The Elements of a Good Teacher

The Elements of a Good Teacher

I've never been a teacher, so immediately some would say, "You have no right to judge teachers." This attitude drives a wedge between a teacher and a student, making it seem as though the two are different, when in fact teachers are students, and students are just teachers in training.

This attitude also creates a power structure that is damaging to the relationship between a teacher and a student. A teacher is not a dictator of knowledge, but a only a guide that shows the student the way. The teacher may only impart tools to the student so that they can traverse the road on their own, rather than being carried to the end, thus learning nothing.

I don't mean this just in the philosophical sense, but also practically such as in a typical classroom setting. In the book How to Solve It by Polya, he begins with a fictional dialogue between a math teacher and his lost student. The student is attempting to figure out a formula for finding the length of a diagonal in a rectangular box. Throughout the whole conversation, Polya emphasizes the types of questions that a teacher asks to inadvertently force the student to figure out the problem on their own. 

 

He spends around 30 pages of detail about how this is done, but some example questions include, “Have you used all the information in the condition?”, “Do you know a similar problem with the same types of unknowns?”, “What is the unknown in the problem?”, “What do you think the answer will look like?” etc. An example of a bad question would be, “Could you use the pythagorean theorem in this problem?” This is bad because, (1) the student has no idea how the teacher figured out that you need to use the pythagorean theorem in the problem (2) the student will not understand how generalization was used to solve the problem (3) the question may have given away the answer and thus the student learned nothing because no effort was required. By asking a question like, “Could you use the pythagorean theorem in this problem?” would carry the student to the end, rather than requiring him to find their own way.

What is more important to a teacher than amassing an impressive amount of scholastic knowledge, is learning to think like their student, so that they can understand where they are encountering roadblocks. This requires patience, empathy, and respect. 

 

A more accurate word than respect might be reverence, which emphasizes “learning your place”. A teacher who is arrogant is the worst kind of teacher, because they believe they somehow dictate knowledge, and that they are always right. A teacher who is arrogant also cannot adapt to their student, and will be unable to help them at all. And of course, a teacher is also a student and that they are sometimes wrong implying that they could learn from their student. A teacher who remembers this will remain humble.