Here I want to try to give you an answer to the question: What personal qualities are desirable in a teacher? Probably no two people would draw up exactly similar lists, but I think the following would be generally accepted.
First, the teacher's personality should be pleasantly live and attractive. This does not rule out people who are physically plain, or even ugly, beacause many such have great personal charm. But it does rule out such types as the over-excitable, melancholy, frigid, sarcastic, cynical, frustrated, and over-bearing: I would say too, that it excludes all of dull or purely negative personality. I still stick to what I said in my earlier book: that school children probably 'suffer more from bores than from brutes'.
Secondly, it is not merely desirable but essential for a teacher to have a genuine capacity for sympathy--in the literal meaning of that word; a capacity to tune in to the minds and feelings of other people, especially, since most teachers are school teachers, to the minds and feelings of children. Closely related with this is the capacity to be tolerant--not indeed, of what is wrong, but of the frailty and immaturity of human nature which induce people, and again especially children, to make mistakes. (212 words)
______ minutes ______ seconds