Did you have a teacher that sparked epiphanies?

did it involve a synchroscope meter ? 

lol no. Most of the entire time, Teachers, peers and anyone one else is telling me Idea X is a dumb idea, impossible, or without purpose.

For example: made an IoT coffee machine, and IoT refrigerator in 2000. Professor was like this is some of the stupidest stuff I have ever seen.
you only pass because it does show you know how to build circuits. 20+ years later, everything is on the internet.

The epiphany is perhaps no one knows what the future will bring. You cant trust other peoples opinions.

to be fair, I've done the same thing. in 2002 or so, I told some kid printing in 3 dimensions would be a tedious and error prone activity, and I couldn't imagine it ever gaining ground in the consumer electronics field.

I remember having to go to a "calculator room" to use nixie tube calculators...you still needed your slide rule and log tables because these calculators were not very capable.

We had a Wang calculator room at one of the places I worked. I was doing FORTRAN programming for a project though and didn’t use them much. Pocket calculators were also a thing by the time I started working there. 

I guess it takes different amounts of time for the penny to drop with different people. Freezer IoT has always been useful.

In 1997 I solved a big problem for a food company by connecting a bunch of walk-in freezers to a server (IoT and cloud computing of the day) The system logged temperatures and if any went out of bounds the system would start phoning people to go and troubleshoot the problem. (that was my first big speech synthesis project) If someone left a freezer door ajar, or there was some failure, it could cause an expensive amount of food spoilage.

I had a few, but the high school history teacher had a special style of storytelling, quite jovial.

I have had several teachers that have sparked epiphanies in me.  I have always been a very poor book learner.  I have always found the lecture to be a great learning tool.  Either directly in the lecture or indirectly through questions and follow-ups during the lecture.

Post education was sort of the same thing.  If I am engaged in a conversation or during a meeting, the back and forth of knowledge sparks the creative juices and 'bang' I suddenly see the solution or just get the spark that eventually results in solution.

I also have found that the shower has a similar effect. Here the conversation in my head, about the problem, seems to be magically open up thoughts that again lead to new approaches to solving the problem.

Some of them had synchroscopes.  Some only had the lights.  The synchronizing and throwing the breaker was always cool - but then you needed to have your wits about you.  You may have put the unit online, but now you have to keep it there.     The reverse power relay is VERY unforgiving.  And you can't just focus on the kW load.  You've got to get right on the kVARs as well - otherwise excessive amps and... you're off line.

The "newer" units had power factor meters.  The EMDs had kVAR and kW meters - so you had to do math to know what the power factor was.  The really old Cats only had excitation current meters so you had to do calculations in your head on the excitation current required. 9 amps per 50kW for a 0.8pf.

Electronics has made all of this obsolete, but in its day, this was what we needed to know to turn the lights back on.  Sometimes we were lucky and the load didn't change much.  That made for really, really boring shifts.  Other times,,, it was Mr. Toad's Wild Ride.

Sadly most of my teachers were not very good.

I spent a lot of time bored in classrooms.

There were some exceptions, but most just followed the books.

That's a very important principle and, surprisingly, I've not seen a lot of people using it!