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NPR is starting off a series titled "50 Great Teachers" and is starting with Socrates:
We're starting this celebration of teaching with Socrates, the superstar teacher of the ancient world. He was sentenced to death more than 2,400 years ago for "impiety" and "corrupting" the minds of the youth of Athens.
But Socrates' ideas helped form the foundation of Western philosophy and the scientific method of inquiry. And his question-and-dialogue-based teaching style lives on in many classrooms as the Socratic method.
Most of us have been influenced by our teachers, and some of them may have even been great ones even if, unlike Socrates, they toiled in anonymity. So, I ask this question: Who were (or are) your greatest teachers, why, and what did you learn from them that made them so great?
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Thursday October 30 2014, @03:01AM
I'm sitting here trying to think what makes a great teacher -- I've had so many excellent and great teachers I wouldn't know where to start. I had only one really bad teacher all through school, for 8th grade American History. He managed to make the subject dry and dense; partly himself, partly his choice of textbook. That was the only class where I ever got a D. I only had one really bad teacher in college, for Physical Chemistry; he could not relate to students and was impossible to talk to (he had some sort of OCD/fear of errors that really interfered, and only taught because it let him do research).
I guess what distinguished my teachers was that they were excited to be there, every single day. They wanted to share knowledge, not just stuff it into our heads. They'd bend over backwards trying to impart understanding. We always had the rote learning that puts a subject at your fingertips for life, but it was never just memorization; we were taught the fundamentals behind it as well. The result was that our schools were consistently in the top 1% nationwide.
And we were expected to be disciplined, and to do our best. No one acted out in class (on the rare occasion when someone did, out came the paddle). It was embarrassing to be seen with a grade below par. The eggheads were the school heroes.
And we had very little homework (and none at all, other than quarterly book reports, until 9th grade). The current craze for homework is not teaching. It overloads young minds that then never get a chance to assimilate the day's learning. We don't expect adults to work 12 hours a day; why do we now expect it of kids, who get 7 hours of school and 5 hours of homework, starting in grade school??!
I applaud you for aspiring to be a great teacher, and I hope your students remember you well, as I do my many wonderful teachers.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.