zameer's views about a good teacher

The task of the excellent teacher is to stimulate "apparently ordinary" people to unusual effort. The tough problem is not in identifying winners: it is in making winners out of ordinary people.

K. Patricia Cross

All of us have had teachers at different levels in our life, of different calibers; with different qualities. Some were loved and others were avoided. We remember a very few of these teachers as being good. What makes these few as excellent, memorable teachers? Why do some teachers inspire students to work three times harder than they normally would, while others inspire students to skip class? Why do students learn more from some teachers than others? Answers to these questions will lead us to a concept of a good teacher.

Aristotle once said that

"Teaching is the highest form of understanding" .

It is obvious that teaching is mainly concerned with understanding. But is it mere understanding or something else is also included? Yes there is. This is ‘understanding with delight’ as the classics’ motto goes. This understanding only comes when both the subjects and the objects are keen, active and desirous of knowledge sharing and the responsibility lies mainly on the shoulders of a teacher. A good teacher presents things in a way that are acceptable to logical minds and are easy to understand. A common example of this is a well-known three step argument (Aristotle 1995) which conveys the idea of Socrates’ mortality.

1. Major premise- All men are mortal.

2. Minor premise-Socrates is a man.

3. Conclusion- Socrates is mortal.

“All human beings by nature desire to know”. (Aristotle 1995).Only the need is to facilitate this ‘to know’ process by intrinsically or extrinsically motivating the students in the right direction and this is the job of a teacher. A good teacher sets grounds for the seeds of learning to flourish and works as a gardener who is always conscious of the plants’ needs.

The element of delight can not be neglected in learning. When understanding is combined with entertainment, the result is always achievements. But only a good teacher can acknowledge when to strike the right cords at the right time.

Moreover, a good teacher is flexible enough and tolerates every learning step taken by the learners. As universally admitted that learning can not take place without mistakes, a good teacher should have the courage to face these patiently. Stiff and rigid attitude at this stage can terribly affect students learning.

In a nutshell, a good teacher motivates the students, provides comprehensible input with logical examples and tolerates learning, no matter how irritating it is for him. We love to be with such teachers, we wish to inhale everything that comes out of them and we remember them long after they are gone.