when to be authoritarian and when to let the students go.
X: When there is no authority there is chaos
X: The good teacher needs to have authority, he is the flexible one that know when to
say "yes" and when to say "no". He does not let things happen "freely"
It is interesting that none of these extreme cases, both negative, are related to lack
ofknowledge:
A: The authoritarian teacher may know a lot but she does not attract the
students' attention.
X: The non-authoritarian teacher might know but s/he is not the authority.
Apart from being authoritarian, the perceived teacher, that is the bad
teacher, also has other characteristics: she does not "know" but pretends that she knows,
her teaching is boring, she does not Ieam from students, does not have any pedagogical
education, and so on. As a conclusion, after having described the bad teaching situation,
a participant, who plans to work as a language teacher, said:
X: When I am in front of that type of teacher, I repeat to myself: "This, what
I am looking at, is what you are going to avoid. Look, pay attention, you are going
to do other things except for this ”
Although there was a tendency to focus on the description of the bad teacher,
perhaps because their belief is that the percentage of bad teachers is very high, it is easy
to build up an ideal teaching situation. Taking into account that the main elements of a
good teacher are her dynamism and balanced authority (avoiding the extremes), then, a
good teacher also has knowledge, is not boring, Ieams from students, has a pedagogical
background, etc, etc.
A straightforward remedial solution for this problem would be to give the
teachers the necessary on-going education to cope with these problems. However, for the
students, this is not that easy, since they believe that in order to be a good teacher one
needs to have the "vocation (dedication) for teaching", something that is not learned in
the university:
K: Vocation is the important thing in teachers. It doesn't matter if she is
qualified or not. Vocation is what counts. Empirical teachers. 'I do this because
I love it'. The good teachers are so few...