Are you seriously defending the thesis that it doesn't matter whether a teacher is smart, bearing in mind that just about the only thing IQ is good for is predicting good academic performance which is exactly the sort of thing we're looking for (for once!)?

"A ditz who can really connect to the students" sounds like a mortal threat to my child's education, not something to be celebrated!

Personality is a lot more important than intelligence in elementary school. You should actually be smarter than your students, yes, but dealing with young kids takes a certain temperament and ability to adapt to personality differences.

Between kindergarten and fifth grade, I'd probably rate my teachers entirely based upon personality. The ones who lost their temper with me or were arbitrary or capricious in discipline were bad teachers. To some extent this remained true even until eighth grade (I was somewhat of a disciplinary problem until high school), but middle school is where my teachers' stupidity started becoming an issue.

In high school, most of my teachers were pretty smart at what they taught. But personality still mattered.

Education ought to be about more than academic performance. I see what you're saying, but having teachers that can't work with students is just as much a problem as having teachers that don't know their subject.

Then, of course, there are the teachers that can't do either. I TA'd a writing class with a teacher that was both ignorant and disliked, who was kept on because of tenure. Not a nice position to think of.

I think it really depends on the subject being taught. I had an eighth grade Algebra teacher who could barely do the problems herself. She could empathize with the student pretty well, especially when neither of them could figure out how the get the answer in the key.

It's possible to teach a subject while not being an expert. That's where a good teacher pulls them in and helps teach the students how to learn on their own. That being said, this requires a teacher who is at least as intelligent as their students.

Apparently my grandfather ended up teaching a course he was taking while in the military. He was able to teach it better than whomever was originally assigned as the teacher.

* when neither of them could figure out how the get the answer in the key.*

It's possible that the answer in the key was wrong. I spent a few years volunteering for RFBD.org, reading math & science textbooks a few hours a week, and many of the texts had answers in the back which frequently were not for the question in the front.

Unfortunately that was not the case. She just had to rely on the smarter students to help her. Then they hired us (woohoo 4.15/hr) to come tutor the algebra class after school three times a week while we were in high school. Almost every algebra student came to the tutoring session most of the time. The teacher never showed up once.