Welcome to the Listening Time Podcast.
Hey everybody, this is Connor and you're listening to episode 85 of the Listening Time Podcast.
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Alright, today we're going to talk about teachers.
I think this is a great subject to talk about, because I'm a teacher and I've had many teachers And I know all of you have had teachers before and I think teachers are important people and they can have a big impact on our lives.
So we'll talk a little bit about that today.
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All right, let's get started.
Are your ears ready?
You know what time it is.
It's listening time.
Okay, let's talk about teachers.
So, first of all, let's talk about the importance of teachers, because these are definitely important people in our lives, or they can be important people in our lives.
So a teacher's importance is to first of all instruct people right to teach, to explain complicated things or new things to students and help them understand these concepts.
So a teacher is the person that explains new things, complicated things and helps people learn these things.
That's very important.
Teachers can also share their experience with students and help students learn from their experience and their background.
This can also be an important thing.
Teachers can also be mentors to students.
And so they can be someone that the student can turn to for advice or for help or things like that.
In English, when we say that someone turns to someone else for something, we're saying that that person depends on or relies on that other person for something.
So if I turn to my dad for help, that means that I go to my dad and depend on him to help me, okay?
Another thing that teachers can do is motivate people.
Teachers can motivate students to learn to do great things to achieve goals.
A lot of stuff, right.
Teachers can motivate people.
And teachers can also correct you, right?
When you do things wrong, when you're not doing something the way you should or you're mistaken about something, a teacher is there to correct you and show you that you're wrong, and show you the right thing or the right way.
So these are some of the important things that teachers give us.
So let's talk about the qualities of a good teacher.
Of course, this is my opinion.
You might have some other qualities that you would also mention, but these are the ones that I thought of.
So I think one of the most important qualities of a good teacher is a desire to teach.
This one seems pretty obvious, but there are many teachers that don't really have a big desire to actually teach.
And so if a teacher really wants to teach, they're probably gonna try to do that well and try to accomplish their goals as a teacher.
So I think you can tell this when you watch how a teacher conducts themselves, how they teach people, how they run their class.
You can tell whether or not they have a strong desire to teach.
I think it's pretty obvious.
In English, we can use the verb tell sometimes to say that you can perceive some information.
For example, if I say I can tell that he's mad, I'm saying that I can perceive that he's mad.
I can notice this, okay?
So you can usually tell whether or not a teacher has a strong desire to teach.
And another important quality, I think, is that good teachers are passionate, all right?
So when a teacher is passionate, It really shows.
You can tell, of course, and the teacher often passes this passion to their students and students can become more passionate about the subject.
Right.
So I've had some teachers that were very passionate about the subject that they were teaching and it got me excited about the subject.
So I think that passion is contagious in a way.
When the teacher has this, then the students can also feel this.
However, if a teacher is not passionate, then it's kind of hard for the student to be passionate about that same subject.
And another quality that I think is important is that good teachers should be patient.
I think this one is very important, actually.
If a teacher is patient, they'll be able to not get frustrated, or not get frustrated anxious.
When a student is taking a long time to understand something, or the student is having trouble, or something like that, a good teacher will be able to wait, be patient, explain things multiple times and try to guide the student through their difficulties.
I think that's very important.
I'm sure some of you have seen this in certain teachers, where maybe you're not very good at something that you're learning.
And you've had a teacher who was very patient and didn't make you feel bad about not understanding things or taking a long time to get things done.
And that teacher is patient with you and actually helps you through the difficulty.
I think that's a great quality.
And another important quality is empathy.
So I think good teachers can empathize with their students, so they can put themselves in their students' shoes and see things from their students' perspective.
In English, we have a phrase where we say you put yourself in someone else's shoes.
This means that you try to empathize with that person and imagine that you were in that scenario.
You were in that situation the other person's situation and you try to see things from that other person's perspective.
In that case, we can say that you put yourself in another person's shoes.
I think that good teachers have that quality.
And one other important quality of a good teacher is that good teachers can find the importance in what they're teaching.
Sometimes we can't really understand why we need to learn something.
Things don't seem important or relevant or interesting.
And I think a good teacher can take material that might otherwise seem boring and actually show students why it's important and actually get the students to be interested in that material.
And I think that this doesn't only apply to boring material.
Even if the material is more interesting or something intriguing, the teacher can really emphasize the important thing or the really cool thing about what they're teaching and get the students hooked on whatever it is that they're teaching.
In English when we say that you get hooked on something, this means that you get very interested in something.
We could even use it to say that you get addicted to something.
So a good teacher can get students hooked on a subject because they can show the student how important it is or how interesting it is or how relevant it is or something like that.
They can really highlight that and the student can become more interested in it.
So i think that those are the qualities of a good teacher and of course, not every teacher has all of those qualities, but i think that good teachers have some of those qualities and some other good qualities.
And how about the qualities of a bad teacher?
Because there are many bad teachers in the world.
I've had many bad teachers.
So I think one of the qualities is a bad teacher is not interested in their subject.
So when you have a teacher that isn't really that interested in the subject that they're teaching they're just doing that job because they want to get paid and maybe have job security and things like that then that teacher probably won't be able to get their students interested in the subject.
So I've had teachers that taught subjects that they weren't actually that interested in.
They just kind of wanted the job.
They wanted a very secure job.
They weren't very passionate teachers, and they just did the bare minimum as a teacher.
In English, when we say that you do the bare minimum, we're saying that you do the minimum amount that's required and nothing more.
