Teachers actually "using" special interests?

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I used to love it when I got a teacher willing to do this! In high school, I was in an "Essentials" math class for the first two years...normally I hate math, but I really, really liked the teacher, the fact that it was a class of only six of us (give or take), and she explained math in a way that I could understand it.

Anyway, at one point, the teacher (Mrs. G) had us do what she called "Math Scrapbooks" - and the scrapbooks could have any theme we wanted them to have - one girl's had an anime theme, another girl had a horse theme, and my theme was - guess what? - Cars!!

Each page in the scrapbook consisted of an Algebra problem and the steps inolved in solving it, but we could incorporate our theme into it, too - like, a word problem in my scrapbook would have read, "What do Mater and Doc Hudson have to do in order to this, this, and this" or something. I had lots of fun writing word problems with Cars characters in them, and decorating the pages with Cars characters.

At the end of the year when we got our scrapbooks back, Mrs. G told me that she had taken them all to her daughter's house (who was married and had a 5 - year - old son) to grade them while she was there, and when she'd graded mine and set it aside, her grandson (who happened to LOVE anything Cars) zeroed right in on it and started looking thru it. Not sure what he thought of all the Algebra stuff in it, but he loved looking at the pictures I used. Finally, when it was time for Mrs. G to leave, her grandson didn't want to give her back my scrapbook, so his parents had to distract him (probably with the ACTUAL Cars movie, lol) while Mrs. G went out and put all the stuff in her Car.

Did anyone else ever have a teacher willing to incorporate your special interest into a lesson in order make it more fun/interesting/relevant to you? If so, how? I'd love to hear about it!

Wow....no one's EVER had a teacher who was willing to see the educational potential in a special interest? That's unfortunate.

I heard about a nonverbal autistic girl whose parents found someway to connect to her through music, and eventually she ended up not only speaking but getting a degree in Linguistics, though I think that's a bit different. I've heard that the best way to teach an aspie is by incorpating an interest countless times from countless sources, but I don't think it's ever been done with me. I have to incorporate my interests on my own.

My physics teacher let me do my work in French (and marked it in French!) when I was obsessed with languages, and looking back now, I have no idea how I was allowed to do that!

In grade 5 we learned Lego/LOGO (like a primitive form of Lego Mindstorm, using the LOGO programming language), on an old (even then) Apple IIe. Lego and computer programming were two things I loved, I had done some BASIC before and as I recall, I had run out of things to read in that classroom, so I read the Lego/LOGO manual and quickly proved quite adept at Lego/LOGO. School was not interesting or challenging to me at that time, which probably helped contribute to some behavioural issues, but the teacher amazingly let my parents take home the computer and Lego/LOGO equipment over the next two week school holiday period so I could learn it further, which of course, I did. When we returned to school, I was tasked with teaching the basics to all the other kids.