As he usually does (and of which I'm always appreciative) JCS shared my most recent Emacs post in which I go over a small Elisp routine that I wrote.

JCS commented that he liked that I don't post process or edit my videos. I work through whatever I'm doing and if I make a mistake, so be it, I'll try to figure it out live. I do things this way partly because of laziness but also because I think the result is more authentic. People doing something similar on their own will likely make mistakes and if every video and resource they find online is perfect, it creates an unrealistic expectation.

It's like how the usual self reporting of AP scores in the CS communitie unfolded a bunch of times with the only people sharing their results were teachers who's students all did well. Given national scores, we know that not every student gets a great AP score but it created an unrealistic and demotivating picture for teachers in the community who's results were more, let's say mixed.

From very early on, I've been pretty comfortable making mistakes in front of my classes. I mean, once I got to Stuy, I regularly taught students much smarter than I was. I almost always knew more material but they could stump me at times and once they dove into the mathy side, I was way out of my league. I felt being honest and open was my best approach and making mistakes allowed me to model that mistakes are part of the process as well as how to proceed. Of course a challenge would be recreating the mistake that was organic in period two later in the day.

Anyway, since I think my willingness to make mistakes in front of my students - my honesty in that regard is part of what made me a strong teacher, JCS's comment made me think of Alfred Thompsons recent excellent post on what turns a good teacher into a great teacher.

Alfred focused on three things:

• Relationships with students - they care about their students as people.
• They had to be enthusiastic about the subject they teach.
• They had to innovate - that is develop their classes over time.

It's a good list. Many great teachers do indeed have these there qualities. I think it's worth considering though that while these are generally positive teacher attributes, they're not absolutes.

I've met some great teachers and teachers who have been considered to be great who don't have these qualities.

While none of the great teachers I know have disdain for their students, some don't have any real relationship with them and they don't really care about their success outside of them wanting all their students to pass their class.

Now, I've built my career on relationships so I never built a wall between me and my students and I don't understand teachers that do but I do have to recognize that building relationships isn't an absolute for one to be a great teacher.

Same with subject enthusiasm. Sure, it probably helps, but again, I've met some great teachers who are more or less indifferent. What's important is that they have sufficient subject knowledge and it probably helps if they also do care about their students so maybe you need at least one from column A and one from column B.

Finally, innovation. I always worked to improve and refine my work and would probably have gone crazy teaching the same thing in the same way for three plus decades but again, I've seen some great teachers who do the same thing pretty much the same way year in and year out.

On the flip side, I've seen some lousy teachers who have all three of these great teacher qualities. They care, they know their stuff and love their subject area, and try new things but they're just not particularly good.

JCS's post made me think about this because for me, open honesty was helpful in being my strongest teacher self, whatever that was and is. I also listened the other day to the most recent CSEd Podcast which had a professor sharing a particular practice he uses in class. I'm also planning to write a post on that but it also made think on how a teachers pedagogical toolbox can also have an affect on how "great" a teacher one is.

I guess the moral of the story is that while we can pick out some common attributes that many great teachers share, great teaching is hard to pin down which is why it's so hard to meaningfully evaluate teachers. I guess it's like Justice Potter Stewart's concurring opinion on identifying "hard-core" pornography. We might not be able to define it but we know it when we see it.