What is good teaching?

Good teaching takes place when both the teacher and the student are open to new ideas.  A teacher may have academic knowledge or skills, but it is possible that a student might have specific or unique experiences that can be brought to the learning environment.  Good teaching needs to take into consideration limitations or needs that a student might have that need to be considered.  Learning environment affects good teaching also, as an environment that is not conducive to teaching will affect the learning of the student.  The teacher needs to control the environment as much as they can to provide a good quality learning environment.  Encouragement or inspiring by using positive not negative prompting is also a must.  It is much easier to promote learning when using kindness thereby invoking a student desire to learn.

I could give a several examples of bad teachers that I had as I had them through numerous grades in school.  In one case when I was in the first grade our class had a creative writing assignment and I received a poor grade.  My mother had read what I had written and as a college teacher she knew that what I had written was good.  When my mother confronted the teacher about the assignment it turned out the teacher had not even read what I had written but had assigned grades based on sex.  The teacher told my mother that boys to not write as well as girls do and she assigned grades as such.

I believe a teacher needs to have more than a passing knowledge of the subject material.  I had several incidences with math classes.  In a third grade math class I had a teacher that could only answer math questions if the answers were in the back of the teachers edition of our math book.  This teacher did not know math well enough to answer simple arithmetic questions unless she had been provided the answers by the book.

I have other examples that I will not give, however I will say that in elementary school I learned to dislike school a great deal.  By the time I graduated high school I had at least learned to tolerate being in school.