What is a good teacher?

Morris Mtisi
WHAT an interesting question! What is a good teacher? Indeed a difficult question too to answer. Yet it must be answered along with all other many questions we must ask about this form of democracy called education.

It is many other stations of influence around the education wheel that determine best practices or the right education, but teachers no doubt play the most significant part in determining the success of the learner.

It is true that the teaching and learning environment is directly driven in classroom practice. All other issues of policy, curriculum design, syllabi construction, examination and marking, evaluation through subject inspection and learning evaluation, teachers’ working conditions and salaries all importantly inform the politics of education. But it is the teacher who controls the game plan appropriate for success and achievement. He or she is the game changer. Hence the question, “What is a good teacher?”

This question demands an answer long and broad enough to fill chapters of a huge volume, for no one aspect or quality of teaching makes a good teacher.

It was Mr Divaries Jaravazi, one Accounting guru and lecturer at Bindura University of Science Education, also a colleague and friend of mine in teaching who took the bull by the horns and asked me. “What is a good teacher?”

I instantly asserted this was no question that called for one straight-faced answer. It was a complex question concealed and made very difficult by its simplicity. And we could put up a world conference of educationists to debate the question and still not exhaust what constitutes a good teacher. But faithful to my belief in doing difficult things immediately, the impossible taking a little longer, I will put the bell around the cat’s neck.

What is scintillating about my labour here is that I will not review or regurgitate views from established education theorists or psychologists, philosophers and writers on education.

I will take pleasure in suggesting personal views emanating or motivated and informed by my many years of experience as a teacher in what I can safely describe as excellent schools and of course sheer imitations of schools; miserable attempts to foster education and civilisation.

It would be a good idea to begin by what a good teacher is not.

He or she is not an intellectual or academic demigod or goddess who knows everything there is to know in every book. He or she is not Charles Dickens’ Mchoucumchild who knew everything about every country, every river, every mountain, every planet, every tree and rock and every star . . every form of Science and Mathematics, Algebra and Geometry. You name it, Mochoucumchild knew it. There are no teachers like that anywhere in the world except in fairy tales and figments of people’s imagination.

Every teacher knows what he knows and that only. He must be a learner too, busy learning as he or she teaches.

Poor teachers are arrogant practitioners who believe they are smart enough to pour tonnes of knowledge into empty heads. And pupils are no empty-headed idiots, tabula rasas, fundis call them. They all already have an innate measure of intelligence quotient naturally embedded in their brain, IQ it is commonly called.

So the best a teacher can do is withdraw what is in there and develop it and guide it to become meaningful and useful for personal and national development. He does not add any more intelligence to a plain brain. It is in fact not wrong to say he or she does not teach anything at all if teaching is supposed to be pouring knowledge into an empty head.

The word “education” is derived from Latin and it means “withdrawing”. And therefore educating someone involves withdrawing what is already readily available in that head.

A good teacher would essentially do that; withdraw whatever is in there already to foster its growth and usefulness in handling challenges of life and existence.

A good teacher may teach a group but must not see them as a group. He or she recognises individual differences, capabilities and peculiarities. He recognises various speeds of receptiveness and quickly observes differences in powers of memory and retention. And must have a method and strategy of handling each special case effectively.

Slow learners must and can achieve the same success as fast learners if their handicap is only slow learning. A good teacher will be patient with them and give them time to catch up. If it means more teaching or learning aids, so be it. If it means altering or reducing the speed of delivery, so be it. A good teacher will know what to do with and at every challenge experienced.

A good teacher is as smart in his or her dress as he or she is mentally. To influence intelligent thinking, teachers must be intelligent themselves. Far too many teachers exhibit below average intelligence and dubious mastery of their own subject matter. That is bad news. A competent teacher is always far above the academic and intellectual range of his or her pupils.

Guiding and shaping pupils’ minds takes competent teachers to effect effectively and efficaciously. It is true that in fact often times good is not good enough. A good teacher must have solutions and answers to children’s problems and questions.

Rarely and times far and between must he or she confess ignorance. As a matter of fact, a serious teacher will admit he or she has no correct answer but assigns pupils to find out as he or she does the same. That is both clever and honourable. A good teacher does not lie if he or she is put on the spot by smart pupils.

A good teacher gives adequate work to his class: homework, class work and more depending on his or her adventurousness.

He marks his work and gives feedback as soon as is humanly possible.

Talking about marking, the best is instructive marking. This refers to teaching in marking. Too many teachers use their red pens to whip children into line and to demonstrate their authority. Whoever suggested red ink as the best to indicate wrongs and rights! Sometimes I wonder why someone does not challenge this violent nonsense in children’s books. It is not a constitutional matter, is it? Even if it was constitutional, constitutional amendments are not subversive, are they?

My Theory of Education lecturer at Gwelo Teachers Education 38 years ago, one Miss Nongauza, roughly 60-65 years old then, brilliant, brutally smart up here, almost sweetly shrewish in conduct, once remarked, “I hate using the red pen. It is screaming violent.” She used a pencil for her marking. Never mind the hieroglyphic handwriting!

A good teacher acts in-loco-parentis, they say. This refers to treating, handling and regarding children as their father or mother; as their parent. Whatever you would do to your own child, do it to your pupil. Whatever you would not do, do not do it to someone else’s child — period.

Some teachers think abusing pupils refers only to improper association like sexual abuse. Mocking or ridiculing, humiliating students in the presence of their friends and peers is child abuse.

Some teachers are famous, notorious really, for spitting verbal venom at their pupils. This is damaging to the child and can incur a permanent wound on the child’s heart. It takes away his or her ego, invites disrespect from the victim and her or his friends. Sometimes students can team against such a teacher and unleash collective resentment because no one knows when it will be his or her turn to have their ego reduced in public.

Above all a teacher whose tongue is a trigger of public contempt is barbaric beyond denunciation. Oftentimes it is a sign of mental or intellectual inferiority, even social inferiority, and unfairly used as compensatory behaviour. Barbarians have no business in the classroom. It is that simple.

We cannot talk about male teachers who see his girl learners as prospective lovers. This is not only barbaric. It is a punishable offence and such teachers must be castrated if they want to continue to teach. Serious joke, isn’t it? But on a serious note they must be shown the exit door out of the education system.

Finally, for now at least, a good teacher must not only teach for examinations. He or she must teach life and prepare children for life. This involves character building. A nation does not prosper on degrees and diplomas, but good citizens whose sense of patriotism, responsibility and discipline determines the scope of a nation’s state of socio-political health.

The stability, honour and prosperity of a nation are not measured by the number of degrees citizens have acquired, but their state of patriotism and sense of responsibility. If learned doctors and professors ferment tribal or racial hatred, exclusionism leading to civil wars and general unrest, they are good for nothing fundis. If they are not role models of peaceful co-existence and tolerance, advocates of genuine democracy, they are dangerous liabilities of genuine development.

All the above must be values inculcated in young citizens in schools, directly or indirectly by teachers, good teachers.

Allow me to invite contributions from interested teachers, school heads and other officers of education to this debate: What is a good teacher? I am pretty sure the wisdom achievable from such a conversation is immense.

Leave your hard copy contributions by The Manica Post outside reception in sealed envelopes addressed to MM On Education. Those who can, please visit my private office at Eastern Highlands Church, opposite Afriport. Call first or alert me on WhatsApp and cell number 0773 883 293. Soft copies on USBs will receive first attention of course.

Until the following week, teachers remember Crosby, Stills and Nash’s golden oldie, Teach Your Children Well. And compliments of a new year! You are drivers of national development, nation builders. Yet, do not forget, you have to be good teachers first. Happy New Year!