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Well, I could go on for hours about the individual teaching methods of all the teachers I've had over the years but that would take a long time and a great deal of the information would be useless to you, so I'll just look at my most recent exam results and comment on those teachers who got me HAs;

English - HA
Irish - HB
Maths - HB
History - HB
Geography - HA
Science - HA
Art - HD
Home Ec - HB
Spanish - HB
Civic, Social and Political Studies - OA

There were my results for the Junior Cert, one of the two major exams in Ireland. The grading system is based on two things, Level and Grade. The three levels distinguish the difficulty; Foundation is the easiest and is considered embarrassing to do, Ordinary or Pass is in the middle ground and is the one that most people take and Higher or Honours is the most difficult and is taken by far fewer than taken Ordinary. Grade, obviously, reflects the results in the exam, 40-54% = D, 55-69% = C, 70-84%, 85-100% = A. Only Irish and Maths can be taken at all three levels and CSPE can only be taken at Ordinary, there is no Higher-level exam. So back to my results;

English; English was always something I was good at. My English teacher had his own way of doing things; "In 1st Year, get them to write, in 2nd Year, get them to think and in 3rd Year, get them to work." When I was in 1st Year, we wrote loads of essays and stories and he almost always let us pick our own topic, or if he didn't, he'd give us something broad to work with. We even wrote a book of short stories, printed it and sold it for charity. Then in 2nd Year, we studied two novels (we all studied Lord of the Flies, plus our teacher picked us each a second one suited to our personality; mine was Don Quixote), a lot of poems (mainly by W.H. Auden, but also some Yeats and Eliot) and a drama (The Merchant of Venice). He encouraged a lot of off-topic discussion, be it about music, video games, politics, philosophy, law, the news, whatever, to get us thinking about things. He always had his own humourous take on the topic. Then in 3rd Year, we practised for our exams, wrote practise essays, got very deep into our analysis of our literature and studied the media and debating. He brought us to see two version of the Merchant of Venice; a comedic one and a dramatic one. Come exam time, not only was I fully prepared, I was overprepared. I wrote 35 A4 pages of work, including a detailed analysis of the reasons why I wouldn't want to live in the same savanna as the hippopotamus from T.S. Eliot's poem of the same name. I was afraid my wrist wouldn't work for my next exam.

Geography; Geography was hands-down, my best subject. Only twice did I not get an A in Geography, once I had the flu and couldn't concentrate, the other time I made a minor error and got 84.96%. I had two Geography teachers, Mr. Morrissey in 1st Year and Ms. Farrell in 2nd & 3rd Year. Mr. Morrissey made geography really fun. Everyone in my year looked forward to geography. In the same sentence, he could tell you about dwindling salmon supplies and joke about how his graph looked like boobs. He'd take the absolute mick out of everybody in the funniest way possible; comparing Davina to the Bride of Chuckie being a memorable example. He wove the information we needed to know into jokes, knowing we'd remember the information long after the punchline had faded from our minds. He didn't mind straying off-topic now and then, he neither encouraged nor discouraged it for the most part as long as we did our work. Then in 2nd & 3rd Year, we had Ms. Farrell. Ms. Farrell was different from Mr. Morrissey in a lot of ways. She didn't tolerate nonsense in her class. But she had a sense of humour. She could take a good joke and crack a few herself. She spent those two years in a battle of wits with my friend Niall; she definitely came out on top. Ms. Farrell's teaching method was based on presenting a fact and then, in clear, concise language, explaining exactly how and why this fact was true. She never beat around the bush, she explained everything that we needed to know. The exam was a breeze. No one who had Ms. Farrell got lower than a B.

Science; Science is something I've always found interesting. In Ireland, for the Junior Cert, one does the subject "Science" consisting of Physics, Chemistry and Biology; after the Junior Cert, the three are broken up into separate subjects. I had Mr. Molloy for all three years of Science. A lot of people didn't like Mr. Molloy but knew he was the best Science teacher, a lot of people liked Mr. Molloy but thought he was better suited to working in CERN than an Irish secondary school. I was of the latter camp. Mr. Molloy was a hilariously sarcastic, totally deadpan snarker of epic proportions. He could get a laugh out of even those who absolutely despised him. The problem, I think, that a lot of people didn't like Mr. Molloy was that he has a tendency to forget he's teaching teenagers and slip into technical terms or speak entirely in mathematics. Now, I've been reading about quantum physics since I was 10, so I could follow the language but I know some other people couldn't. He always encouraged us to enter science competitions; I wrote an essay entitled "A Day in the Life of an Amoeba" for one, I did an experiment about acid rain for another. He also didn't mind going off-topic into some other branches of science that we either didn't cover in detail, or didn't cover at all; genetics, quantum physics, superstring theory. The Science exam is supposed to be two and a half hours long; almost everyone in my science class was out after an hour. We flew through the exam.

So, I think the two most important ingredients in teaching are 1) humour and 2) being able to go off-topic while still educating your students.