What's So Cool About a Teacher?

Are “cool” teachers better teachers? In the bloggingheads diavlog between William Deresiewicz and Mark Edmundson, the two professors discuss the Academic-Industrial Complex. As part of their debate, they converse about the topic of whether or not professors should be “cool” in the classroom. In this dialogue, William Deresiewicz brings up a major point: teachers need to stop trying to be cool so they can show students how they should be behaving and thinking. However, I don’t think that that is entirely the case.

The main objective of any teacher should be to effectively teach their students so they will retain the information taught to them and apply the concepts. A number of teachers forget this main objective when teaching, which results in a “fun” class that students did not retain any information from. On the other hand, there are a number of teachers that take their work so seriously that students tend to find classes taught by those teachers extremely boring. In such cases, the teacher’s objective of making sure their students learn the material backfires on them and most of their students are so disinterested that they forget the material by the end of the course. An effective teacher should keep the main objective in mind while attempting, if not succeeding, to make their classes interesting enough so that all of their students are paying attention and actually learning.

Pauline Slakey writes in her essay that “the most effect teaching is a the[sic] type of teacher that takes it upon him or herself to apply the information learned to the students lives and to give examples of how he or she as a teacher feels in relation to the material.” While that is an effective form of teaching, it may not be the most successful way of teaching. There are many ways that a teacher can make a class interesting and still teach the required material. A teacher can use media in the classroom that pertains to the subject, or a teacher could get the whole class involved in a big discussion on a topic pertaining to the subject matter. There is a multitude of teaching techniques that make a class more interesting to students; saying one is more effective than the rest may not be correct.

A very important point about an effective teacher is brought up by Dave Soltes in his essay. He talks about an AP US History teacher that was voted “favorite teacher”; she obtained this award because “she was genuinely passionate about the material that she taught and was unwavering in her goals to inspire and challenge her students”. When a teacher attempts to be “cool” by using different techniques they learn from other teachers or at conferences, it may not always work as planned. An effective way of being a successful teacher is to teach like the AP US History teacher Dave Soltes talks about. A teacher can’t just try different techniques to make things more interesting; they need to be the best teacher they can possibly be. Teachers really need to be “genuinely passionate about the material that [they teach] and [be] unwavering in [their] goals to inspire and challenge [their] students”.

William Deresiewicz and Mark Edmundson also brought up the point of teacher evaluations in their Bloggingheads discussion. They talk about the fact that students evaluate their teachers. They say that if a professor is not seen as cool, they can get fired due to the student evaluations. If a teacher is going to be evaluated, they will most likely stress over the risk of getting fired. This is a lot of unneeded stress on a teacher. A teacher evaluation is an unnecessary attempt at making a university look better. In the Bloggingheads discussion, they talk about a particular case where a teacher got fired simply because her evaluation score was just below the minimum passing score. Universities don’t need to be that critical on teachers. If a small percentage of students don’t like the class, it does not mean that the teacher is doing a bad job at teaching. Universities need to take into account the facts that some students don’t always answer those evaluations truthfully and that students may dislike a teacher because they dislike the subject. There is a multitude of factors that colleges and universities need to take into account when deciding whether or not a teacher should be fired when they look at the students evaluations.

When it all comes down to it, the most important factor of teaching is not whether or not a teacher should be cool. Most importantly, a teacher should make sure that their students learn the required information about the subject they are teaching. Once a teacher knows that they can accomplish that goal, they can then attempt to make their class interesting enough so that all their students pay attention and learn the required material.