It didn’t take me long to realize that one thing was being an expert in some subject and another very different thing was to teach that subject to someone else. ‘The Atom’ was an eminent professor of Physics. I had the uncomfortable honor to have him as a teacher in my last year of high school. He had one of those voices that was impossible to forget, and not exactly because of its sweetness.
‘The Atom’ used to smoke like a hockey player, and also drank a lot. His son was attending his classes, we used to call him ‘The Proton’. Both, father and son wore thick spectacles and both had that natural talent for everything related to math and physics. It used to look so easy when The Atom solved those crazy problems on the blackboard… He used to just write the whole thing while whispering some mysterious words. No one in the whole class understood the steps he and his son took to deal with those puzzles made of letters, numbers and arrows.
Being an expert doesn’t necessarily mean being a good teacher, or maybe it only can mean it when your speciality is Education itself. A teacher has to know how to transmit ideas, how to make them alive, he has to connect with the students, and most importantly, he has to know how to turn on the light of interest in their heads. A teacher has to be patient, he has to show mercy with our sometimes insupportable ineptitude, and has to have the capacity to always encourage you to become better.
I believe we all owe a lot to our good teachers, those who we always remember for their kindness and support, for their spontaneity and their wisdom, for their love of their job. A good teacher doesn’t need to be a giant in the subject. In fact, sometimes he or she has to become a student as well and learn from the students in order to grow.
