In middle school one of my science teachers was really great and thorough, the kind of teacher that you remember the things you learned years later because they made the classes memorable.

We would drop things off the roof of the building and record with slow-mo cameras to calculate the formula for gravity, he lit hydrogen balloons on fire and you could feel the heat. The coolest day of the year was when we got to play with his “hovercraft”. He had repurposed a Vacuum cleaner to create a baby hovercraft.

It was basically a small platform, with a plastic tarp on the bottom that had little holes and when you turned the vacuum on it would expel the air and the little platform would ever so slightly lift up and glide across the ground.

The reason I remember it so vividly was because each of us students got a chance to sit on the chair atop the hovercraft platform and the teacher would push us down the hall and we’d “hover” from one side of the building to the other.

I am forever grateful for the teachers who go above and beyond to make learning fun for students with no reward to themselves.