One of the things I heard repeated several times in my teacher ed class discussion about good teachers was a passion for the subject being taught. I think that a teacher’s excitement is infectious – and although, as I recall from both high school and college classes, it can cause some minor giggling among the class, it really helps to involve students in the material.

Besides merely being more animated (and thus more interesting to watch), an excited teacher is also more likely to put more effort into the curriculum, both out of the love of the subject and the desire to get the students more engaged in it. I think a class is certainly going to respond better to bunch of colorful demonstrations, hands-on experiments, outside-the-textbook readings, relevant current topics in the news or other media – much more so than to a text-on-whiteboard lecture day after day. Various activities designed to target different types of learners are better able to reach the wide diversity of students that comprise an average classroom. Those sorts of activities take much more time to select and prepare, though, and so it’s more likely that a teacher who is honestly passionate about the subject is going to do them.

Because of real interest in a subject, a teacher is also more likely to be more of an expert in that field, due to outside reading and a variety of previous related courses at the undergraduate level. This teacher is more likely to be able to answer a student’s question regarding the subject, and also to be able to refer them to related topics they may find interesting or to literature that will help them explore further information on their own. They are more likely to have their own library of media related to the topic – I remember how much I enjoyed perusing classroom libraries when I was in school. These teachers are also likely to have the depth and breadth of knowledge to be flexible enough to bend the curriculum toward what students would like to know more about – such flexibility helps to increase student interest. Interested students are more apt to become proficient students than bored ones, too.

It goes without saying that enthusiasm for the subject is a pre-requisite for, and not the be-all-end-all, of teaching excellence. Proficiency in the subject matter is also crucial; as are creating critical thinking, discussion, and collaboration among students, systematic organization, and fair evaluation methods and rubrics. It is my belief, though, that an underlying love of the material helps a teacher to build these other elements into their work.

Right now I really, really love science. It’s my hope that I can encourage that in my future students too. The one thing I really worry about is losing enthusiasm over time or in the face of a class that I just can’t get involved in the subject material. I hope just having even one or two students per class that seem to want to know more will help keep me on track with finding new and better ways to teach and including the best up-to-date material possible.