Golden or rotten memories of our own teachers will never disappear!

The golden memories of the teachers that we used to look up to will never fade away. Maybe we even tried to copy the ways of teaching of that person at the beginning of our career.

My favourite teacher happened to teach history. Later on at the university I realized he had five essential qualities:

1. He was … credible = he meant what he said and was a convincing , there was no pretending
2. He was … reliable = he followed his principles and rules consistently, we mostly knew what his reaction would be like
3. He was … empathic = he was on our side and fair in all situations
4. He had … emotional intelligence = he could sense our moods and emotional states and knew which strings to pull
5. He was … knowledgeable = he knew what he was teaching us and had the skill to get the message through to us

I always looked forward to the lessons since he had the ability to make the lessons fascinating with his stories, explanations and big cardboard pictures or slides. He had a great sense of humour and the first exam question was always a joke. He also played the guitar in a band and we sometimes sang songs in his lessons too.

Thanks to him I still believe that lectures can be an effective way of learning. Sad to say but good lecturers are hard to find. Lecturing is a skill most of us don’t have. Besides, students of today are often too impatient to listen to someone talking too long. That is why I always recommend student-centred methods which also guarantee better learning outcomes.

In spite of his old-fashioned teaching methods of the 1970s we enjoyed the captivating lessons and loved our history teacher because …

• he gave us clear rules of behaviour and we knew exactly what we could do and were not allowed to do in his lessons, he even told why he insisted on those rules
• he actually managed the class well and we felt the discipline was not harsh, we felt safe with him
• he treated all of us the same no matter how good we were in history, he had some magical way of knowing if a weak student knew the answer and encouraged that student to reply
• he was interested in us as individuals and kept on advising us while he was going around the class while we were working
• he made clear from the very beginning that there were no bad answers and no-one was to be bullied or teased no matter what
• he had a great sense of humour and the stories and jokes helped us to remember the big picture too
• he was patient with us, guided us to grasp the main points of the lesson
• he respected us and our opinions and raised his voice very seldom and

Above all we felt he was on our side, always ready to help us. Secondly, he was fair in his decisions and marking.

Unfortunately we also had some bad teachers whose memory will never vanish either. In brief, what I am trying to convey to you is that in the end we teachers are measured at many levels and it is most unfortunate if we are remembered in such a negative light as I still after more than 50 years remember some of my teachers.

My worst school memories are from elementary school at the age of eight. I started to dislike my woodwork teacher because …

• he beat me in front of others when I accidentally dropped a plane (a tool used for levelling wood) on the floor
• he had very strict military-like discipline in class and he kept on shouting at us
• he lost his temper easily and mocked students in public, he was a bully himself in modern terms
• he controlled us with fear and used verbal or physical abuse
• he believed in the power of physical punishments, sadly enough I did not dare to tell my parents about this incident
• he told us once what to do and ignored our questions if we did not understand what to do or how to do it

Another bad memory concerns my class teacher at the same time in the elementary school.

• she favoured one boy in many ways and we thought it was wrong but had no guts to tell her so
• she got rid of a boy representing a minority group because he could not resist eating our colourful crayons, we never got to know his destiny

In the final year in the sixth form we had a hopeless physics teacher.

• he had no authority in the class and the whole lesson was always a chaos
• he entered the class, started talking and kept on talking even if we were not listening or learning anything
• he did no care if we followed the lesson or learnt anything, the noise was awful and some of the boys were playing cards to pass the time away
• he had no respect for us and neither did we for him, I shut my ears and read the physics book to learn at least something