• Most people think that a good teacher is a fun, outgoing teacher who assigns almost no homework, but that’s not always the case. What makes a good teacher for me is a teacher who assigns a reasonable amount of homework for the subject, whether it be science or art, and a teacher who likes a little fun here and there.
    A great teacher can pop up in the most unexpected subjects. A good teacher to me is a teacher with a sense of humor, but that sense of when enough is enough and we have to get working. A world without humor is just black and white. But humor is only half of it. I also like a teacher who has a lot planned, including everything from boring reading to fun projects and activities. I expect these things of a good teacher, but a great teacher is so much more. A great teacher knows a trouble maker when they see one and act upon a whim, because usually teachers don’t act on a whim to something that seems right. They wait until they can know for sure. I do not like that in a teacher. It scares me. I think ‘You’ve been teaching how long and you don’t notice these things??’
    The best teacher I have ever had would probably have to be my 4th grade teacher, Mr. Teacher-man*. He had the best sense of humor I’ve seen in a teacher yet. He had a lot of great projects for us, and we even had pen pals in Afghanistan! It wasn’t all fun and games though. We did actually learn whether we wanted to or not. He had us sitting on the floor the first day of school, and I just knew he was different. Mr. Teacher-man* has a great personality, he’s like a big kid, in the sense that he knows what’s fun to us. Although he is a big kid, he’s a big kid with responsibility. He knows what’s what and when is too much.
    I learn best by doing things hands on and creative. If you just make me sit there and call on me every few questions and make me read, yeah I might retain some of the information, but I’ll forget the little things that aren’t “important” enough to my thought process. If I even just take notes or doodle throughout the reading then I’ll most likely retain a lot more facts than just sitting there and reading it. The absolute best way for me to learn is by doing outside-of-the-classroom projects. The project that I felt I learned a lot was the cell model we did last year in science. Every science teacher in the world does something like it, but it taught me a lot about cells, and a lot about myself. The project was to create a 3-D model of either an animal cell or a plant cell (of which you did was your choice) and label all ten parts I think you had to have on it (of which were all up to yourself also). But not only label the ten parts, have a key that told you what the part was and how it helped/worked in the cell. It was a great project. Needless to say it was fun and I was really excited that we actually got to play around with the idea of a cell. Take a cell, mutiply it in size by maybe 100,000,000 and present it.
    Great teachers come in all different subject and different grade levels. A fun, outgoing, anti-homework teacher just isn’t gonna cut it for me personally. All-in-all, I am a person who needs a wide variety of learning, and I learn the best by hands-on projects and what-not.