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
We love the precepts for the teacher's sake.
GEORGE FARQUHAR
The Constant Couple
Teaching is an art, not a science, principally because it involves human beings, their emotions and their values.
GILBERT HIGHET
The Art of Teaching
Great knowledge is requisite to instruct those who have been well instructed, but still greater knowledge is requisite to instruct those who have been neglected.
HORACE MANN
Thoughts
No teaching is complete that does not issue in plain and intelligent expression of the truth taught; but it is the most miserable of mockeries when, in place of leading the child to perfect and put into its own simple speech its own simple conceptions of truth, we impose upon it the ready-made definitions of some learned master or teacher, dressed, for the most part, in words it never heard before.
JOHN MILTON GREGORY
The Seven Laws of Teaching
There was really only one way to teach kids how to develop it: You give them something they can't do, they work hard until they find they can do it, and you just keep repeating the process.
RANDY PAUSCH
The Last Lecture
All I can say to teachers, both indigenous and non-indigenous, is this: Our children need to learn about one another and about the world, even when the world is a difficult place. We need creative, thoughtful and kind people who are willing to take risks to teach all our children. Please don't be afraid to engage them. They need you.
DANIELLE S. MCLAUGHLIN
"What Is Appropriate And What Is Cultural Appropriation?", Huffington Post Canada, May 23, 2017
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
It is better to teach a few things perfectly than many things indifferently.
ANDRÉ MAUROIS
An Art of Living
It's the student who makes the teacher, not the other way around.
CARLOS RUIZ ZAFON
The Angel's Game
If I were president? First thing I'd do is take care of the schoolteachers. I'm not saying we should start 'em out with six figures, but in some places they've got to be mother, father, brother, sister, and mentor. They're real important people. Let's give 'em a raise -- and attract the best people to the job.
CARMELLO ANTHONY
Esquire, January 2005
Life is amazing: and the teacher had better prepare himself to be a medium for that amazement.
EDWARD BLISHEN
Donkey Work
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
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
The object of teaching a child is to enable him to get along without his teacher.
ELBERT HUBBARD
A Thousand & One Epigrams
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
One thing that isn't a myth about teachers is that they love the actual act of teaching. However, sometimes teachers can be made to feel as if their wings are being clipped by ever-changing guidelines and standards that demand they rework, rewrite, and resubmit curricula and lesson plans for approval, when the materials and ideas they'd already developed were working well.
GINA BELLI
"8 Reasons Teaching Is More Difficult Than You Think (Not One Is About the Kids)", PayScale, October 23, 2016
As a teacher, I possess a tremendous power to make a child's life miserable or joyous. I can be a tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration. I can humiliate or heal. In all situations, it is my response that decides whether a crisis will be escalated or de-escalated and a child humanized or dehumanized.
HAIM G. GINOTT
Young Children, vol. 51, 1964
None can teach admirably if not loving his task.
AMOS BRONSON ALCOTT
Table Talk
The teacher is a sympathizing guide whose familiarity with the subjects to be learned enables him to direct the learner's efforts, to save him from the waste of time and strength, or needless or insuperable difficulties, and to keep him from mistaking truth for error. But no aid of school or teacher can change nature's modes in mind work, or take from the learner the lordly prerogative and need for knowing for himself.
JOHN MILTON GREGORY
The Seven Laws of Teaching