Oppinions About Good Teachers

Personally I think that there are two essential skills that any “good teacher” must have. The first is to be able to have fun with the students. I know from personal experience that without some level of engagement from the teacher, if I do not find the topic to be interesting then I will not absorb any of it. So the educator must be able to find a way to make a topic interesting. I remember from middle school I had a really cool French teacher who I can still distinctly remember the lesson (if not the actual words). When he was teaching us the french words for various body parts he brought in a tear apart doll dressed like a coach. He would rip off the arm and say the french word. After a few repetitions he replaced the arm and did the same with the head and so on. The following year my high school French teacher was a flashcards-and-workbook kind of teacher. I took her classes for two years without learning anything more than je ne parle pas Francais, or “I do not speak French.”

The second criteria is that they can retain some sort of control over their class. I have had a fair number of teachers who easily fit into the above category but when it came to student/teacher dynamic they tried to hard to be friends and as a result they could not get the class to fall back into line when it was time to actually teach. One of my favorite teachers from high school was a really cool guy and very understanding with grades and projects, but many of the students did not respect him and as a result there were times where he would “let the class go work on their projects” rather than try to continue the lesson.