Read and discuss the following text. What Makes a Good Teacher

What Makes a Good Teacher

1) Look at the list of qualities below. Which, in your opinion, are the most important ones needed to be a good teacher? Listen and tick the ones which are mentioned.

A good teacher should:

a) speak clearly

b) establish a friendly relationship with students

c) have a lot of confidence in front of large groups

d) understand students’ individual needs

e) encourage students to be creative

f) keep tight control of a group of students

g) give students a lot of praise and support

h) attend refresher courses regularly

i) spend time preparing lessons thoroughly

j) punish students who don’t work hard enough

A Teacher's Lot is Certainly a Different One

Say "teacher" and a clear image forms in people's minds. People usually think that teachers, if female, are intense, persistent creatures, and if male, are a little strange. They refer to teachers they know and proceed to generalisations, most frequently concerning their quarrelsome emotional way of discussing things, their dictatorial or pedantic tendencies and above all, their boring inability to talk about anything other than their jobs.

Teachers themselves have a particularly self-conscious view of their role. Outside their working milieu, they tend to feel isolated and to grow away from friends who work a standard office day. The teachers' job imposes exceptional stresses and conflicts, and these have the power to isolate teachers from everybody else, to alter their outlook and even their characters.

Monday morning is a good example of the differences between school and office. In many offices you can arrive a little late, whatever is not important can be put off, and with luck you can have an extended lunch-hour. A teacher's Monday is more likely to begin on Sunday night, when the first uneasiness creeps up behind. There are preparations to be made for the morning, and even if they have been made it is difficult to shake off a sense of guilt about the quantity and quality of the preparations, or vague resentment over the erosion of free time. From the moment of arrival at school there is no place for lethargy; children are all around, full of questions and bounce.

The same worry can spill over into evening and weekends. Young teachers who have had college lectures on "discipline in the classroom situation" or "the deprived child" are not properly warned of the emotional impact children have on them. They sit and brood about the children's needs and always feel that they could be doing more. Of course that's true, but the best teachers are the ones who can switch off, by doing whatever work is necessary, and then refusing to let it encroach further on their life. If a teacher falls ill he can't afford to stay in bed till he gets well. Knowing the difficulties that absence creates in school, with the class being split up and loaded on to colleagues, teachers don't stay home when they should, and often totter back to school before they are fully recovered, propelled by anxiety.

It is this kind of intensity that makes teaching so extraordinary. Extremes of behaviour are more common in the classroom than people would believe. Many teachers discover in themselves depths of bad temper, even rage, they never knew they had.

But the rewards of the job are so special that teachers learn to maintain high expectations, and apply them generally. The experiences they have at school have a great influence on their attitudes to jobs and people. Most of the generalisations about them are rooted somewhere in truth — teachers are different — but few people bother to find out why.

3) Transcribe and pronounce correctly the following words:

generalize, generalization, dictatorial, dictator, milieu, isolate, isolation, alter, lethargy, impact, anxiety, anxious, extraordinary.

4) Find the English equivalents for the following in the text:

ссылаться (на что-л.), придирчивый, рабочая обстановка, немного опоздать, откладывать (отсрочивать), подкрадывается тревога/беспокойство, избавиться от чувства вины, обделённый/обездоленный ребёнок, посягать на что-л., движимый беспокойством, вспыльчивость, гнев.

Дата добавления: 2014-12-29