Teaching Quotes

An essential part of teachingis to show how to enjoy learning.

~ Phil Mitchell

How much verbal garbage there is going out across the air waves and across the pulpits of our land because preachers do not believe the Gospel, do not believe that Jesus Christ is the only way.

~ Dr. J. Otis Yoder

Life in the Kingdom of God is accepting and knowing Jesus Christ, it is studying and applyingHis teachings to your life.

~ Sunday Adelaja

I do not teach students anything. I learn along with them.

~ John Marmysz

When I took over as chair of the fashion program, I was horrified that only the faculty member was allowed to speak in a critique. I'm talking about perfectly nurturing teachers. But the rule was there would be no call of hands for students to contribute their feedback. It was embedded in the department's culture. That was alarming to me. When I was teaching, I was the least important person in the room as far as I was concerned--my students' points of view mattered most. I wanted to learn who they were and teach them to respect one another's perspectives.I would start off by saying something like, I am having trouble understanding how this work solves the problem at hand. Here are some things about the work that I appreciate: X, Y, Z. But I see these virtues independent of the problem we're solving.

~ Tim Gunn

grades really cover up failure to teach.

~ Robert M. Pirsig

When a person sets out to learn from others and not to teach others he becomes a true writer.

~ Carla H. Krueger

One of the hardest things for a teacher is to know when to keep quiet and when to let go. It is a terrible thing to hold someone back from success, or to insist on sharing credit, or to tie someone to your apron strings. We need to have faith that we have done all we can, and then we need to kick our birds out of the nest.

~ Tim Gunn

Without books no one can be a good teacher nor even a good student of this art.

~ Fiore Dei Liberi

As a teacher, his task was not to make policy but to follow the policy made by the Department.

~ Earl Lovelace

The purpose of teachers should be to add to the sum of human knowers rather than the sum of human knowledge.

~ Stuart Sherman

Educators are spiritual beings—we are on earth to make a difference.

~ Holly Elissa Bruno

I can't say I ever remember getting less than a whole child in my 29 years here.They come in whole and I teach 'em that way.

~ David Kahn

Good teaching gains its authority from having consistent and repeated support from multiple scriptural sources, and it builds a firm base for our unity and our confidence in Christ.

~ Reid A. Ashbaucher

One of the hallmarks of great teachers is that they rejoice when their students surpass them. Encouraging an atmosphere of questioning and inviting people to grow within your classroom isn’t necessarily easy, which must explain why people who want to create cults or die hard followers discourage questioning in general. They would rather have people reciting their dogma than asking hard questions.

~ Gudjon Bergmann

Our professional competence and pride should rest not alone in our possession of knowledge but as well in our ability to communicate it. Of course we shall carry on our research, and of course we shall applaud the colleague who 'produces,' but we shan't be happy if he offers that as a substitute for inspiring young people with a desire for knowledge, a sense of taste, and a regard for virtue.

~ Denham Sutcliffe

Make a better mousetrap and the world will know it, it can measure and applaud your skill. Make a better man and the world will say he did it himself.

~ Denham Sutcliffe

It's better to teach people than to scare them, Lauren. If you scare them and nothing happens, they lose their fear, and you lose some of your authority with them. It's harder to scare them a second time, harder to teach them, harder to win back their trust. Best to begin by teaching.

~ Octavia E. Butler

If you treat every question like you've never heard it before, your students feel like you respect them and everyone learns a lot more. Including the teacher.

~ Anita Diamant

Knowledge (curriculum) and behavior (pedagogy) are embedded in everyone’s core beliefs about the nature of God, humanity, and the world.

~ Abraham Kuyper

Life is not trying to entertain us, it's trying to teach us.

~ Seth Adam Smith

First day of your teaching you are to stand at your classroom door and let your students know how happy you are to see them. Stand, I say. Any playwright will tell you that when the actor sits down the play sits down. The best move of all is to establish yourself as a presence and to do it outside in the hallway. Outside, I say. That’s your territory and when you’re out there you’ll be seen as a strong teacher, fearless, ready to face the swarm. That’s what a class is, a swarm. And you’re a warrior teacher. It’s something people don’t think about. Your territory is like your aura, it goes with you everywhere, in the hallways, on the stairs and, assuredly, in the classroom.

~ Frank Mccourt

I noticed (the ball) was multicolored. One side was green and the other was red. When we got to the gathering I held that ball up and I said, 'Before we begin, will you tell me what color this ball is?' They said, 'red.' I said, 'no, it's green.' We argued a while and I turned the ball around and said, 'tell me what you see here.' Here's what we want to do. We want you to understand until you shall have seen how it looks to me on my side, you can't convince me that you know what you're talking about, because this ball is going to be red on this side and green on that side until the day it dies. Now, if I'm willing to come around here and see how it looks to you, and if you're willing to come around here and see how it looks to me, we can reconcile that.

