Finding the BEST Teachers

If you are a parent, you know the conversations that go on at the end of every school year. “Who are the good teachers in the fourth grade?” “Has your daughter taken math from Mr Jones? How was he?”

If you want real fun, check out the websites that rate college teachers. Everything from who is a good teacher to who is the “hottest” teacher at the college.

So what makes a good teacher good and a bad teacher bad? Let’s start with the bad teacher first. They are much easier to work with anyway.

A bad teacher really doesn’t care about kids. In a meeting I was in yesterday in Alaska, it was stated, by administrators, that teachers have to identify with and like kids. That makes sense. If a teacher, or an administrator, doesn’t like kids, they should not be working at a school. The schools product is kids. If you don’t like cars, you should not work in a car factory or for a car dealership. Go find something else to do.

And if you don’t like kids then you should not work at a school. Go find something else to do.

There are also those teachers that are just not very good at teaching. Teaching is a skill. Because it is a skill it can be learned. Learning means you have to practice that skill to get better at it. But sometimes, no matter how hard you try, it just doesn’t work.

As much as I thought I was a world-class soccer player, I really wasn’t. I was a decent high school and college soccer player. But that was all. I was actually a much better coach than I was a player. I practiced hard, played pretty much every day of the week for 52 weeks of the year. I played the best I could. It was very important to me to succeed and be good at this. But, eventually, you come to the realization that you have reached the top. And there is nothing wrong with that.  My top is just different than someone else’s top.

The same thing happens in teaching. Some people really want to be teachers. They work at it, study it, read about it, work very hard to make things happen. But their top is different than someone else’s top. And that is just okay.

What you want to avoid, and what schools need to eliminate, is the teacher that just doesn’t care about the kids. They only care about them. It is all about them. They want to teach a certain subject, they will teach it their way and if the kids can’t learn that is just too bad. Your student must not be smart enough or they are just not working hard enough to pass the class. But whatever it is, it is not the teacher’s fault. Or that is what they will tell you.

Not every teacher has to be world-class. They just have to be good at what they do. Some will rise to the top and be praised as examples to their fellow teachers. They will be seen as the “Ideal Teacher” and be awarded Teacher of the Year and other honors. Everyone will ask, “Is there room in that class for my child?” And that is all well and good. But that doesn’t make them a good teacher.

What makes a good teacher? They care. That’s all. Very simple. They care.

What do they care about? They care about their students. They care about their students’ families. They care about their school. They care about their colleagues. They care about things they should care about. Most importantly, they care about learning.

Notice I didn’t say they care about teaching. That is just the outcome of their care about learning. Good teachers are always learning. They love to learn. What they learn about changes all the time. One year it may be about Native American history and the next it is about Victorian England and the stories of Sherlock Holmes. It doesn’t matter. They just love to learn.

Because they love to learn, they teach kids to love to learn. The teachers I remember best may have not been the “best” teachers in the school. But they were the best for me. I had a math teacher somewhere in the junior high years that taught me to love math. He made it fun for me. I used to play games with pennies that he taught me. They were fun, and I learned math. Maybe I didn’t learn processes, but I learned concepts. The problem was, that later math teachers didn’t make it fun so I stopped learning math. I decided I didn’t have a “math mind” after all. Too bad for me.

I had one teacher in college that all he did was lecture. It was a history class. It was the old days and the latest technology was an overhead projector. He would write on the sheet all the notes we were supposed to take. We just had to write as fast as he did. As he talked, you could tell he loved history. And because he did, so did I. I took every class he taught and, for a time, I declared a history major. Though I never finished the major and took another direction, I still see myself as a “history buff.” And because I do and have shared that, my kids consider themselves “history buffs” as well. One just told me that she wants to teach history and has started to school to make that happen.

Learning is fun. When you stop learning you stop living. Teachers are what make learning fun. They are the tool that is used to teach kids to love learning. If you want to know who the good teachers are, ask them what they are learning themselves. That is how you will know. And if they are not learning, then your child probably won’t either. That is the time to ask the principal or the counselor for a change.