For Dr. Dan Morrill, history isn’t about learning a list of facts or timelines. It’s about living. “If you have no sense of history, it’s like living in a room without windows,” he says.

Wesley Mancini was drawn to art when he was growing up in Connecticut, he says, “because the art teacher was the only unusual person I knew.” So he went to the (then) Philadelphia College of Art, where he became interested in fiber. He did some fiber art, but soon realized he couldn’t support himself and his mother that way. So he went into textile design instead.

Clara Jones’s love of music and devotion to her piano students were so intense that when she retired from private teaching in 2011, her house was filled with 26 pianos. To accompany them all, she and her late husband Cedric had enlarged their Lincoln Heights home six times.

For his entire career, Dr. Robert Corbin has dedicated himself to “igniting wonder” about science in children of all ages. He spent his first 18 years as a science teacher in Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools at Myers Park, Garinger and Waddell high schools. In 2007, he joined the staff of Discovery Place as vice president of learning experiences.

Is Byron Baldwin a photographer who teaches, or a teacher who does photography? Actually, when he started as a photography teacher at Myers Park high School in 1972, he was just looking for a job.