On Teaching

avinashv.net

5 points·avinashv··4 comments

He missed the absolute most important aspect of teaching: communication skills. The great teachers I have had have all been able to explain their material clearly, and have been able to tell when students understood vs when they needed to redo an explanation. The worst teacher I have ever had was clearly a genius, had a great sense of communication, and certainly was passionate about teaching, but he simply could not properly communicate his ideas to the class.

I quote myself from the article:

> While this seems to be a blueprint of what makes a perfect teacher, I prefer to think of it more as what made my most impressive teachers such great educators in every aspect.

This wasn't, though it seemed like it, a blueprint to the perfect teacher. I think that aspects like communication skills, confidence, and to some extent, appearance are given.

Excellent post, and excellent blog! I've added you to my RSS shortlist.

Out of curiosity: is there a system that you use to set up those citations? Or do you hand-code them each time?

Sorry for not getting back to you sooner. I wish I could "watch" threads for comments.

I use a Wordpress plugin called WP-Footnotes (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-footnotes/) that handles everything. It has a few issues, namely, I can't use Markdown syntax within the footnotes, so I have to hard-code links within them, but it's worth it to have everything automagically work.

I'm glad you found my writing worth subscribing to, thanks!

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