A few months ago I luckily came across a small documentary called A Touch of Greatness. Through interviews, group meetings with former students, and archival footage of students from a Rye, NY elementary school from, roughly, the late 1950′s to the mid 1960′s a portrait of an astonishingly compassionate grade school teacher – Albert Cullum – begins to emerge.

Cullum was the type of teacher I wished I had growing up. Someone who looked for your strengths and accentuated them to give you the confidence, and interest, to try new things, to attempt the unattemptable.

This isn’t necessarily a great film, it is, more importantly a beautiful and important document and visual textbook in and of itself. Here’s a brief trailer, which, it must be said, doesn’t do the film itself justice. It’s far more startling than it lets on…