~ Dudley Flood

I just thought that was the most noble contribution you could make to human kind, was to be a teacher.

~ Dudley Flood

Cerise! Come and kiss me, you red haired harpy,” Izrayl bellowed. She smiled and moved to kiss his stubbly cheek. He held her tight and squeezed. “How goes it Old Dog,” Cerise said fondly to her temporary captor.“Still alive,” he grinned salaciously at her. “And still young enough to learn some new tricks if you are the one doing the teaching.”“Try it and I will neuter you,” Cerise threatened and tugged on his braid. “You dogs, all you think of is hunting, fighting and fucking.”“What else is there?” Izrayl growled in the back of his throat and raised an eyebrow at her suggestively.

~ Amy Kuivalainen

Finally, let me share a feeling of mine, I hope it will not be misinterpreted as pride. I am seventy four now. But still, if they give me a duty in the wooden hut where I used to stay when I was a mentor long years ago, I will gladly run there and try to fulfill that duty. Perhaps, some of our friends can see that task as a simple and trivial one. But I have not underestimated this duty and would never do so. Even today, some people may consider our having lessons with the small circle of young scholars here as a simple and trivial job. However, in my opinion, this is the most important occupation that can take human to the highest levels.

~ M. Fethullah Gülen

Participating in the filling of others' brains with knowledge and know-how is just an extraordinary gift only very few have. Hence, teaching a language is indeed opening these brains to the world with its similarities and dissimilarities taught in different words.

~ Messaoud Mohammed

Given the consumer-pleasing politics of today's universities, I have, in effect, seventy new bosses each semester; they're sitting at the desk in front of me.

~ Maureen Corrigan

Teaching is the best way to learn.

~ Debasish Mridha

How deaf and stupid I have been, he thought, walking on quickly. When anyone reads anything which he wishes to study, he does not despise the letters and punctuation marks, and call them illusion, chance and worthless shells, but he reads them, he studies and loves them, letter by letter. But I, who wished to read the book of the world and of my own nature, did presume to despise the letters and signs. I called the world of appearances, illusion. I called my eyes and tongue, chance. Now it is over; I have awakened.

~ Hermann Hesse

I’m not sure I ever met an American teacher in Korea that hadn’t volunteered at an orphanage at least once—even our resident idiot could be surprisingly decent on occasion—but I’ve also visited foreign countries where children are taught hatred. I’ve seen it up close and personal. It’s antithetical to everything I believe in as a teacher. The mandate for all teachers is to instill hope, not fear and hatred.

~ Tucker Elliot

Any academic skill is quickly achievable if charged with clear purpose and an appeal to enthusiastic self-interest. Tarzan of the Apes only needed about twenty minutes to figure out how to read the beautiful Jane Porter’s cursive writing.

~ T.k. Naliaka

I don't see how it's doing society any good to have it's members walking around with vague memories of algebraic formulas and geometric diagrams, and clear memories of hating them.

~ Paul Lockhart

This is the pedagogical paradox. The person and the teacher is required precisely because the knowledge itself is nontransferable from teacher to student.

~ Rebecca Goldstein

Each time I walk into a classroom, I can choose the place within myself from which my teaching will come, just as I can choose the place within my students toward which my teaching will be aimed. I need not teach from a fearful place: I can teach from my curiosity or hope or empathy or honesty, places that are as real within me as are my fears. I can have fear, but I need not be fear - if I am willing to stand somewhere else in my inner landscape.

~ Parker J. Palmer

Active critical reflection is necessary in every aspect of our teaching, not only in front of a class. We must try to reevaluate our own values and experiences as they relate to our teaching. Our assumptions and theories about teaching composition must remain open to inspection, evaluation, and revision, a condition that requires an active inquiry paralleling the inquiry in which we engage our students.

~ George Hillocks

...God is already out there in the world ahead of us. In our teaching, therefore, we must do more than merely help people learn how to be good church members. We are directors preparing people for roles in a drama that encompasses every part of their lives.

~ Richard Robert Osmer

I try to learn better, do better. I have no idea how I got to be the one at the front of the classroom, the one who gets to be in charge of things. Most of the time, I feel like the kid who gets to sit at the adult table for the first time at Thanksgiving. I'm not sure which fork to use. My feet can't reach the floor.

~ Roxane Gay

I am not sure that the best way to make a boy love the English poets might not be forbid him to read them and then make sure that he had plenty of opportunities to disobey you.

~ C.s. Lewis

Theodore had an apparently inexhaustible fund of knowledge about everything, but he imparted this knowledge with a sort of meticulous diffidence that made you feel he was not so much teaching you something new, as reminding you of something which you were already aware of, but which had, for some reason or other, slipped your mind.

~ Gerald Durrell