Its hard to describe Brian Jaeger as a teacher, because I never felt that he was teaching at me, instead he trained me. After 11 and a half years of schooling, Mr. Jaeger's 12th grade writing class was a breath of fresh air where I finally got the answer to the age-old question, what is all of this good for? It was much more comparable to classes I took at the University of Wisconsin - Whitewater than anything I had ever taken in highschool. It was closer to a job training than either one of those. It was, if I can make my point clear, something different.
Mr. Jaeger showed me that english was more than some language that I already knew how to speak, it was a tool that could be used for many different, specific purposes. He helped us unwrap and discover the tool and its many uses by including the requirement that we actually submit our assignments, whether a complaint letter to Wendy's or an essay contest.
Brian Jaeger changed my relationship with my native language, and for that I will always be grateful to him.