What do you think makes a good teacher?
anshul: The objective measure of a teacher's success must be what the class ended up learning regardless of what was or wasn't taught and all other random factors involved.With that definition in mind, as a former pure math student, the best teaches I had were those who were- oddly enough, good story tellers!  By which I mean, they sounded very much interested in what they were telling me.  Their narratives always had at least a few mini-mysteries going on just like in a good story.  They used one thing leading to another kind of explanations rather than stating unrelated facts one after the other.  The narratives always seemed to have a underlying theme even when that theme was sort of irrelevant to the lesson at hand.- did not answer my question unless they properly understood what I was asking and why I was asking it.   I hate it when I ask X and the teacher answers Y.  The good teachers always went to great lengths to understand my questions.- good mentors and guides and could help your career along if you deserved it.  the best ones would go out of the way to make the system reward the deserving.I think those were the two  crucial factors.  I have had awesome teachers on all sides of the arrogance, style, humourous, lenience, liberal, demanding, thorough/good enough at the subject matter, popular, good natured/asshole  spectra.Ummm... Not all the good teachers did this, but I very much liked the ones who actually tested what I had learnt rather than whether I was paying attention in the class or taking good notes or pretty much was even present in the class or not.