Me:

Nice schoolteachers are like nice prison wardens. They can smile and care all they want, and it’s an improvement, but it’s still prison.

HackingChinese

@ajatt What’s your ideal teacher like? It’s not as if we (I’m I a teacher) can change the system even if we want to. We can smile, though.

No, you’re right. You guys are just doing your job. You’re just following orders.
Within the confines of the system, my ideal teacher does smile, does care, persuades with humor and reason instead of fear, and lets the rebellious-but-studious kids get away with…being studiously rebellious.

Example: I used to get school assignments in subject X to do “q”.
But “q” would bore me, so I did “r” instead. Still in subject X, but different.
The textbook bored me, so I’d buy my own book(s) on the subject and read those instead.

A good number of my teachers let me get away with this to some extent or other, and that helped immensely, both then and now. It kept me happy and sane back then, and now it’s helped ensure that I retain curiosity and a love for learning and reading — a love that would have been destroyed had I been forced to do boring assignments and read badly written books.

I was basically getting a self-education within the system. I was quiet; I was studious; I was polite. I was just…disobedient? Rebellious. My ideal teacher (within the confines of the system) lets that kid alone. Maybe she even encourages him. But mostly she lets him alone. “First do no harm”, if you will.

It made sense to force kids to listen to the teacher when there was only, like, one book in the entire school. When teachers had a monopoly on information and methods. Those days are long over.