These days, I do understand that teachers are human beings. However, thanks for the idea that teachers are expected to have “magic”, and that this is unreasonable.
I’ve heard claims that some teachers can get useful dominance quickly over otherwise difficult classes, but I don’t know whether those claims are true.
If it’s any consolation, I only disrupted classes less than a dozen times, possibly less than half a dozen.
One of the questions I asked in those informal surveys was what the respondents liked about school, and the answer was always something about being social and never about learning things, even though the school was probably academically better than most.
I’ve heard claims that some teachers can get useful dominance quickly over otherwise difficult classes, but I don’t know whether those claims are true.
I don’t know either. Most examples come from movies, and fictional evidence is unreliable. In the movies the teachers are often doing risky things which succeed only by a good luck, and a different result could bring them serious trouble. Also the solution (in movies) seems to be that students strongly care about something; the teacher notices it and shows that he cares too; initially students don’t believe him, but later it causes a conflict between the teacher and other authorities and he pays a cost of signalling; and this makes students love him. -- Maybe I am generalizing here too much from a very small sample of two or three movies. (Also “he”, because in my sample the teacher was always male.) -- In real life I consider this very unlikely. There is no single cause uniting all students, ready to be discovered and utilized (not even playing flash games online, though that one comes closest).
Some teachers have the kind of personality that makes them very dominant in some classes, but in my experience it does not work at all classes. Different things make impression on students of different age and background. Seems to me that for younger students being a parent or grandparent figure works great. For students near 18 being physically attractive and irradiating success works great. If there is a group of students that care about the subject, knowing the subject deeply works great—this last example is most politically correct and most widely known, but is very rare in the real life, because most students don’t care, even many of those who signal that they care.
However, even assuming that some exceptional people have this right kind of personality that works for everyone, problem is we need thousands and thousands of people in teaching positions.
These days, I do understand that teachers are human beings. However, thanks for the idea that teachers are expected to have “magic”, and that this is unreasonable.
I’ve heard claims that some teachers can get useful dominance quickly over otherwise difficult classes, but I don’t know whether those claims are true.
If it’s any consolation, I only disrupted classes less than a dozen times, possibly less than half a dozen.
One of the questions I asked in those informal surveys was what the respondents liked about school, and the answer was always something about being social and never about learning things, even though the school was probably academically better than most.
I don’t know either. Most examples come from movies, and fictional evidence is unreliable. In the movies the teachers are often doing risky things which succeed only by a good luck, and a different result could bring them serious trouble. Also the solution (in movies) seems to be that students strongly care about something; the teacher notices it and shows that he cares too; initially students don’t believe him, but later it causes a conflict between the teacher and other authorities and he pays a cost of signalling; and this makes students love him. -- Maybe I am generalizing here too much from a very small sample of two or three movies. (Also “he”, because in my sample the teacher was always male.) -- In real life I consider this very unlikely. There is no single cause uniting all students, ready to be discovered and utilized (not even playing flash games online, though that one comes closest).
Some teachers have the kind of personality that makes them very dominant in some classes, but in my experience it does not work at all classes. Different things make impression on students of different age and background. Seems to me that for younger students being a parent or grandparent figure works great. For students near 18 being physically attractive and irradiating success works great. If there is a group of students that care about the subject, knowing the subject deeply works great—this last example is most politically correct and most widely known, but is very rare in the real life, because most students don’t care, even many of those who signal that they care.
However, even assuming that some exceptional people have this right kind of personality that works for everyone, problem is we need thousands and thousands of people in teaching positions.