Do you agree or disagree with the following statement? A teacher’s ability to relate well with students is more important than excellent knowledge of the subject being taught. Use specific reasons and examples to support your answer.

A teacher's primary duty is to share his knowledge and simultaneously cultivate interest among his or her students. But if a teacher can’t properly connect with the students, then know matter how erudite he or she is, he or she won’t be able to share his knowledge with his students.

A teacher might be very learned and might have proved himself in research and academics, but when it comes to class room teaching a different set of skills are needed. And if a teacher doesn't have these basic skills required to relate well with students then students won’t be able to comprehend his or her teachings, and in most cases students even loose interest in the subject. This has happened to me when I was in college, my teacher was a PhD professor. But I and most of my classmates couldn't understand what he was trying to explain and eventually we lost interest in the subject too.

On the other hand if a teacher has limited knowledge of the subject, but if he or she can connect well with students, then students can easily grasp this knowledge. Most of the time such a teacher can compensate for his lack of knowledge using other tools such as, Slides, Presentations, Charts, Video lectures, etc. In fact during my college days we had a teacher, who was an assistant professor and only had a superficial knowledge of the subject. He used to use presentations and slides to explain the topics. Although he couldn’t explain the complex concepts but we could understand whatever he used to speak. Moreover he used to keep the class interested in the topic being discussed.

But, a teacher needs to have at least sufficient knowledge of the subject to be able to take classes. If the teacher doesn't even have this basic knowledge, than his ability to relate with students won’t matter at all.

In conclusion, I believe that it’s the ability of a teacher to relate well with students which matters most, but provided that the teacher has required knowledge to take the class. My reason being that, this way students would be interested and also learn to some extent.