Cue Card # 115: Describe a teacher who has influenced you

IELTS Cue Card/ Candidate Task Card # 115

Describe a teacher who has influenced you in your education.

You should say:

• where you met him/her
• what subject he/she taught
• what was special about him/her

and explain how this person/teacher influenced you so much.

[You will have to talk about the topic for one to two minutes. You have one minute to think about what you are going to say. You can make some notes to help you if you wish.]

Model Answer:

I have tremendous respect for teachers because of the roles they play in grooming up our future generations. So, thank you for such a great topic as it has allowed me to talk about a favourite teacher of mine who has significantly influenced me in my education.

The teacher, I am talking about, was a mathematics teacher at my high school. He used to teach math to 9th-grade students. So, even though, I already knew Mr Albert, the math teacher, before, I didn’t get the opportunity to formally meet him until after I became a 9th-grade student.

By the way, prior to starting my 9th grade, I dreaded math. In fact, I would consider myself as one of the happiest students on earth just to have a passing grade in mathematics before having Mr Albert as my mathematics teacher. But, as Mr Albert started to teach us the 9th-grade math, I felt like even though, the Pythagoreans, the Ancient Greeks, and Euclid began a systematic study of mathematics as a subject around 300 BC, it was teachers like Mr Albert who made mathematics look like a “walk in the park”. Nobody in my high school had any doubt about the math teaching ability of Mr Albert, but what made him more special was that he was willing to keep working with his students to teach them math, by trying virtually all kinds of methods, even if it meant that the lesson would continue until 12 at midnight. Besides, what had made him even more special was his ability to understand exactly why a student wasn’t able to understand mathematics.

Anyway, my 9th-grade math teacher influenced my life to a great extent by teaching us not to ever give up on our goals, no matter how difficult they seem to look. Besides, it was Mr Albert who gave me the confidence to find solutions to all kinds of problems in life by saying that each and every problem in this world has a solution, and all we need to do is to keep trying until the end.