If 1/4 of the teachers were like him we would not have an education problem. Period.
Mr. Sattof took a genuine interest in his students and went far beyond the "call of duty" so to speak. Everyone learned in his class including the troublemakers and the not so bright students. Mr. Sattof taught my 7th grade math class at Wyoming Are Middle school. Nice guy but he didn't have to worry about students taking advantage of that because of his teaching style. When you went into Mr. Sattof's class everyone paid attention because you never knew what tangent he was going to go off on...
Seriously, you'd go into his class and ended up learning about some far off subject, what was special about that was he always soemhow tied it into what could be one of the most boring subjects on the planet... math. You might learn about space, you might learn about engineering or you might learn about why the price of carrots just went up. You may not have learned about math specifically but you always learned something. Mr. Sattof could probably teach one class for half a day and they would have learned more than another class there for the whole day.Just to give you an idea Mr. Stattof at one point invested his own money in stock's for an inter-class competition. Each class had to buy and sell their stocks and decide what they were going to do. He didn't interfere except to offer advice. He'd buy the Wall Street Journal each morning and bring it in. He kept the money(or took the loss I forget which) but the winning class got a free pizza party.
So for that reason I nominate him for the Teacher of the Century.
Coincidentally I delivered coal to Mr. Sattof when I first started with my Uncle many years ago.
