What is a good teacher?
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What
is a good teacher?
“Can you bring a child to joy through Geometry?”, (Krishnamurti,
n.d.).
This for me is the essence of being a good teacher. The focus
and the intention is clear. Bringing a child to joy of learning the subject is
the core of being a good teacher.
Everything else moves around it.
What is joy?
“According to my Random House dictionary, joy means, "The emotion of great delight or
happiness caused by something good or satisfying."” (Wolk, 2008)
In my personal experience, some of what a good teacher would do
to bring joy in the classes is as follows. I have given each point with 1
example from my own Maths classes.
Give students choice: Set a target work for 3 days. Ask students
to organize it as they wish. If they finish fast, they can organize the extra
time as they wish without disturbing others.
Take the class outdoors: During winters, one can always go
outdoors and have the class on the lawns or have an activity that is outdoors.
Make the physical space beautiful: Let every point in the class
reflect beauty and order. The boards, the furniture arrangement or the floors.
Have multiple settings in the class: Rotate between teacher teaching,
students working on their own and students working alone as settings in the
class.
Differentiate the teaching strategies: Teach using multiple
strategies based on Multiple Intelligences.
Bring art and music in the class: Connect Maths with art and
music. This is to make the subject softer and more emotionally appealing.
What kind of classrooms students gravitate towards?
Jenny was a Spanish teacher. Students ran for her class. She was
simple, hardworking and shorter than most of the students in the class. For her
birthday the entire group of Spanish students spent the time in their lunch or
buses designing cards for her.
I asked her once, “What do you do?”
She said, “I just love them!”
Beyond all that you know about how to teach and where to teach, “All
you need is love”, (Shelja, 2016)
When you love the students, you would try to be present with
them in the situation that they are. Then the rest would flow out of it. The
lessons, the classroom environment, the activities and the rest of it.
Relationship would be the heart of the whole work.
“Every kid needs a champion”, (Pierson, n.d.)
References:
- Krishnamurti, J. (n.d.). Krishnamurti on Education. Retrieved from http://legacy.jkrishnamurti.org/krishnamurti-teachings/view-text.php?tid=43&chid=297&w=&s=Text.
- Wolk, S. (2008). Joy in school. The Positive Classroom, 66 (1), 8-15. Retrieved from http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/sept08/vol66/num01/Joy-in-School.aspx
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