It is difficult for teachers to be both popular (well-liked) and effective in helping students to learn.

It is difficult for teachers to be both popular (well-liked) and effective in helping students to learn.

Recent studies have shown that increasing parents are willing to provide their children with high-standard schools. However, this brings out a question about which teaching style can be most beneficial. Some argue that teaching should be intriguing, while others highly value effectiveness. However, there are difficulties for teachers to become popular and effective simultaneously.

First, a major reason for such a phenomenon is the necessary rules in the classroom for effective teaching. Teaching with satisfying outcomes generally has strict rules. No gossips, no novels, and no mobile phones are common rules in my high school classroom. Such rules are constructed to avoid the students from frequent disturbance and distraction, which might cut down their learning efficiency. However, these rules are compulsory and usually give students a sense of unwillingness although this frustration could be overcome by the will to score high eventually. Even in classrooms taught by gentle and kind teachers, it is likely to have rules that banned food or drinks from the classroom. More or less, rules can disappoint students when doing anything they want is a natural thought of students, and thus make the teachers unpopular.

Another reason could lie in the quality in the attempt to be both popular and effective. A popular and effective class requires skills. It is not easy for a teacher to explain everything in the books to be attractive and vivid which can inspire the students’ motivation to learn. Humor is usually based on the feeling about a familiar thing, but there is a gap between teachers who are already familiar with the things and students with barely any idea of them. This gap is a natural barrier for humor to occur in classrooms. The generation of humor requires imagination between knowledge and daily matters. However, in my 12 years of schooling, such kind of teacher is few, but the most teachers just teach by the textbooks and feed-force students to memorize the knowledge they do not grasp.

For those reasons, we can safely conclude that it is hard for teachers to be both popular and effective.