What makes for a good teacher? Also, tell us about great teachers you have known.

In My Humble Opinion
1

The Pit thread about senior managers contains a brief side discussion about teaching that inspired this thread. I’m too lazy to link to it, though.

In answering the first half of the thread question, I think we should keep in mind that different subjects require different teaching approaches. I don’t know jack about sports, but I tend to think that teaching someone to be a good basketball player is quite different than teaching someone biology, and both of those are different than teaching someone to be a good salesman. Thus it’s likely, maybe even probable, that various posters may contradict one another and yet both be correct.

The second half of the question is possibly easier, and because I’m lazy I’m going to start there. My high school trig & calculus teacher was absolutely brilliant at teaching math. In part it was because of his dedication – he stayed hours after school every day to tutor anyone having trouble – but more importantly it was because he always found a way to relate his subject to the real world. Whenever anyone asked the cliche question “When am I going to use this in the real world?” he’d reply, "Well, let’s see. You plan to be an (engineer/surveyor/chemist/whatever) and explain exactly how the topic we were on was useful.

Anybody else? Bueller?

2

Love of the subject matter. Genuine enthusiasm is infectious, enlivens lectures, and helps motivate teachers to do all of the other things that good teachers do. (Staying after class, arranging interesting guest speakers and field trips, and so on.) If you love what you’re teaching, it’s pretty easy to be good at it; if you don’t care for the subject, you’ll have to work a lot harder.

One example: My International Relations professor in college. Fantastic teacher - engaging, clear, good sense of humor. After my mandatory IR 101 class, I decided to spend the rest of college focusing on that field, and I never looked back.

3

Mr. Excellent nailed it. If you don’t even love it, how can I love it? It brings to mind my eleventh grade who adored Shakespeare and brought so much passion to it, or my tenth grade history teacher who used to bring in a guitar and sing songs of the period, or my tenth grade English teacher whose fond smile I still remember while discussing Goldman’s Princess Bride.

I don’t at all remember a gym teacher that was enthused about it, but then again I never liked gym class much - it’s not fun after everyone gets SOOPER DOOPER SERIOUS about a game that’s supposed to be entertainment.

But here’s another one. I got, in eleventh grade, a Spanish teacher who EVERYONE said was a real dick. But…when I got into the class, I found out that he was only a dick to people who didn’t love Spanish. I did, and he was never a dick to me. He taught Russian, in Spanish, after school, and I attended that, and he and I always got along well. He wasn’t warm or kind but he noticed effort and love and I appreciated that.

How could I say all this and not mention my college calculus teacher? A nun who totally, totally changed my opinion on nuns - up until then I’d never met a nice one. She was as kind as a mother and sharp as a whip, too.

4

A good teacher is aware of their surroundings and can simultaneously see the classroom through multiple eyes. They see all the individual misunderstandings that are happening and move to correct them. A good teacher understands where each kid is and knows where they want them to be at the end of the year.

A good teacher has enough personality to keep people focused and interested and to minimize disruptions without spending a lot of time on it. In that sort of classroom everything will seem to just work and there is very little wasted time.

A good teacher can see which kids have which buttons, and knows when and how to push them.

A good teacher knows how to set boundaries without the kids noticing or feeling rebuffed, in order to preserve their own sanity.

A good teacher is proud of what they are and what they do, and tends to associate with others who feel the same way.

There’s more, of course, but those are the first things that come to mind.

5

That for one. In general, my HS classmates and I learned Math in Chemistry and Physics - because our Math teachers didn’t just “not make any efforts to relate their subject to the rest of the world”, some of them even took offense when we tried to make such a connection. Chemistry and Physics applied Math, made them have a relationship with the rest of the world.

Also, a good teacher is good at listening and good at making students feel that their efforts and their results are appreciated.

One of my classmates was hyperactive: maybe not medically, and he didn’t have any more attention deficit problems than the rest of us, but he definitely had a lot more energy than the rest of us put together. When it was evident even before we’d sat down that he was even more hyper than usual, the teachers would send him to run around the schoolyard a couple of times, then come back in: that burned off the excess energy and let him behave.

Eventually he became our HS’s PhysEd teacher, and several of us went there to watch his first class. After looking our way several times, he spent most of the class very carefully Not Looking at the area where we were. Once he’d sent the kids to shower, he came over saying “c’mon, lay it down, you guys are here to rip me a new hole, aren’t you?” There was a general “oh no”, someone pointed out “we just think it’s funny you’re a teacher here after how much some of our teachers suffered with you :D” and I told him “I expect you to be a good PhysEd teacher, actually: you know most people don’t have your energy levels… you may be one of those rare PhysEd teachers who believe a kid who says a certain exercise hurts”. He looked very thoughtful at that - and from what I hear, the kids adore him.

