What makes the best teachers the best?

It is easy to tell the difference between inspired and insipid teachers. The good ones engage; the dull ones don’t notice the spitballs.

It’s harder, though, to explain how the good ones do it.

Measuring good teaching is tough, as Georgia is learning as it rolls out a controversial evaluation system for educators. But go into any school and most students and parents can identify who they think is doing a good job.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution visited the classrooms of some of metro Atlanta’s best educators — those named Teachers of the Year — and talked to parents and students to find out what characteristics good teachers share.

They each had unique methods, knowledge and skills, but seemed to share something that may be hard to teach in college, or even to quantify: They worked hard at relating to children and seemed to have an instinct for it. They established an emotional link, a line of trust, that they then used to tug their students along.

“I’ve been in classes where it’s on the student to make it work for them,” said Zoe Williams, a rising senior in Gwinnett County. “Sometimes you just have to do what you have to do when you don’t have a teacher like Coach Nebel, who makes it fun.”

Jay Nebel taught Williams history at Norcross High School, where he also coached girls basketball.

Williams said her teacher recognized that people learn in different ways, some by observing, others by doing. So he developed a diverse repertoire that went well beyond textbooks. He’d play film clips then break students into teams that would perform quick skits that illustrated historic facts. He set up a program in which older students such as Williams mentored freshmen at risk of dropping out.

He even printed his likeness on strips of paper for a game he called “Coach Nebel’s Fast Cash.” Students would wager “Nebel bucks” on their classmates’ ability to recall a given set of facts within five minutes.

The students were tickled, recalled Williams: “Kids were like, ‘You really took the time to do this?’”

Nebel explained what drove him: hearing freshmen say they were planning to drop out. Some were already holding jobs to help the family. “Your heart just drops,” he said. “They’re still babies and they don’t get that the decisions they make today will forever have an impact.”

While some use fun, others meet students at their level.

At DeKalb County’s Stephenson High School, where nearly two of three students were from low-income households last year, Mario Miner was able to engage 32 freshmen while explaining nuanced concepts such as allegory and satire.

How did he do it?

For one thing, he watches the same cartoons they do.

He could have lectured about how satire uses humor, irony, exaggeration or ridicule to expose dumb behavior, but he would have risked losing their attention. Instead, he told them that his favorite episode in the animated comedy “The Boondocks” revolved around a rapper character named Gangstalicious.

The classroom noise level ebbed, as Miner recalled the story line.

When the rapper totes purses and wears skirts, he tells his idolizing public that he’s carrying a “man bag” and wearing “shorts for thugs” (they have a flap to hide things from police). One of the main characters in the show, a boy named Riley, starts copying Gangstalicious.

“We laugh at Riley rocking shorts and a man bag,” Miner says, “yet we all emulate people we admire.”

That cartoon was using satire to make a point, Miner continues. “While you can laugh at Riley for doing it, it’s supposed to make you think about how often you do it.”

Later, one of Miner’s students tells a visitor that this teacher is good “because he explains things very clearly and he always comes around to see if we need help.”

Don’t all teachers do that?

The boy, Jailan Lawton, smiles at the naive question: “Not all of them,” he says gently.

At another DeKalb school, Ethan Daley, who was a senior at Druid Hills High last spring, shared an anecdote about one of his favorite teachers.

Alyssa Montooth teaches British literature and composition and is a flamboyant character on campus. At a pep rally for the school football team last fall, she was part of a group of teachers who staged a “flash mob” performance in “Gangnam Style.”

One afternoon when Ethan was waiting for his ride home, Montooth walked by. They slipped into a conversation that wound up lasting an hour, covering everything from Shakespeare to Sherlock Holmes and his sidekick Watson’s diary.

“It’s weird because she understood everything I said and most people don’t,” Daley said.

Montooth has taught for 16 years and said everything flows from the connections she tries hard to make with her students.

She keeps scrapbooks with pictures, student notes and cards they’ve sent, and when she gets tired, she flips through them for inspiration. Or, as she puts it, to “amp up.” She also changes her routines periodically because, she said, students can sense a teacher’s boredom.

She bounces around her classroom, composing rap poems for her students. She risks embarrassment because she wants to inspire her students to break through their own comfort zones.

She had one of her classes compose poems, which they read aloud for a year-end project. Some were intensely personal — one even tackled the unrequited love of another student who was in the classroom at that moment — yet each reading was applauded by snapping fingers. There was no derision.

“You have to be able to let go and be goofy,” Montooth said. “Because then when you need to be serious, they’ll go with you.”

Many of these teachers share another common trait: they work long hours outside the classroom, despite the stress the job already entails.

Parent Traci Harden said the work was too much for her. The former visual arts teacher left the field six years ago to start a graphic design firm. The pressure was overwhelming, especially the expectations for student performance in tests.

“I knew this wasn’t something I wanted to do with the rest of my life,” she said.

That’s why she was in awe of her daughter’s fourth-grade teacher last year, Jennie Scott.

Harden’s daughter, Diana, had known Scott since the first grade when she joined the teacher’s “Green Team,” an environmentally-focused after-school club at Oak Knoll Elementary in Fulton County. Scott found grant money to buy equipment. They had microscopes and telescopes. They’d look at the stars and talk about Copernicus and Ptolemy.

All that extra time invested outside the classroom helped to stir Diana’s budding interest in science. The teacher-student bond also helped when Diana struggled in a math class. She is back on the honor roll now and Harden credits Scott for encouraging her.

Good teachers must love what they do, Harden said.

“It’s just a lot of pressure,” she said, “and I admire anybody who can do it.”