My small blog Can Good teacher be Bad teacher? Greetings, dear friends. Today I'd like to describe some thoughts about a topic that my friend and I discussed on the last weekends. The key point of our discussion was "How rigorous should a teacher be and is it eligible for teacher to be even rude if it made children overmotivated?" I doesn't know well how is the educational system built in other countries, so I will mention a few features of the Russian/Ukrainian one. Children study in school for 11 years and usually start since 6 or 7 years old. A number of lessons per day depends on school and rises by the age of children e.g. I used to have approximately 20 lessons per a week when I was five-year student and about 32 lessons per week when I was 11th year student. A school year is split into two semesters. Children's achievements in all subjects are scored in each semester. As it usually is, some of students study good and some of them are bad in studying. For good ones Students Subject Olympiads take place when you can be challenged by more complicated problems. Let's now turn to discussion between my friend and me. There is a teacher in my friend's school, many of whose student's became successful, and as for me, he made a valuable contribution to their success. However, he is incredibly rigorous, e.g. student's are laughed at because of their mistakes. Once during a training camp where people from different schools get together, I saw him shouting on the boy because of that boy brought "wrong" sweets for a tea party (This boy was about 10 years old). Sounds really terrible. Nevertheless, this strict approach enables to set up a community that value knowledge and is much more disciplined comparing with an average Ukrainian student. The bulk of children in Ukraine are incredibly lazy even those who are so smart, hence most of them prefer play computer games rather than study math even if they are really good at it. I'm almost sure that most of successful students taught by that "angry" teacher would have achieved nothing if they hadn't been highly motivated in their childhood. Unfortunately, I don't have an exact opinion about a eligibility of a such behavior. The only solution I can suggest is to find teachers who can pick children's interest in a less aggressive way. As a bonus, a picture of me competing with my favorite teacher, who had a perfect skill of mixing strict approach and a friendly attitude to his students. https://pp.vk.me/c628721/v628721987/f1f0/gzWrOfG19Bo.jpg