As someone who had a lot of little medical problems (glasses that would come apart if I moved too much, warts in sole and ankle, equilibrium problems, vertigo, locking elbows, rinitis) which were always disregarded on account of “pfaugh, you’re just complaining because you’re lazy”, that one gym teacher who actually set out to solve those she could solve is still one of my heroes.

6

My 10th grade Math teacher loved math, but she couldn’t relate to us at all, couldn’t keep discipline, didn’t even understand our questions. She was very enthusiastic about math, but having a student ask “ok, so the tangent function is actually continuous, no? I mean, it just loops through infinity” didn’t throw her half as much as having five other students agree with the asker. Her answer was “:eek: but it is not! :eek:”, with no further reasoning (according to a college Geometry teacher I met years later, “in Geometry, infinity is a real number” is perfectly coherent Math… we just happened to be better at Geometry than Algebra).

I wish her well, but teaching HS was simply not something she was good at, any more than I’d be good at playing basket.

7

The National Board for Professional Teacher Standards suggests 5 Core Propositions for being a good teacher:

These might be an interesting place to start.

8

The good teachers I had showed personality. They weren’t afraid to openly break the rules. Even “good” rules.

For instance, there was one high school teacher I had who was quite religiously devout. She’d write long-ass spiritual tracts on the chalkboard in the morning and sing gospel songs in the hallway. Once, I had a class with a Matthew, Mark, and Luke in it. That sent her into a frenzy.

But she was a brilliant math teacher, and there was a reason she was the department chair. She commanded a classroom like no one else, and she had this no-nosense style that jibed very well with mathematics. She also knew how to go for bat for her students. I wasn’t her student for geometry (a subject she didn’t even teach), but once she saw me stressing out about an up-coming geometry test and told me to come to her before school for extra attention. My own teacher had not offered to do this. She gave me a heavy dose of prayer pep-talk (which I now find hilarious), but she did actually help me with the problem I was having too.

Another good teacher I had was kind of a hard-ass too, but on the polar opposite of the moral spectrum–a devout atheist who cussed openly, always sitting behind her desk, talking to us kids like we were grown. She also played favorites BIG TIME. She was unabashed with it. She threw parties for two of her classes, even inviting those students to her house, while excluding the other students. And you could kind of tell she didn’t really do lesson plans and didn’t cleave to any kind of theory of education. Based on these things, you might be tempted to think she was one of those “bad” teachers.

But no. She was one of the best teachers I’ve ever had. She taught me how to not only write an essay, but how to write a KILLER essay. I was able to ride that skill all through college and graduate school. And she didn’t just assign books. She made us eat and digest them, whether we wanted to or not. She didn’t care if you didn’t like taking notes, she mandated that you write annotations as you read (she actually had us turn in our books so she could see that we had done this). She assigned the hardest essay topics, and everyone would have a different one. I once had to write an essay on the role of diction on the symbolism in Ethan Frome. I’m still blown away that I was able to pull this off as a sixteen-year-old. I wish I had saved the paper.

She made one of her classes read the Bible. Not what you would have expected out of her, but it makes perfect sense too.

They were not necessarily my favorite teachers, but they were exceptional ones. I think their ballsiness against the establishment made them better at what they did. Even the ultra-religious one. Because if you stand out as different, you’ve already won a good part of the battle: capturing attention. Also, if they could break administrative rules, then that probably emboldened them to be more innovative and take more risks in what they did with their students.

9

A good teacher is not necessarily good at explaining things, but a person who is able to enthuse the pupils and make them want to learn.

10

These things are all necessary–without these, enthusiasm for the subject and “personality” alone are not sufficient.

Moreover, these are things almost always are attained only by extensive experience in the field with any given target student population.

11

My 11th grade English teacher was fantastic. It was an AP prep course. At the beginning of the semester, I couldn’t hang on to a thought long enough to write a 500-word essay. At the end, I was able to bang out essays that got 5s on the AP tests, and to think more clearly too.

I think there were two great things about the way he taught.

First, he was absolutely clear about what this course was about, and had clearly thought-out ways of achieving it. We read books and then went through them page by page, and he would point out to us the developing themes and plot structure. He also had us write one in-class and one out-of-class essay every week. This gave us lots of practice in formulating ideas and interpreting text, both on our own time, and on the clock.

Second, he was ruthless in grading the essays. If we weren’t sticking to our theme, if we missed something obvious, if we had a spelling, grammar or punctuation error–kablooey. He usually wrote more on our essay papers than we did. It was a great way to learn; no pussyfooting around.

12

Great teachers push students beyond their current capabilities.

13

My ninth grade math teacher (for both terms) was great. The two tenth grade geometry teachers were awful, but I could not point out how they differed from the ninth grade teacher.

But the really awesome teacher that made me a mathematician was not even generally considered even a good teacher for the general student. What he did, essentially, was teach a graduate level course in modern algebra to a class of students who had had no math beyond calculus. This destroyed most of the students, but it made me.