Ask HN: What do you think makes a good teacher?

For technology in particular, there is always so much more to learn that by not having humility there is no incentive to want to learn, which is arguably the strongest point to make. Teaching is not one-way. Students have to want to learn just as much as teachers want to teach.

Personally, I don't mind lecturers "telling" the answers straight away. Obviously give motivation and lead into it rather than just delivering it with no introduction, but I've found a lot of problems are simply too large or too non-obvious to take a straw poll from the class.

The best teachers I've had have been:

(i) Really bloody good at their subject. My probability lecturer (the Field's medallist Tim Gowers), when presenting the proof of Stirling's approximation, said something along the lines of "now, the normal method for proving this bit is a bit complicated, and on my cycle in this morning I thought 'There must be an easier way', when the following struck me. Now, I've never written this down before, so hopefully it works...", and of course laid out a simplification of a famous proof that worked perfectly. Inspirational. (See http://gowers.wordpress.com/2008/02/01/removing-the-magic-fr...)

(ii) Incredible elucidators. The ability to take a complex concept and pick exactly the right words or metaphors to explain it is a powerful ability.

I feel these criteria are far more important than asking the audience questions. You need both -- I've been taught by plenty of talented mathematicians who had no idea how to teach, and certainly a handful of great teachers who simply didn't have the aptitude to really grasp the more complex topics.

Respect is important because no student will be engaged in a class with a teacher of whom he has a low opinion. At best the student will ignore the teacher and turn to an alternate, respected, source - ie textbook. At worst, the student will entirely disengage from the subject. To earn respect, I would suggest first that the teacher respect the student. A student who is respected will find class more enjoyable and engaging, knowing his ideas mean something.

Howard Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences states that there are ~8 different types of intelligences. A student who is exceptional in one of them will learn best in that one - and will usually be more interested in information reaching him through it. Out of the blue, it occurred to me that a file format analogy lends itself perfectly to the situation. A program may be able to open files of several formats, but it is built around one. This format will generally produce the best results for the program, even if it can interact competently with several other formats. Think excel (because I've had to deal with it recently). You can work with CSV files, certainly, but you can do much more with xls files. So teach your material in different formats. Have the content available in both visual and auditory formats as a default, but whenever possible (and you really want to reach for these!) make it available in kinesthetic, verbal, musical, and social formats as well. (I've missed a couple of Gardner's intelligences. But you get the idea.)

Teaching to multiple intelligences will also increase students' respect for you. If you help them to understand something (by teaching it in a format that naturally makes more sense to them), they will A) realize that you know what you're talking about, and B) see that you are a better teacher, likely to teach them more stuff.

I don't mean to imply that everyone is naturally interested in learning everything, and it is only the format of the data that is interfering -- but how much more enjoyable is working with a dataset if you don't have to write a parser for the input format? ;)