Absolutely.
Mr. Burson who I had throughout highschool for electronics and for physics.... Even before I learned guitar I was "mad scientist-ing" electronics at my house since I was a little kid. My dad was an electrician and engineer so we always had weird random parts that at first I just pretended were ray guns or some shit, but later would put power to and try to make them move or light up.
My freshman year of electronics I was notorious for going off script when Mr. Burson would visit the teacher's lounge to smoke or refill his wide-bottom-beaker-shaped coffee mug that he would carry completely level and unwavering through any chaos. When multiple workstations are daisy chained from one desk to another to send MANY volts through a capacitor until it sizzled and exploded in a ball of putrid smoke and had to be thrown out the window and into the snow with needle nose plyers, he only raised an eyebrow but remained silent returning to the room and the haze was in the air.
He was building a computer with the individual ram chips that had to be soldered to the motherboard... even the back of the tube CRT was completely exposed and just begging for a curious nerd to mess with in all it's pre-steam-punky glory. I checked out several computer books from the public library (our school had nothing) on Cobol, Fortran, BASIC, and eventually figured out that his machine responded to PASCAL commands. When he would leave the room, I would enter several lines of code until I could get it to display different characters. After a couple days in a row, I got the screen to clear and it randomly placed individual pixels, crosses, and stars throughout the screen, making a VGA starfield. Apparently it was interesting enough that the lookout at the door got distracted and I got busted.
But instead of getting mad, he said "
Do you really want to learn how a computer works?" Even though it wasn't part of the curriculum, he changed the end of the current and all of the following semester to include the parts of a computer and how to code. The best part was while we were working with resistors and transistors, we were simultaneously seeing those parts in practice once they were fully assembled, making our understanding of how the electricity was flowing through all of the chips and why static or heat could make them fail to work properly.
By summer I was building my own shabby little Heathkit computer while my wealthier friends were getting Apple or TRS-80 computers. Often times I would write my programs in a notebook with notes and variations for the different OS types crammed into the edges of the page and type them into my friends machines when visiting (I didn't have a tape drive at the time at home... every time it was boot up and work until it was good or a power blip would shut the computer down and make me scream at the heavens.
Even when I started playing guitar, growing my hair out, and hanging with the heavy metal crowd, Mr. Burson never treated me like a degenerate or a stupid punk. I was shy and quiet, but he knew I still had that mad scientist inside of me when I told him about my first pawn shop guitar and some of the experiments (and failures) I had when changing out pickups or controls. We didn't have much money at the time, so I couldn't just go into a guitar shop and buy a Charvel and a Marshall... I was making changes to my pawn shop guitar and plugging into the mic input on my dad's stereo, then later through stupid shit like 70 volt PA horns. For the first couple years of guitar playing, I would plug into a friend's amp and say "so that's what it's supposed to sound like", and had a bass amp at my house that I drove with a fuzz pedal and eventually a little pawn shop Marshall combo that was a preamp into the bass head.
Back to the OP: During a physics lecture, he had me bring my electric guitar in and used a strobe light that he matched to the vibration of the strings so you could see the shape of it going back and forth.... then hitting the harmonic to make the double, triple, and quadrupal wave shapes. At the end of the class, I just played a few bars of Van Halen and Hendrix that I had been learning and being a shy, nerdy, outcast type kid... it honestly was the first time that some of my classmates even realized I was alive.
So besides making me visible to some of my peers, it honestly was the first time I was in front of any size group with an instrument even if it was only for a couple minutes.... and as I continued to be one step ahead of other kids in my school with computers it helped me get some early college credit in a later summer, I tested out of some freshman college classes, and even though I was convinced I was going to be an Artist or a Musician for the next several years, Computers ended up being the thing I "fell back" on and eventually became my career.
When I went to School he looked like John Oats and drove a Subaru.
Years later, when my kids went to the same school, I sought him out during Parent-Teacher conferences and we chatted computers, German cars (I had my Porsche at that time), and he looked like Ben Franklin.
Gonna have to see if he is still around... kinda scares me if I find out he's not around. :(
But I learned countless things that still influence me to this day.
