TOEFL ESSAY: Do you agree or disagree? A teacher's ability to relate well with students is more important than excellent knowledge of the subject being taught.

The best way for human beings is to learn a subject with the aid and assistance of a person who has excellent knowledge on that special field. Another characteristic that the person who is going to teach an academic content is his/her ability to relate well with the learner. In my mind a good teacher's only way to become a high quality tutor is having both of these major specifications in a balanced way. My reason for this view go as follow.

At first, without enough knowledge on the academic subjects, a teacher can never teach the students the educational content in the right efficient manner. For example a chemistry lab teacher who does not have significant inspiration towards the combination of two specific materials might not only not reach the final product, but can also mislead the young students in a manner that cannot be changed back easily. The first time a material is taught, it goes in a such a deep layer of the mind that changing the wrong information that has been learned might be quite difficult and even impossible sometimes. This can lead to the misunderstanding of the future lessons or even other classes that a student must learn to finish his studies. So having the right knowledge is a must for a teacher, especially the ones who teach youngsters.

Second, the teacher's ability to transfer the educational content to the student in a friendly and effective manner is as important as the first reason mention in the previous paragraph. In other words, a teacher must also have the ability to relate with his students. For instance, when I was a university student at my hometown Isfahan, we had a modern-physics teacher who was very famous for the work he had done in having multiple patents in his major. He was also a director and editor of a high ranked physics magazine, which had a high impact factor of 4.3, and was the author of about one hundred scientific papers. But when joining his classes even if listening hard and patient to his lectures, student would hardly understand his sayings and examples. He did have a high rank in understanding and developing his field, but could not transfer his ideas in the class towards the students and did not relate well with them. That’s why students only got classes with him only once in their four years of being students.

To have a conclusion, none of the two features of having excellent knowledge nor relating well with students is enough solely for a top teacher. And each one acts as one wing of a bird, with the only available ability for that bird to fly through having both wings in harmony.