During my career as a college student I discovered that there are all kinds of teachers, not just good ones and bad ones. I had dedicated teachers, lazy teachers, foolish teachers, arrogant teachers, wise teachers, and dumb teachers. Since I was attending college to learn how to be a teacher, I suppose it was good for me to experience being in all of these different types of classrooms, but it sure made learning hard sometimes.
The teachers I disliked the most were the arrogant ones. These were the teachers who were trying to prove how smart they were, at the expense of their students. I suspect you know this kind of teacher. They delight in designing tests that are as hard as possible, intentionally writing trick questions so they can fail as many students as possible. These teachers aim to be known as the HARD teachers, the TOUGH teachers, so everyone will know how brilliant they are. At first I just disliked this kind of teacher and tried to avoid them, but one day it dawned on me just what bad teachers they really were. After all, what should a teacher's main goal be? To fail as many students as possible, or to impart as much knowledge as they can to every one of their students, with the eventual goal of being able to pass every student they teach?
Teaching is hard, and it is easy to get burned out after awhile, but another type of teacher that really bothered me were the lazy ones. These teachers didn't care enough to put forth the effort to teach their students. Instead they expected their pupils to read the textbooks and gather knowledge on their own, with the teacher's only job being to hand out and grade tests. You know this kind of teacher, you probably had one in a high school history class. They were the ones who handed you a book when you walked in the door, told you to read chapter 23 and answer the study questions at the end, then gave you a test on the material, never bothering to do any actual teaching themselves.
I had some teachers like that in college, only because they had such large classes they didn't even grade the tests themselves. They had prep students, older college students getting credit for helping out professors, do all the work for them. I discovered in one psychology class that the more I wrote on essay questions, the better my grades got. After awhile I got in the habit of writing at least a full page for each question, and even though I had no idea what the real answer was, as long as I rambled on and on the prep students wouldn't take the time to read my answer carefully enough to see that I didn't know what I was talking about.
I took one class at ASU from a professor who was just about to retire. He didn't spend much time during that semester teaching, but I hadn't realized just how burned out he was until the last day of regular classes. All we had left to do was take our final exam the following week, but he really didn't want to bother with that, so he told us we could come and take the final on Wednesday and see how well we did, but he would automatically give anyone who chose not to take the final a B+ for that grade. I have no idea how many kids actually went and took the final on Wednesday, I don't suppose there were many. I took the B+.
The professors I enjoyed and learned the most from were the ones who loved what they were doing,and loved passing their knowledge on to their students. They got the most satisfaction from seeing us succeed, and consequently, they were the teachers whose students did the best. I determined pretty quickly that these were the teachers I wanted to emulate. Years later, when I became a teacher myself, I tried to remember how these teachers taught; how they wrote their tests, how they worked with each student and instilled in the classroom an enthusiasm for learning and an excitement for gaining as much knowledge as possible. Although it was impractical to expect perfection from every student, I sure wanted all of them to succeed. So it became my goal to pass every one of my students, and I usually did.
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