Compare/Contrast: Final Draft

So what makes a great teacher? A great teacher will first and foremost care about the material they are teaching and how well they are reaching the students with that material. They will also listen to their students and be able to take the criticisms about their teaching method to heart, adjusting his or her method to better reach the class. A caring teacher will take an interest in all their students on an almost friendship level. Not just within school but also taking interest in their extracurricular activities lending support where and when it’s appropriate. They will also give special attention to the students who are struggling rather than push them aside to get them out of the way. They will even go as far as to take time after class to reach these students so they don't, by proxy of spending too much time with struggling students, neglect the students who are doing well. A perfect example of a teacher who embodied all these qualities would be my high school math teacher Mr. Krats. I have also encountered the flip side of this coin in a math teacher we will call Mrs. Bake. So what makes a great teacher? A great teacher is a teacher that cares.

A caring teacher must first care for the work they do. Mr. Krats always came to work eager to reach his students, there was always this positive aura that came with him and filled his classroom with positive energy. It wasn’t necessarily the math that he was so enthusiastic about, although he had plenty of enthusiasm in that area; it was the opportunity to teach that he loved. A teacher who cares so strongly for his work makes it impossible to not care to learn it. As a student his enthusiasm pulls you into trying your best and earning better grades. You can’t help but want to learn from him. Mrs. Bake could drain the eagerness out of you just as fast as Mr. Krats could put it there. Her room was always unkempt and had a fairly offensive odor to it, already setting you in a downer place. She would seldom stand usually lecturing from a chair behind her desk, but when she would she had a slumped defeated demeanor as if all her students were just another irritating part of her annoying job. When Audre Lorde said, “caring for was not always caring about. And it always felt like sister MPH hated either teaching or little children.” (72) She could have been talking about Mrs. Bake herself. If she can’t care about teaching or her class why should her class care about her or what she teaches?

Caring teachers listen to their students about their views on the curriculum. One of the things most impressive about Mr. Krats was how readily he was willing to change the way he approached teaching something if people couldn’t quite grasp it the way he was trying to teach. He would listen to the class when they had a complaint about something then figure out a better way to reach them without dumbing down the material. In “The Banking Concept of Education” when Paolo Freire defines the superior style of teaching he calls “problem-posing education" he states, “The teacher is no longer merely the-one-who-teaches, but one who is himself taught in dialogue with the students, who in turn teach while being taught.” (3) Freire would agree that Mr. Krats has adopted the superior “problem-posing education” method of teaching. Mrs. Bake was all banking method. She would sit behind her desk and lecture, lecture, lecture leaving very little room for questions. If someone did manage to pop out an "I don’t get it" her “helping answer,” if you were even lucky enough to get one, was to simply reiterate what she had just said as if repeating what you didn’t comprehend in the first place would solve your problem. She had a hard time just listening to the fact you needed help, let alone listening to any suggestions you might have on how to better reach her class. Dan Brown states “no great teacher can simply shut her door to the outside world.” (2) But that’s exactly what she did.

Taking an interest in your students is one of the most important things a caring teacher will do. As mentioned before this should extend beyond academics and include home life as well as any extracurricular activities the student may be involved in. Dan Brown states “Great teachers have strong relationships with their students’ families and engage in meaningful ways with the larger community. Going to a volleyball game and cheering your face off can sometimes make a world of difference.” (2) Mr. Krats was incredibly good about doing these types of things. In high school I had a very keen interest in video editing and Mr. Krats, because he cared enough to get to know me, knew this. So after a math test one day when we had about 30min of extra class time he asked me if I would be willing to share one of my short films with the class. I did and the class loved it fueling and inspiring me to keep trying my best even in my little side hobbies. I however, cannot think of a single time Mrs. Bake ever took an interest in me, or anyone else. She never connected with her class it was simply be here, listen, and do your homework. Her inability to harness even the slightest interest in her students is one of the biggest reason I view her as the worst educator I have encountered in my schooling.

A teacher must care enough to take extra time with struggling students. I spent more than a few hours after school with Mr. Krats puzzling through tough math problems. He was always willing to put aside extra time for you if you needed extra help. He knew the value of his time, and he knew how he wanted to spend it. Krats went so far above and beyond with my friend Leon practically becoming a personal tutor for him in order to get him through algebra so he could graduate. Leon had fallen so far behind because of his encounters with Mrs. Bake years prior. Again Audre Lorde could have been talking directly about Bake when she said “Since I could not see at all to do any work from the blackboard, sister Mary of PH made me sit in the back of the room on the window seat with the dunce cap on.” (74) This is practically the same treatment Leon got from Mrs. Bake. Every time Leon got lost and raised his hand during her lectures to ask a question Mrs. Bake would send him out of the class for “disrupting her.” She must have taken an extreme dislike to him needing extra help and inconveniencing her with question because no matter how you cut it a student having a question on the material is NOT a disruption! Her appalling treatment of a struggling student set that student behind for years and could have destroyed his chances at academic success.

Mr. Krats and Mrs. Bake were, and are still math teachers. They both work at schools within the same district and I believe at one point they both worked in the exact same school. They also both had the amazing opportunity to teach wonderful me, but that’s about as far as their similarities go. Mr. Krats is caring teacher who will listen, help and take an interest in his students trying to do simply the thing he loves, teaching. If Mrs. Bake could adopt even half of the caring attributes of Mr. Krats the experience with her wouldn't be been such a colossal bump in the road of education. If she was just able to try, the massive detour in Leon’s success at school would have never happened. If Caring and great teachers like Mr. Krats were more common they would inspire other teachers as well as students who are soon to be teachers to achieve much more than the bare minimum required of them and potentially change this country’s standard of education to a much needed higher degree.