It’s “Teacher Appreciation Week” — an annual observance designed to acknowledge the more than four million instructors who shape and nurture the next generation.

We all have our favorite teachers, I’m sure. Maybe it was what they said to us or how they said it. Or it could have been the season of our life — i.e., “When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.”

I’ve been blessed with many great instructors, but none who have had a longer-lasting and more profound impact on me than Russ Josephs — a.k.a. “Mr. Russ.”

Mr. Russ was my elementary and middle school gym teacher. He left for one year in the middle of that timespan to work on a master’s degree at the University of South Carolina, but came back for grades 6, 7 and 8.

The return from that hiatus will give you a flavor of his eccentric spirit.

Our school was on Long Island in the town of Baldwin, so lots of thick New York accents were all around me. Of course, we didn’t realize it at the time. That’s just how people talked. But Mr. Russ returned with an intensely thick drawl, almost as if he were straight out of a Civil War saga.

We were shocked, mesmerized and amused. He carried on the charade for months before finally admitting it was a joke.

Yes, there is a spiritual revival breaking out in the United States, but it is not good news. In March, National Geographic celebrated the fact that “at least 1.5 million people in the United States identify as Pagans — up from 134,000 in 2001.” And Nat Geo is getting all evangelical about this revival, telling readers “Here’s how to immerse yourself in the cultural traditions of Pagan communities” with notices to local events. They also offer definitions to essential pagan terms like “wiccan,” “druid,” “heathen” and “witchcraft” that they believe folks should familiarize themselves with.

The conservative Jewish magazine Commentary is also recognizing the revival with a cover story “The Return of Paganism,” in their May issue. They take a significantly less ceremonious view, lamenting,

“Everywhere you turn these days, pagans are afoot, busily hacking away at the Christian and Jewish foundations of American life and replacing them with a cosmology that would have been absolutely coherent to followers of, say, Voltumna, the Etruscan earth god, or to those who worshipped the Celt tribal protector Toutatis.”

Commentary continues, “If you think the above paragraph is a little bit overblown, consider the numbers.” They cite data from sociologists of religion explaining that in 1990, only about 8,000 Americans practiced some form of paganism. In 2008, that number shot up to 340,000 Americans practicing some form of naturalistic religion. They concur with National Geographic that the pagan faithful now number 1.5 million, making it one of America’s fastest growing faith practices.