Just the very basic things.
That's the bare minimum.
So I've had teachers that just did the bare minimum and their classes were not fun.
I did not like those teachers because those teachers weren't that interested in the actual subject.
Another quality of a bad teacher is that many bad teachers are not knowledgeable.
They actually don't have a lot of knowledge regarding the subject that they're teaching.
I think that this should be obvious, that teachers need to know a lot about the subject that they're teaching.
They don't need to know everything.
They shouldn't know everything, because nobody has that type of knowledge, but they should know a lot more than the students, for example.
And I remember having some teachers that just weren't very smart in terms of their subject.
They didn't have a lot of knowledge.
I remember having one english teacher in high school who did not seem very smart or very knowledgeable about english and i felt like i knew more than this teacher and i was just some 15 year old kid and i remember that this teacher would sometimes ask me to help other students or explain things to other students, because i think that this teacher also realized the same thing.
She realized that i was maybe more qualified to explain something than she was, and so she would ask me to help the other students instead of her helping the other students.
So I remember that and I remember that she was an example of a teacher who wasn't very knowledgeable about her subject.
And another quality of a bad teacher is that bad teachers are often impatient, right?
We talked about the importance of patience.
If a teacher is not patient, this means that they won't be able to bear with their students when their students have difficulties.
In English, when we say that you bear with someone, it means that you are patient with someone, okay.
So teachers that don't have this quality won't be able to bear with students through their difficulties.
And students won't want to ask these types of teachers a lot of questions because they're afraid that these teachers will get mad or frustrated.
And so nobody wants an impatient teacher.
And one other quality of a bad teacher is that bad teachers are often boring.
They don't actually make the class interesting.
Maybe they have a lot of knowledge and maybe they even really like their subject, but they just can't be interesting in the way that they teach.
And so their students can't really get that passionate about this subject.
So I think it's important for teachers to not only be knowledgeable or passionate about their subject, but to try to present it in an interesting way to students.
I think that's something that teachers should strive to do.
In English, when we say that you strive to do something, it means that you try really hard to achieve something.
All right, let me talk a little bit about my best teachers and my worst teachers that I've ever had.
First, let me mention my favorite teacher that I had.
He was my seventh grade English teacher.
I wouldn't say that he was the best teacher, but he's the teacher that got me really interested in English and grammar actually.
I was like the only kid in the class that was really interested in grammar at that time and i thought the teacher did a great job of getting me interested in that.
But the other kids didn't think the same, so they didn't share my opinion about him and, like i said, i don't think that he was the best teacher in the world, but i wanted to mention him because he was my favorite actually.
But let me talk about my 11th grade english teacher.
He was one of my best teachers.
However, I remember that in his class a lot of the students were really interested in the books that we were reading.
So students that might otherwise feel bored in other English classes.
They were more interested in his class because I think that he made the books interesting.
He actually helped us see what was intriguing about the literature that we were reading.
And I think that was a great quality that he had.
And one of the assignments that I remember that I had so much fun with was when we read the book The Great Gatsby.
This is a very important book.
A lot of people consider it one of the greatest books of all time.
But of course, not everyone is interested in that type of literature.
But it seemed like everyone in this class became interested in it because we did this very cool writing assignment where we had to try to imitate the author's writing style and write a chapter of this book like write an alternative chapter that we invented.
And I remember thinking that it was so fun to try to copy this author's writing style and create something on our own.
And most of the other students felt the same.
This was never something that I did in any other English class.
So that was really cool.
That was an assignment I remember.
And one other really good teacher that I had was my cultural anthropology teacher in college.
She was a good teacher because she taught a lot of really interesting new things that I had no idea about.
She introduced a lot of cool concepts and very interesting facts.
None of her classes were ever boring.
They were all really intriguing.
And she highlighted the most intriguing things.
She was very good at kind of surprising us with some really cool facts about different people from around the world.
And I think she was also a really good teacher because of her background.
She's from Eastern Europe and she would tell a lot of stories about her childhood and compare her culture to ours.
And this was really interesting for us to learn about another part of the world, and so she used her background and her childhood experience to kind of help her teach us even more about different cultures and things like that.
So she was also a great teacher, And I had plenty of bad teachers growing up as well.
One of those really bad teachers was my ninth grade Spanish teacher, because he didn't seem qualified to teach.
He didn't seem knowledgeable.
He was very boring.
I didn't get interested in Spanish at all in his class.
And he didn't know how to give grades.
He didn't know how to properly grade students.
And so he would give random grades to students that weren't fair.
Like he gave me a B, even though I did all of my work and did everything well.
He just randomly gave me a B instead of an A And so I had to complain and it was just not a good experience.
So he was one of my bad teachers.
And there was one other really bad teacher that I can remember in eighth grade.
This was our health class teacher.
This teacher was not qualified.
She didn't do anything interesting in the class.
She didn't teach us anything useful.
She would just tell us to read different chapters of our textbook, and And she didn't teach these things to us.
We just had to read them in our textbook.
So as you can imagine, these classes were really boring.
We didn't learn anything useful.
She didn't even teach us.
She just told us to read these books.
So all of us could have done that on our own.
We didn't need her because she wasn't actually teaching us.
So she was another example of a very bad teacher.
All right, why don't we stop there for today?
I hope this episode was interesting for you, and I hope it was good practice for your listening.
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All right.
Thank you for listening to this episode.
And I'll talk to you on the next episode of Listening Time.
