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Great teaching is not quantifiable. As dorky as this sounds, great teaching happens by magic. It isn’t something that can be taught. I’m not even sure that good teaching can be taught.

the keys to great teaching

Here are 10 qualities of a great teacher: (1) has a sense of humor; (2) is intuitive; (3) knows the subject matter; (4) listens well; (5) is articulate; (6) has an obsessive/compulsive side; (7) can be subversive; (8) is arrogant enough to be fearless; (9) has a performer’s instincts; (10) is a real taskmaster.

In the nineteenth century and for much of the twentieth, most industrial workers did work silently on their own, in large open offices or on production lines, under the supervision of a manager. Schools, which have always been designed to prepare children for life as adults, were structured similarly. An important life lesson was to be able to follow rules and think inside the box. But today's world is very different - at least for those of us living in highly developed societies. Companies long ago adopted new, more collaborative ways of working, where creative problem solving is the key to success - the ones that did not went out of business - but by and large the schools have not yet realized they need to change and start to operate in a similar fashion.

I ask you, which is the more important information: the score on a standardized, written test taken at the end of an educational episode, or the effect that educational episode had on the individual concerned?

teaching math in the progressive way requires teachers with more mathematical knowledge than does the traditional approach (where a teacher with a weaker background can simply follow the textbook - which incidentally is why American math textbooks are so thick)

if you know nothing about someone's real situation, it's easy to caricature it as being defined by bad choices and laziness, rather than understand the constraints and limits the economy itself imposes. Seeing yourself doing so well and others doing poorly tends to bolster ideas that "you deserve your wealth," simply because guilt otherwise becomes uncomfortable, even unbearable.