Post # 1
Member
9916 posts
Buzzing Beekeeper
My father-in-law posed this question at dinner the other night:
For your children, would you rather have a teacher who was intelligent or educated?
Then, would you rather have a teacher who was intelligent or compassionate?
Or then, of all three: intelligent, educated, compassionate…
If you’ve ever read my responses to the “moral” questions of saving an animal or a human, you know I can avoid choosing. But I’m curious as to what you all think…
Post # 3
Member
9916 posts
Buzzing Beekeeper
My answer was that an intelligent teacher would be best, because he/she would educate herself about the science of teaching, and he/she would recognize when a student needed compassion. But that’s a cop out.
Post # 4
Member
3772 posts
Honey bee
#1. Intelligent
#2. Compassionate (as long as they’re competent and not a complete idiot)
#3. I’ll rank in order of “importance”: Compassionate, intelligent, educated. I feel this way because I personally have an extremely hard time learning from someone who doesn’t care if their students succeed or fail. And I also feel that anyone who studies long enough is capable of getting an education. For the sake of this discussion, I am assuming that “educated” means “having a degree”. There are plenty of doctors out there who are so unintelligthat that it’s terrifying.
Post # 5
Member
9916 posts
Buzzing Beekeeper
@s2bmrscook: I think he meant educated as in, “Went to school to learn how to teach.” His goal, of course, was to say that teachers are stupid, and that no amount of education can help that. Ugh.
Post # 6
Member
9916 posts
Buzzing Beekeeper
I also think compassion matters more in a case by case basis…younger children need it more than they need a super smart teacher, but older children need the super smart teacher more than they need to be coddled…unless it’s a kid who needs coddling.
My husband’s sister-in-law is enrolling her son in kindergarten this year, and said if the teacher isn’t intelligent enough she’s going to homeschool her son.
Post # 7
Member
1143 posts
Bumble bee
Are you meaning compassionate as showing an emotion like when a student has a bad day and consoling them, or where they have a passion for teaching and seeing their students succeed. Thinking back to high school, which really wasn’t that long ago, there was clearly a difference between teachers who were just there to be there, and those who really wanted us to learn the material and be good at/with it.
I do think intelligence is important (as PP said, having an education/degree doesn’t necessarily mean you’re good at what you do), but without the passion to teach and help your students learn, they’ll just be left behind in the dust.
Post # 8
Member
9129 posts
Buzzing Beekeeper
- Wedding: November 2013 - St. Augustine Beach, FL
Intelligence then education then compassion. Education can only take you so far and there are plenty of dumb people out there with lots of education but little sense. I ranked compassion last because while I don’t think a teacher should be mean to her students, I do think that nicer teachers tend to be pushovers and provide too many do-overs for students that should be either pushed harder or allowed to fail out. I’m sorry but some people are just not college material and we need to be providing meaningful education for those students as well as the ones that are intelligent enough for college.
Now if you replace compassion with passion then my order would be 1) passion; 2) intelligence; and 3) education.
Post # 9
Member
9916 posts
Buzzing Beekeeper
@Twyla_Smith: I had teachers in high school who fell into a third category: they absolutely knew the material, but they could not get the students to understand it. Those are people who I think fall completely in the “intelligent” or even just “book smart” category. They wanted us to learn, sort of, but more I think they didn’t understand why we couldn’t understand what they understood. Sorry, Ms. Mace, your “teaching” method of glaring when students did trigonometry wrong was NOT HELPFUL.
I do think intelligence matters so much, though. I know so many teachers who are like, “Hee hee reading is sooo hard!” or “I never did well in school.” THEN WHY ARE YOU A TEACHER?? “Cause kids are sooo cute!” UGH.