Teaching Quotes

Never talk back to a teacher. Teachers are like God. Actually, teachers are God's boss.

~ Deborah Wiles

The kind of teacher who never learned anything herself. Or taught anything, except sarcasm or fear.

~ Tanith Lee

As a Jew, I had no desire to challenge my childhood prejudice. But as a teacher, I could not do otherwise.

~ Sondra Perl

I noticed that the [drawing] teacher didn't tell people much... Instead, he tried to inspire us to experiment with new approaches. I thought of how we teach physics: We have so many techniques - so many mathematical methods - that we never stop telling the students how to do things. On the other hand, the drawing teacher is afraid to tell you anything. If your lines are very heavy, the teacher can't say, Your lines are too heavy. because *some* artist has figured out a way of making great pictures using heavy lines. The teacher doesn't want to push you in some particular direction. So the drawing teacher has this problem of communicating how to draw by osmosis and not by instruction, while the physics teacher has the problem of always teaching techniques, rather than the spirit, of how to go about solving physical problems.

~ Richard Feynman

I realized I was a teacher when I felt warm during class and got up to open the door. Later on there was noise in the hallway, so I got up and shut it. Students can't open and close the door whenever they feel like it.

~ David Sedaris

Adrienne started teaching a few months ago in Denver and wrote that it leaves you with a constant feeling of deceiving people. That you know nothing they don't, or couldn't learn on their own if they cared to.

~ David Sedaris

Would it not therefore be wiser in moral concerns to acquiesce in the judgement of common reason, or at most only to call in philosophy for the purpose of rendering the system of morals more complete and intelligible, and its rules more convenient for use (especially for disputation), but not so as to draw off the common understanding from its happy simplicity, or to bring it by means of philosophy into a new path of inquiry and instruction?

~ Immanuel Kant

Instead, we try to give them affection, confidence and guidance, more or less in that order, because experience has shown us that those are their most immediate needs.

~ E.r. Braithwaite

Teachers are often rightly praised for all they do for our children. But there are others out there who are working to make the youth of today a happy and productive generation of tomorrow. And I'm proud to say I'm one of these others providing a positive environment for many wonderful children who are full of promise.

~ Jack Canfield

Let your ego grow enough to teach but not enough to dictate.

~ Ben Tolosa

... Let me start with the top mistakes that teachers make. Some of these mistakes are forced on teachers by a badly designed education system, and some are ones that teachers make no matter what they are teaching or which system they are teaching in. Some of these are less than obvious, so let's consider them one-by-one.1. Assuming that there is some kind of learning, other than learning by doing.2. Believing that a teacher's job is assessment.3. Thinking there is something that everyone must know in order to proceed.4. Thinking that students are not worried about the purpose of what they are being taught.5. Thinking that studying can replace repeated practice as a key learning technique.6. Thinking that because students have chosen to take your course, they have an interest in learning what you plan to teach them.7. Correcting a student who is doing something wrong by telling them what to do instead.8. Thinking that a student remembers what you just taught him.

~ Roger Schank

A classroom is like a Greenhouse where the teacher must provide essential amenities like knowledge and life-skill with patience and empathy, control temperatures and provide adequate ventilation to release unwanted energies for everyone and everything to bloom.

~ Kavita Bhupta Ghosh

You can never stop being a teacher. It is the core responsibility of a leader.

~ Alex Malley

Though the legs of a football coach are never so active on the field of play during playing time, his mind is the best or worst player on the pitch!

~ Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

Though the legs of a football coach are never so active on the field of play during playing time, his mind is the best or worse player on the pitch!

~ Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

How can I teach my children not to lie but always speak the truth when now people are fine with alternative facts?

~ Maria Nieves

Active scholars are uniquely attracted by a high-quality graduate school of arts and sciences. Faculty members consider the teaching and training of new generations of graduate students as their highest calling. They believe that working with graduate students maintains and develops their professional skills more effectively than any other activity. It may be the main reason for the great attraction of academic jobs. Laboratory scientists have told me that the opportunity to work with graduate students keeps them in the university. For them, other options would center on research in commercial laboratories, but there the principal investigator would be assisted by technicians, and that is considered a far less creative interaction.

~ Henry Rosovsky

A question asked in earnest, deserves an earnest answer.

~ Christopher Moore

My students still don't know what they will never be. Their hope is so bright I can almost see it.I used to value the truth of whether this student or that one would achieve the desired thing. I don't value that truth anymore as much as I value their untested hope. I don't care that one in two hundred of them will ever become what they feel they must become. I care only that I am able to witness their faith in what's coming next.I no longer believe in anything other than the middle, but my students still believe in beginnings. Ask them, and they will tell you that everything is about to start in just a moment, just one more moment.

~ Sarah Manguso

Camillo always say we are on earth to learn. I think I want to teach. I want to teach history so that the world does not have to repeat our mistakes.

