What makes a teacher great?

In my homeland, “teacher” has degenerated into a rather despised profession in the eyes of the public. Since primary school, teachers often demand bribes from students’ parents. If they refuse, the teachers move the children’s seats to the corner of the classroom. They also deliberately mark exam scores down if the parents haven’t provided a sufficiently “satisfying” bribe. In general, education in my homeland is used to produce docile and obedient generations, with all exam questions having exclusively “correct answers”. As such, students who show even the slightest critical thinking are labelled troublemakers by teachers and isolated.

However, even within such an oppressive school culture, I still feel compelled to remark on my high school physics teacher, who genuinely tried to cultivate human beings rather than churn out industrial components before he retired a few years ago.

I vividly remember the first physics class in high school: he said the philosophy behind physics could just as well be applied to a job in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and that a physicist unable to express discoveries in eloquent language would never become a great one. He insisted we would eventually forget everything learned in the high school physics syllabus, but the methodology and epistemology would remain with us—and that was precisely why we studied physics.

The vast majority of STEM teachers in my country sneer at non-STEM subjects and force students to focus solely on maths and science. My physics teacher often warned us of the dire consequences of neglecting the arts, literature and sports. That made him something of a heretic. While other physics teachers assigned tortuous exam questions to prepare students for the university entrance exam, he set homework like this: write a short novel or play explaining Ampère’s circuital law to laypeople, with all characters in the story having distinct personalities.

Students in my homeland really despised this sort of homework. For them, endlessly drilling exam papers to score 99 out of 100 was the only worthy pursuit. Even more intolerable to these students was that my physics teacher was extremely “picky” about the rhetoric in their stories, in addition to the accuracy of the physics exposition. To confront their refusal to accept his style of homework, he made it clear:

“If you lot get into the best university in this country with a sky-high score but don’t know how to argue, debate and explain, society will trample you as disposable labour, even if your starting salaries are impressive. But if you know how to speak and write elegantly, you will gradually rise to the top of society, even if you go to a mediocre university.”

As someone who has just completed a PhD in engineering without letting it become the sole lifeline of my existence, I must acknowledge how insightful he was as a high school teacher.

Now, back to the topic: what makes a teacher great? By introducing my high school physics teacher, I think one persuasive answer is this: they teach students the true logic of life beyond school years, and deliberately train them in skills that may not seem essential at school but prove crucial for one’s place in society.