Even though I was always the top math student at my elementary school, I don't remember any prominent, influential characters until I reached high school. One of my early high school math teachers was very helpful in cultivating my interest by bringing an enthusiasm and new outlook to the class. He would often start the class with tricky riddles or questions, give bonus problems to students who finished early, and kept his classroom open every lunchtime for anyone who played chess (and also offered an award of pizza to anyone who beat him). Through these gestures, as well as encouraging me to join any math contests, he was able to help me grow a stronger intrinsic motivation to learn math. In my final year of high school, I was going to transfer schools to take Pre-Calc 12, as my school didn't offer it. In response, he talked the school into running the class with only 6 students, which worked out amazingly as we were able to hold some of the classes on the school lawn. Even though I entered high school as one of the top math students, I still hold him responsible for my successes throughout my math education.
In contrast, I had an awful experience with one math teacher in high school. In grade 9 or 10, I took an AP Math class with a new teacher (I believe it was a year-long substitute teacher). The first difficult came from the fact that he could barely speak above a whisper due to a medical problem. This made learning quite frustrating and difficult. Unfortunately, there was a greater problem. He was very distrustful and challenging towards the students. At the end of the semester he declared that every student (and this was an AP class) was failing. He then offered a bonus assignment to let the students make up some of the marks, in which he subsequently declared that every single student plagiarized their work and would receive a zero. The bad experience I had this year luckily did not discourage me from studying mathematics, but it did leave me more jaded towards the education system.
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