I also think that teachers who can bring a ‘real-world’ perspective and experience into the classroom (one of the key points in the article) can give their students real knowledge as opposed to just reciting facts & figures out of a book. Of all the teachers I had in high school, the one I most remember was an English teacher (Mr. Parrott), who had been an airline pilot. The stories and anecdotes of his career helped bring relevance to the material he taught and made me appreciate the value of learning this subject. On the other hand, all of the math teachers I had did a terrible job at teaching this subject. To them, it was just theorems, formulas and proofs; they did not show me the relevance that learning geometry, trigonometry, etc. would have in the real world. As far as I was concerned, I would have absolutely no use for a sine, cosine or tangent after I finished that course. How ironic that my life path led me to make career choices that require me now to deal with these relationships on a daily basis.

I agree that good teachers need to be rewarded and teachers that are poor motivators or are apathetic about their students should find employment in another field; somewhere hopefully where they would do no harm to our future generations. The question becomes, “How do we determine this without losing years of missed opportunities for our children?”.