Do you agree or disagree with the following statement? Patience is the most important quality of a good teacher. Use specific details and examples to support your opinion.
I will base my argument on my own teaching experience. I would say patience apparently is very importan, but there are a lot of qualities of a good teacher much more important than patience. For me, being professonal is the most important quality.
For a teacher being professional requires two essential components: knowledge and pedagogy. A teacher with amazing amount of knowledge in his or her subject is always very convincing. Most students appreciate teachers to give a reasonable interpretation of the theories written in the textbooks which are really hard to read. Being knowledgeable means that a teacher is able to explain things with more convincing examples, and sometimes the ability to explain theories by using multiple fields of study is considered as a more important quality of a teacher.
This is not necessarily related to patience. One of my professors in college is very unique of his personality. When I asked questions to him, he always cut me off within the first thirty seconds, saying, “I know exactly what you say. And it’s quite too na?ve. You go back home and read, uh… these two books. Is that clear? I have to go.” He never bothered answering questions in person but always left me a chance to figure it out by myself. I have to say he is the most impatient person I have ever seen. But I also think just because of this, I started regarding teachers as a guide instead of a wheelchair. They point out the direction to us and let us go exploring independently.
Another aspect of being professional for a teacher is if the pedagogy a teacher employs is good or not. A good teacher may not communicate with students directly instead of which he would just give lectures with audiences all listening. A good pedagogy is, in my opinion, a teaching method that can change complicated issues to a clearer vision and friendly access. Some of my collegues, who mainly teach in my company, are experts in employing modern techonology in class. They usually have over four hundred students in the class at the same time. There is no way that they can answer each student’s question patiently. However, they manage the class more efficiently by writing teaching books that contain the answers to those most frequently asked quesiton and by using multimedia to clarify each point they make in class.
To be honest, teachers are not babysitters. They certainly are required to be patient. However, to say if a teacher is good always comes from the class performance with a crafty teaching skills and sufficient knowledge backing it, which, I think, is the utmost consideration of evaluating a teacher.
(448 Words, Ge Xu)