~ Amy Harmon

I loathe it when they [English teachers] are bullied by no-nothing parents or cowardly school boards.

~ Pat Conroy

To keep up interest in a subject, a teenager has to enjoy working in it. If the teacher makes the task of learning excessively difficult, the student will feel too frustrated and anxious to really get into it and enjoy it for its own sake. If the teacher makes learning too easy, the student will get bored and lose interest. The teacher has the difficult task of finding the right balance between the challenges he or she gives and the students' skills, so that enjoyment and the desire to learn more result.

~ Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Teaching is not about how we see things, it is about how children see things.

~ Kavita Bhupta Ghosh

Henry David Thoreau, Susan B. Anthony, W. E. B. DuBois, and Lyndon B. Johnson are just a few of the famous Americans who taught. They resisted the fantasy of educators as saints or saviors, and understood teaching as a job in which the potential for children’s intellectual transcendence and social mobility, though always present, is limited by real-world concerns such as poor training, low pay, inadequate supplies, inept administration, and impoverished students and families. These teachers’ stories, and those of less well-known teachers, propel this history forward and help us understand why American teaching has evolved into such a peculiar profession, one attacked and admired in equal proportion.

~ Dana Goldstein

Even we set aside the nearly 50 percent of all beginner teachers who choose to leave the profession within five years—and ignore the evidence that those who leave are worse performers than those who stay—it is unclear whether teachers are formally terminated for poor performance any less frequently than are other workers.

~ Dana Goldstein

School is the worst choice, it teach us that we can focus on a lot of stuff at first view it's like preparing to work hard as a villager use to do or somebody else with such type hard work. From other it's selfish and from last it's full of obstacles...

~ Deyth Banger

To enter a room is to move from one environment to another and that, for the teenager, can be traumatic. There be dragons, daily horrors from acne to zit.

~ Frank Mccourt

I am teaching. Storytelling is teaching.

~ Frank Mccourt

You can't teach in a vacuum. A good teacher relates the material to real life. You understand that, don't you?

~ Frank Mccourt

Teaching is bringing the news.

~ Frank Mccourt

Nobody ever told them they had a right to an opinion.

~ Frank Mccourt

The teacher must adopt the role of facilitator not content provider.

~ Lev S. Vygotsky

Everything in my head was secondhand, too: Catholicism; Ireland's sad history, a litany of suffering and martyrdom drummed into me by priests, schoolmasters and parents who knew no better.

~ Frank Mccourt

I consider the two years in Beaufort when I taught high school as perhaps the happiest time of my life. My attraction to melodrama and suffering had not yet overwhelmed me, but signs of it were surfacing. No one had warned me that a teacher could fall so completely in love with his students that graduation seemed like the death of a small civilization.

~ Pat Conroy

There's something hostile about the way they enter and leave the room that tells you what they think of you. It could be your imagination and you try to figure out what will bring them over to your side. You try lessons that worked with other classes but even that doesn't help and it's because of that chemistry. They know when they have you on the run. They have instincts that detect your frustrations.

~ Frank Mccourt

They look back and relixe that they learned much about Christian behavior an churchy experiences, but whatever they learned about Jesus didn't really change them. They never saw him so strikingly that he became their one, overriding hope and their greatest love. They were never convinced that Jesus is better - a zillion times better - than anything and everything else. Our goal must be for kids to catch this rock-their-world vision of Jesus.

~ Jack Klumpenhower

Also, I am not sure what you are teaching in your classroom, but Seb came home the other week talking about a healthy eating pyramid. I had to explain to him that pyramids are made of stone and therefore not edible, so I would appreciate your not filling his head with these fanciful notions.

~ David Thorne

I returned, however, with unabated vigour to my work—a more arduous task than anyone can imagine, who has not felt something like the misery of being charged with the care and direction of a set of mischievous, turbulent rebels, whom his utmost exertions cannot bind to their duty; while, at the same time, he is responsible for their conduct to a higher power, who exacts from him what cannot be achieved without the aid of the superior’s more potent authority; which, either from indolence, or the fear of becoming unpopular with the said rebellious gang, the latter refuses to give. I can conceive few situations more harassing than that wherein, however you may long for success, however you may labour to fulfil your duty, your efforts are baffled and set at nought by those beneath you, and unjustly censured and misjudged by those above.

~ Anne Brontë

Teaching remains a heroic act to me, and teachers live a necessary and all-important life. We are killing their spirit with unnecessary pressure and expectation that seem forced and destructive to me. Long ago I was one of them. I still regret I was forced to leave them. My entire body of work is because of men and women like them.

~ Pat Conroy

Though I’ve never met a teacher who was not happy in retirement, I rarely meet one who thinks that their teaching life was not a grand way to spend a human life. The unhappy ones are the young ones, those who must teach in public schools when the whole nation seems at war with the very essence of teaching.

~ Pat Conroy