Who is a good Teacher

A teacher is one who imparts the knowledge within, to all those who are willing to learn from. The understanding of the process of imparting the knowledge is very important before one attempts to teach. A good teacher is a person who knows the subject, the subjects (the recipients of the knowledge), teaching methodology and the objective.

This can be explained by way of a simple analogy. Take the instance of electricity which is the source of power, the wires being the power transmission path, the recipient of the power are the bulbs and the objective is to ensure that the bulb glows. Compare this to the teacher the source of knowledge to electricity the source of power. The methodology adopted by the teacher to transfer the knowledge can be associated to the power transmission wire. The student who assimilates the knowledge can be compared to the bulbs and finally the objective is the knowledge gained by the students which can be ascribed to the glowing of the bulb.

Deficiency in any one of the various entities involved, will not have the desired effect.

Situation one.

The electricity is there, the bulbs are there, but the transmission wire is not there. The bulb will not get power and so will not glow.

Similarly, the teacher if he/she does not want to impart the knowledge the student will not learn.

Situation Two.

The electricity, the wire and the bulbs are there. The bulb might glow but the intensity of brightness could vary. If the wire is of a high resistance nature the intensity of the bulb will be reduced, while if the wire is of very very low resistance capacity, the probability of the bulb blowing is there. To ensure that the full brightness of the bulb is achieved, the right wire and resistance should be selected. Sometimes a step-down transformer is also used to ensure that the bulbs of lower capacity also glows from the same power source.

Thus the teacher to ensure that the students gain complete knowledge, must follow the ideal path. The teacher ought to ensure that every student, right from the most intelligent to the lowest IQ students gain the knowledge. Thus sometimes the teacher will have to introduce examples or may be slow down the pace (equivalent of a step down transformer) to achieve this objective. This I call the methodology or the transmission process.

From the above it is very clear that a good teacher has to have a thorough knowledge of the subject, a good understanding of all the students and their capacities and apply the right teaching mechanism to achieve the objective of ensuring that students gain the knowledge that is being attempted to be imparted.

A good teacher is one who ensure that even the lowest IQ graded student also understand the subject.