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Dear preservice teacher:

I’m writing you this letter because you’re studying to become a teacher, and I have a lot invested in making sure you are not just a good teacher but a great one. I approach the question of your skill as a teacher from two directions. One: I’m a mathematics professor at a small liberal arts college, and I spend a lot of time working with folks like you and helping get you ready for the classroom. Two: I’m a dad of a two-and-a-half year old girl, a kid who is extremely bright, curious, and inquisitive — and she starts school in a few short years. And she’ll have teachers like you — she may even be in your class one day — and I want her curiosity and inquisitiveness to flower into a lifelong love of learning. Like I said, I have a lot invested in this, and so do you, because you will be either the primary catalyst for this love of learning or its primary obstruction. I think we’re both hoping for the former.

So I’m writing to tell you a few things I think you ought to know, because like it or not, your influence as a teacher will make or break the intellectual lives of possibly thousands of students over the course of your career. Bear with me.

First of all: To be a great teacher you must love learning, in all its forms and in all subjects. You must embrace your subject and learn it deeply. Learn its technical nuances, its difficult passages, its history, its folklore, its current state of the art, its characters and milestones. You may not ever teach many of the things you learn; but you cannot teach a subject well if you aren’t enthusiastic enough to dig deeply into it, and you certainly cannot represent a subject well if you treat large portions of it like I used to treat my kid’s dirty diapers — at arm’s length, using a minimum number of fingers, and getting it over with as quickly as possible. Remember that as a teacher, you do not just teach your subjects — you embody them, and students form lifelong opinions on the worth of a subject primarily based on their experiences with, you guessed it, the person who taught it to them.

If you are going to be teaching at the early childhood or elementary level, you must learn to love all subjects and teach them all with equal skill and enthusiasm. This is one reason why elementary education is actually really hard, despite its reputation for being a refuge for students avoiding college-level work.

Second: To be a great teacher, you must learn a lot about the teaching profession itself. There is a lot to learn, as the majority of teachers enter the public schools, and the public schools are a vast governmental bureaucracy. And  you need to go beyond the legal and administrative stuff you get in your ed classes to learn about the profession on the human level. Read widely about teaching, especially education-oriented weblogs like Edspresso, which give a window — often brutally transparent — into the wide world of the teaching profession that no course and no single field experience can give. Read these blogs and comment on them often. Learn about the system. Think about how you will manage to be a great, creative enabler of student curiosity in that system. And learn about alternatives to that system, like charter schools, which are often left out of teacher education programs due to unfortunate political biases in a lot of education departments.

An important way to learn about the teaching profession is to bug your professors about their teaching. Ask your profs questions about their teaching — how they approach it,  how they handle various things that come up in a class, what their idea is of the big picture. Read their blogs. Make yourself a sort of unofficial apprentice to them. This isn’t for brownie points. Despite our crusty outer shell, we profs genuinely enjoy, even long for, mentoring relationships with students who are sincerely interested in what we are thinking about teaching. There are lifelong, fruitful relationships just waiting to happen here.

Third: While in college, cultivate an attitude that does not accept mere competence as sufficient. Competence is nice, even necessary; it is sufficient for many professions, but not for teaching. Excellence in everything, and mastery of your subjects and in your pedagogy, is essential. Always remember that your students want, and deserve, something more than mere competence. Many of them have high aspirations, great questions, and loads of curiosity. Many more could have these things but have never been asked or inspired to. Anything less than your own excellence will hold them back for good. Do not aim just to be reasonably well-versed in only the subject material you plan to teach; this only puts you at the level of your best student. Your students need more than that.

Fourth: Don’t be afraid to confront your choice to become a teacher. Teaching is not for everybody, and it’s very common for people to get into the profession for the wrong reasons. Stop right now and ask yourself: Why am I doing this? Why am I spending the prime of my life studying to become a teacher? And then write down the answer in a single, clear, complete English sentence. Examine that sentence. Does it center on the education and intellectual growth of your students? If not, then you really seriously need to consider leaving the notion of teaching behind, and trying something else for a living, or else re-center your motivation. No other motivation for being a teacher will really work in the long run, and in fact you will probably end up doing more harm than good.

Many well-meaning young men and women start down the road to become teachers for all the wrong reasons. They want to befriend young kids, for example; but teaching a kid and being his friend are often vastly different things. Many choose teaching because they secretly long to relive their school days. Whatever the case may be, when your motivations veer away from the central premise of the education of your students and their long-term intellectual development, your students — like my daughter — lose out.

It’s easy for me to sit here in the ivory tower and fire off big riffs of supposed good advice at you.  But I want you to know that your professors really desire for you to become not just good, but great. Although we often require very difficult things of you, we are pulling for you; we are your fan base. And I have this young daughter who will be great in your classroom, if you will be great in your classroom as well.

Robert Talbert is associate professor of mathematics and computing science at Franklin College in Franklin, Indiana and a blogger at Casting Out Nines.