As a professor at the University of California, Irvine, I am often asked what makes me a good teacher.
Here are five reasons I like it. 1.
I know how to create empathy in students.
I like to imagine how they might be feeling when they encounter something, not what they would have done had they known it existed.
The problem with this kind of storytelling is that we don’t always get to see the person’s point of view.
Sometimes it’s just what the student’s eyes and ears tell us.
I use an interactive classroom setting in which students can ask me questions about the topics they’re studying and then ask me to reflect on those answers.
The students then get to vote on how they feel about the answers.
2.
I’m comfortable in my own skin.
I am not a model for others to follow.
I have a lot of friends and family that are not as confident and self-assured as I am.
I understand that people who are less confident and confident tend to be more isolated, lonely and insecure.
They tend to avoid contact with others and tend to have less positive relationships.
So while I don’t want to feel bad about my own confidence, I also don’t think I need to be perfect.
I want to make others better.
And so it’s really refreshing when they don’t judge me for being a confident person.
3.
I enjoy being creative.
I also enjoy making people laugh and having them laugh at my jokes.
It’s an exercise in creativity.
So I’m not always able to get them to laugh, but it’s a great way to do it.
I don, in fact, think I’m funny more often than not, but that’s because I like being creative with people.
4.
I can create my own challenges.
In a very short period of time, I can often get people to do things that they would never have thought of doing themselves.
For example, when I was in college, I started to feel the urge to learn math, but the math wasn’t very difficult and I was always getting distracted by the music in my room.
I knew that it was time to try something different.
So after years of struggling with math, I took a class on the subject.
I realized that the teacher was right and that learning math would improve my life and that of my friends.
I had to take the class.
The next year, I went to grad school and now I’m in my third year of college.
I learned from the experience, and I have to tell you that I have never had a math teacher that I was as good at math as I was at the class and that’s pretty remarkable.
5.
I often feel like I’m better off as a teacher than a student.
When I started my first semester of college, there was no way I was going to graduate.
I was doing a very bad job of educating myself, and even worse, I was struggling with my grades.
I wasn’t getting a fair amount of help from my parents and teachers.
I needed to start from scratch and learn from my mistakes.
So for the first time in my life, I actually felt that I could make a difference.
And that’s really what I like about teaching.
I think I’ve learned a lot from working with students and teachers in general.
As I said earlier, I’m really proud of my accomplishments.
But I also think that there are times when the lessons I’ve picked up along the way are just so profound and insightful that they’re worth sharing with others.
That’s why I like sharing my experiences and thoughts with other teachers and students.