al-Raghib al-Isfahani #77 – The Difference between GOOD & BAD Teachers

Just as every student has to have certain characteristics, in order to benefit from knowledge, teachers also have to have certain characteristics of their to be effective. So for all of us for HANA, he talks about what some of these characteristics are. First of all, obviously, just like with studying anything, you need to have a good intention. And so you need to basically be a parent figure to your students, you are kind of a parent figure, because parents are kind of responsible for the material well being of their children, making sure they have enough food to eat and clothes on their backs, and, you know, doctor's appointments, whatever they need, but teachers are kind of

responsible for the spiritual well being of their students. And so there's nothing more tragic for a teacher than if one of their students goes astray, right. And, you know, either you know, reneged on the religion entirely, or stopped studying or abandoned study and things like that, before I was a Muslim, I was very into music, and I studied it classically. And at a certain point in my life, I had to make a decision, what I was going to do, whether I was going to go to, to school exclusively, or college for music, or to do something more kind of intellectual in the humanities. And I chose the latter Hamdulillah, Allah guided me to that decision and actually saved me from a lot of things

and eventually brought me to a snap. But I remember the moment that I told one of my, my teachers that was teaching me music, and he literally just put his head down in his hand, and he and he walked away. And I never saw him again, because I had been with him for years. And he was sort of kind of grooming me and building me up to be this sort of thing, right. So you know, that's the type of connection that a teacher should have with their student that they really, really care about their success. And then going on a certain path. Obviously, this is a conditional or contingent example, because that's music, something that we assume or stay away from in Islam. But the the

point of the relationship between a teacher and a student still stands, and it's still valid, like that's the type of devotion that a teacher should have to their student, because your students are your lineage, right? If you're a parent, your children or your lineage if you're a teacher than your students or your lineage. And so if you don't have any students, you never had any students, you never really built anybody up as a leader to take your place or to carry on the work after you, it's like your lineage is cut off. And then there's only a very limited impact that the knowledge that you obtained is going to have, it's the teachers responsibility to facilitate cooperation between

students. And you can see this, I think more with coaches, they set the tone for the entire team, what their what kind of behavior they're going to tolerate, are they going to tolerate hazing and bullying and these sorts of things, or are they going to try to create an environment of mutual respect and cooperation and collaboration, just like it's up to the coach to do that, it's up to the teacher to do that. And the teacher is responsible. And this is something that a lot of teachers are ignorant of, or they don't pay enough attention to that you are responsible for setting the tone of the relationships between your students. Another thing that a teacher has to keep in mind is that

the method that they choose to instruct their students with is going to have a tremendous impact on the development of their students. And so you're not going to be able to take them from A to Z all in one go, you might have to slowly bring somebody from what is morally bad, or even just a bad understanding to something that's a little bit better, or something that's less worse, initially, and then slowly to something that's even less worse, or fairly neutral, or like to just the basic understanding, and then better and better and better. It's going to have to happen incrementally. And the teacher where the teacher comes in, and why the teacher is a thing and hasn't been replaced

by YouTube, is that the teacher is supposed to understand, what is the sequence? What are the steps that the person has to take, in order to walk that path. If it were just as simple as going from zero to 100, going A to Z and one blow than everybody would learn everything, it would be easy, but that's not how it works. You need a teacher in order to show you actually you can't just go with this direct straight line, you have to go this way. And then this way, this thing and then this thing, don't worry about the destination worry about what's right in front of you in the here and now. A good teacher says Raghava Hani focuses on understanding not just memorization, and this is a

huge problem in the Muslim world. Memorization is important and it serves a role. It serves a role when it comes to preserving the text. It serves a role when it comes to sort of this technology, the stuff that actually shapes who you are, you're kind of like letting it inhabit you. But it's not enough. You have to understand and it's up to the teacher to make sure that the students understand you don't want a word for word account of what you're teaching. You want someone to be able to put it in their own words, and then to teach somebody else, right, we say that teaching is the finest form of learning because you can't teach something unless you've truly truly learned it. And that's

more dignified. Honestly, that's more dignified for the student and for the teacher. It's not worth the teachers time to show up and just here's the words memorize the words given back to me, okay, memorize them, and it's definitely not dignified for the student. And this is where a lot of young men sort of they fall off or they lose their motivation because especially for boys, it seems I'm not sure why but boys really, really need to know

while you're studying something, to find the motivation to study, and if they don't think that the thing that you're trying to teach them is applicable or relevant to them, then they're going to have a really, really hard time getting that motivation to study. So you need to provide that motivation as a teacher, and you need to be able to communicate with your students to preserve their dignity, they have dignity, they're human beings, right, don't insult them have respect for your student, so that they'll have respect for you. And sometimes, in addition to this sort of this memorization versus understanding, teachers cannot simply rely on being explicit all the time, right, sometimes

you have to be implicit. Sometimes you have to let your student connect the dots. Sometimes you have to let your student fail, like put them in a situation that's going to demonstrate that they either understand this thing or they don't, and then be willing to let them fail and face their failure and then eventually overcome their failure and learn from it. That's something that a good teacher has to do. This is amazing. Alright, so heading says explicitness being too explicit too often in your instruction. It invites opposition, it invites debate, it invites pushback, because again, it says something or it implies something about the intelligence of the student, or it doesn't fully respect

the students, right? Imagine if I asked you to, I don't know, make me a sandwich, and you were like, willing to do it, because you're a nice person. And I said, Okay, you have to open the drawer. And then you have to take the knife out of the drawer, and then you have to pick up the peanut butter or whatever, then you have to unscrew the lid, then you have to stick the knife into the jar, if I was to give you that level of explicit instruction, you would be offended, right? Because I'm not assuming good of you. Right? I'm actually disrespecting you, I'm insulting you your intelligence. And I'm not showing the proper respect. So teachers actually have to have a tremendous amount of

respect for their students. It doesn't do them any favors, to think lowly of them, or to underestimate their abilities, you have to have high standards, and you have to expect that they're going to be able to do things that is going to be maybe reaching up for them and doing something that they couldn't do before. And so the last point that I'm about us for honey makes us that the teachers have to have the right intentions, they have to do it for the right reasons. We shouldn't just be showing up for a paycheck, teachers have to avoid conflict of interest as much as possible. If not, then you have a conflict of interest where the teacher is financially dependent upon

stretching out the course. Right, if it's a pay to play system, or it's a fee based system, you know, there's always that worry that the teacher has an incentive to keep you ignorant or to not to keep you dependent upon him. There's this famous story that's sort of like a fable that's always told where there's a doctor and one of the villagers comes to the doctor and he complains that he has a splinter in his eye or he's a piece of wood in his eye. And so the doctor subscribes in these eyedrops and say just go home and you know, put these eyedrops in your eye every night and every morning and then you'll be fine. You'll come back to me every week and get more eyedrops. And so

this keeps on happening. This keeps on happening. And then one day the the villager comes to get new eyedrops, and the doctor isn't at home, his son is home. And so he tells the son about his situation and what's going on in the son says, oh, here, well, let me just take that Take That splinter out of your eye for you. And then the village is so happy. He doesn't need eyedrops anymore. And then the doctor comes home and talks to his son and his son explained to his father what happened and that doctor says to his son, well, you just lost a customer, right? So there's a type of teacher there's a type of teacher that is going to unfortunately cave into this pressure to keep us sort of

prolonged to string you out to not put you in a situation where you're ready to transcend and actually move on from this particular teacher and everybody who's a student or wants to learn anything has to be very, very careful about that situation.