1. So long as a teacher is content to keep in his possession information or facts he is not a teacher at all. He must transfer these facts to minds of others in order to be a teacher. It goes without saying that the teacher must have knowledge, a wide range of information about various things, before this knowledge can be passed on to someone else. The teacher’s duty is that of taking a thought out of his own mind and putting that thought into the minds of others. It goes without saying, therefore, that he must have possession of the thought in the first place himself.
2. The teacher must have a passion to lead others to learn. This eagerness must be accompanied by imagination which leads the teacher to put himself in the place of the pupil. This means that the teacher has to take facts and wrestle with them until they are lodged safely and permanently in the minds of the pupils. The teacher must see the things that confuse the pupils and after seeing these difficulties must clear them away. There is always the temptation for the teacher to blame failure on the dullness of pupils rather than to ask whether the teaching has been adjusted to the conditions of the pupil’s mind.
3. In addition to the intellectual wealth and the sympathetic imagination above mentioned, the ideal teacher must make the pupils like to learn. Too often school work is offensive and results in arousing a rebellious spirit on the part of pupils.
4. The ideal teacher must be willing to be forgotten—to have his kind acts overlooked—to be generous, even in the absence of praise. If praise and recognition are essential to him the prospective teacher may as well give up the profession.
Test Questions for Self-examination
The discharged soldier can decide to some extent what his teaching chances are by asking himself questions like the following: Have I attended evening school or taken instruction work, or gone to lectures, or enrolled in correspondence schools, or done anything previous to entering the Army which would lead anyone to suppose that I was ambitious to advance in my vocation? When in the Army, did I obtain recognition for capacity for leadership and for teaching others? Have I in the past looked upon teaching as a desirable profession where one could render service at a fair compensation? Have I “Stick-to-it-iveness” to attend a teachers’ training school and adapt myself to classroom work with books, catalogues, reports, and lectures on the theory and practice of education?
One looking forward to a position in vocational education should ask himself such questions as the following: Have I actual technical knowledge of some trade or am I only capable of practicing a few operations connected with the trade? Have I ever been interested in social and economic life that lies behind the vocational life? Did I ever join any organization connected with an occupation or pursuit which promotes the economic and educational welfare of its members?
Each prospective teacher should ask, Have I a strong personality? Nothing awakens within a child sleeping moral qualities so well as contact with a strong attractive personality. The problem of the school is to find the teacher inspired with patriotism, filled with zeal, and favored with intellectual interests.
Teaching not Easy Work
The question of health, also, is an important one for the person who is looking forward to teaching. Many people feel that school hours are short, and that, therefore, a great amount of physical endurance is not needed in the work of teaching. Because of the particular strain of the teacher’s work it is a mistake to think of the workday at all in terms of hours. It has been said that one hour of teaching is equivalent as far as fatigue is concerned to two hours of ordinary study done in quiet without the necessity of speaking. The four or five hour teaching day, therefore, becomes the equivalent of an eight or ten hour day, and on top of that must be added two hours a day for correcting papers, preparing lesson plans, etc.