How intelligent do teachers need to be?

Well hello. We meet again...

This will be me next Wednesday. I have been given the name of the school I'll be working in for four months, Oct-Jan: Norbury Manor Business and Enterprise College for Girls. I'm rather excited about it... mainly because LOOK AT ONE OF THE BUILDINGS

I'm thinking of getting the girls to work out the volume of the building. They could take one cuboid each.

But in all seriousness. If you have read this blog title, you'll know I've been thinking about teachers and their intellect, and whether people necessarily have to be brain-boxes with PhD's and insane mental arithmetic skills in order to become good educators in Mathematics.

In short, my answer would be no. Of course you can't teach something if you have no knowledge of the subject (well, I don't believe you can teach effectively if you haven't got that good subject knowledge) but, it requires a hell of a lot more in terms of fully understanding your subject, being able to make connections, and of course social and communication skills, in order to impart knowledge to your learners. 

To take an analogy from my own degree experience. Those who had extremely in-depth, extensive knowledge of their subject (not mentioning any Cardiff University Mathematics lecturers *ahem* Marletta) I felt, were in fact the hardest to learn from. They certainly were impressive to watch, with their 6 chalkboards full of calculations and 5-A4-page long proofs, but rarely would they stop to explain what they were doing, why "for any ε > 0, δ >0, and complex number w, there exists a complex number z in U with |z − z₀| < δ and |f(z) − w| < ε " (Casorati-Weierstrass Theorem, Complex Function Theory, 3rd Year, aka Worst Year Of Maths Of My Life)

I'll be honest - I didn't do terribly well in my degree. Well, in the Maths part of it anyway - luckily I had my Music to back me up and scrape me a tidy 2.1... but on its own, the Maths was dreadful. But I don't think that puts me at any disadvantage in becoming a good Secondary Maths teacher. As long as I have the sufficient knowledge to talk about GCSE/A-level Maths confidently, freely (and clearly!), I think I'm set. 

There are obviously so many other things which are important to becoming a good teacher. That is my ultimate goal of course, and I don't think I'm anywhere near it yet. But the idea of teachers' intellect was playing on my mind today after a particular incident in a session at the IoE today.

One of my course-mates - and I mean 'mate' in the loosest terms possible - I understand holds a PhD in Mathematics and Philosophy from Cambridge, and is currently teaching postgrad students there, part-time between sessions here at the IoE. In a presentation a friend of mine (Ben) was giving, about vocabulary in probability, the following conversation (accusation?) took place;

Lee-of-superior-educational-ranking (L.O.S.E.R) : "That thing you said about an equal, 50/50 probability being 'fair' is completely WRONG. You shouldn't be using language like 'fair' when you're talking about probability, it describes the situation like 'fair dice' or 'a fair coin'... *more philosophical nattering* ... but yeah, what you've said is just WRONG." 

Ben (B) : "..."

So is that how Lee is going to react when a pupil makes a tiny misnomer like that? Luckily Ben realised Lee was being his usual academic self and brushed it off, but a young 14-year-old really trying to understand this new topic of 'probability' would probably have been completely crushed, and disillusioned to further learning, for fear of being completely ripped apart like poor Ben was.

So I believe it's really not enough to have infinite wisdom on the subject matter, but to be open to learning how to effectively impart your knowledge, and how to help young Mathematics students reach their full potential.

... I mean, I still can't do mental arithmetic. There's an interesting doodle at the side of this page if you look closely; 1 + 1 = pencil.