuming that he had some sort of carer following him around. The expression on her face when he told her that he taught college was one I'll never forget, and I didn't even see it.
Anyways, at the end of this semester, the two teachers asked a few of us smart kids if we wanted to be TAs (teaching assistants) for the next semester. Since most of us had already become friends during the make-a-group-and-discuss-things portions of the class, this sounded like a party that would look good on our records later. And it really was.
I TA'd for that class a few times in a row, with my buddies and the two very cool teachers. We met up outside of class for holiday parties and everything.
And, since this was during the time the Lord of the Rings trilogy was first coming out in theaters, we all dressed up in costume and went to an early screening together.
Wayne drove. His handicap placard meant we got to park at the front, which was pretty awesome.
Now, I'd met people before who knew more LotR lore than I did, but they all paled in comparison to Sandy. As I said in the notes on that other post, she shared some stories of her youth with us. When she was fourteen, she ran away to join a hippie commune. She already knew fluent elvish, and she used that to help the commune's drug-runners stay out of the clutches of the cops, by translating their drug notes into a language the cops couldn't read. With a start like that, it was unsurprising that she still knew elvish now, along with all sorts of fascinating deep lore.
She had a limited edition book that looked shockingly expensive. She made beeswax candles for all the TAs as holiday gifts, with our names written on them in elvish. I still have mine somewhere.
I haven't heard from any of these lovely people in a long time, since college moves on and so does life, but I will treasure those memories forever. I hope Sandy and Wayne and the others are doing well. They deserve the best.
