quotations about teaching
Reflecting on my past teaching mistakes has made me more reflective about who I am. Sure, part of teaching is a performance, pretending to be in a better mood than I am some days, being patient even when I face personal struggles. But the real work of teaching involves making the world, and myself, knowable to students.
BENJAMIN DOXTDATOR
"My First-Nations Identity Feels More Like An Absence", NPR, May 30, 2017
Since human beings are highly adaptable it may be possible for an individual with any sort of competence to learn, in the end, according to any teaching strategy. But the experiments show, very clearly indeed, that the rate, quality and durability of learning is crucially dependent upon whether or not the teaching strategy is of a sort that suits the individual.
GORDON PASK
Learning Strategies and Individual Competence
To know how to suggest is the great art of teaching. To attain it we must be able to guess what will interest; we must learn to read the childish soul as we might a piece of music, Then, by simply changing the key, we keep up the attraction and vary the song.
HENRI-FREDERIC AMIEL
Journal Intime
Any teacher that can be replaced by a machine should be!
ARTHUR C. CLARKE
Electronic Tutors
I have come to believe that a great teacher is a great artist and that there are as few as there are any other great artists. It might even be the greatest of the arts since the medium is the human mind and spirit.
JOHN STEINBECK
"...like captured fireflies"
Teaching is a performing art. It's part technique, part experience, part commitment to the mission a teacher takes on -- the growth and development of the kids with whom he or she meets for 185 or so days each year.
GEOFF JOHNSON
"Little advice goes a long way, even for teachers", Times Colonist, May 30, 2017
Q: How many teachers did you have? A: Myself.
BABA HARI DASS
The Yellow Book
It is always the teacher who must learn the most ... or else nothing real has happened in the exchange.
KIM STANLEY ROBINSON
The Years of Rice and Salt
It's the student who makes the teacher, not the other way around.
CARLOS RUIZ ZAFON
The Angel's Game
A schoolmaster should have an atmosphere of awe, and walk wonderingly, as if he was amazed at being himself.
WALTER BAGEHOT
"Hartley Coleridge", Literary Studies
The world of knowledge takes a crazy turn
When teachers themselves are taught to learn.
BERTOLT BRECHT
Life of Galileo
Don't tell us that the only way to teach a child is to spend too much of a year preparing him to fill out a few bubbles on a standardized test; we know that's not true.
BARACK OBAMA
National Education Association Speech, 2007
It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge.
ALBERT EINSTEIN
Motto for the astronomy building of Junior College, Pasadena, California
No man can instruct more than half-a-dozen students at once. The whole problem of education is one of its cost in money.
HENRY ADAMS
The Education of Henry Adams
Who dares to teach must never cease to learn.
JOHN COTTON DANA
New York Times Book Review, March 5, 1967
Deciding to teach is an indication you are interested in joining an engaging, worthwhile, and yet challenging profession. It is important to recognize that schools are a microcosm of society. Just as society has changed (i.e., technological advancements) and become more diverse, so too have schools, and they may be quite different from what you recall as a student.
GLADIS KERSAINT & DENISSE R. THOMPSON
"Advice on Making a Mid-Career Change to Teaching", Education Week, June 13, 2017
The object of teaching a child is to enable him to get along without his teacher.
ELBERT HUBBARD
A Thousand & One Epigrams
A good teacher does not draw out; he gives out, and what he gives out is love.
A. S. NEILL
The Problem Teacher
The important thing is not so much that every child should be taught, as that every child should be given the wish to learn.
JOHN LUBBOCK
The Pleasures of Life
We love the precepts for the teacher's sake.
GEORGE FARQUHAR
The Constant Couple