There is more than one way of being a great teacher. Some teachers are great because their passion for their subject is so wholehearted that it’s catching.
There are older teachers who teach us secretly by exciting our own passions. They can teach even the least promising children to read by giving them books about the things they love. They may teach us science by letting us raise baby hamsters (仓鼠), math by allowing us to build bridges for a model railroad, and reading by getting us to write stories for each other which will be printed out and bound as books.
Some teachers start by asking children what they want to know about. If the children want to learn about their environment, they teach reading using books like Who Killed Cock Robin? (an ecological mystery), science by having the children conduct population studies of nearby POOIS and small rivets, math by having them analyze their data and writing by having them share their data by e-mail with kids in other schools who are doing the same thing. What the kids learn is meaningful to them because they wanted to know it and because they didn’t just passively absorb knowledge – they actively created it.