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Greatest Teachers

posted by n1 on Thursday October 30 2014, @01:10AM   Printer-friendly
from the student-of-life dept.

mendax writes:

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?

 
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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by Thexalon on Thursday October 30 2014, @01:38PM

    by Thexalon (636) Subscriber Badge on Thursday October 30 2014, @01:38PM (#111506)

    Some pointers:
    1. Care deeply about what you are teaching, and know it intimately. That kind of passion and knowledge is contagious.

    2. Care deeply about the success of your students in learning the material. (Don't worry so much about them getting good grades - if they really learn the material, the good grades will happen. If they don't, they deserve the grade they get as a result.)

    3. If you get to the point where a student asks a question you don't know the answer to, the right answer is always either "I don't know that, so let's try to figure out a way to come up with a good answer." or "That's a really good question, but so far nobody else has been able to come up with a way of answering it. I'll help you find the current research on the subject."

    4. Admit mistakes when you make them. One of the better math teachers I had in high school spent most of the class time doing the homework problems and having us students gleefully point out his mistakes - which was a great teaching device, because it meant we got really really good at spotting and correcting our own mistakes.

    --
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