“You will search the world over and not find a nonsuperstitious community. As long as there is ignorance, there will be adherence to superstition. Dispelling ignorance is the only solution. That is why I teach.”
“But the purpose of a story is to teach and to please at once, and what it teaches is how to recognize the snares of the world.”
“Whoever teaches without emancipating stultifies.”
“The difference between a beginning teacher and an experienced one is that the beginning teacher asks, How am I doing? and the experienced teacher asks, How are the children doing?”
“Grades really cover up failure to teach. A bad instructor can go through an entire quarter leaving absolutely nothing memorable in the minds of his class, curve out the scores on an irrelevant test, and leave the impression that some have learned and some have not. But if the grades are removed the class is forced to wonder each day what it’s really learning. The questions, What’s being taught? What’s the goal? How do the lectures and assignments accomplish the goal? become ominous. The removal of grades exposes a huge and frightening vacuum.”
“My words itch at your ears till you understand them”
“The whole art of teaching is only the art of awakening the natural curiosity of the mind for the purpose of satisfying it afterwards.”
“Ask yourself: Do I feel the need to laminate? Then teaching is for you.”
“I would teach how science works as much as I would teach what science knows. I would assert (given that essentially, everyone will learn to read) that science literacy is the most important kind of literacy they can take into the 21st century. I would undervalue grades based on knowing things and find ways to reward curiosity. In the end, it s the people who are curious who change the world.”
“Students never appreciate their teachers while they are learning. It is only later, when they know more of the world, that they understand how indebted they are to those who instructed them. Good teachers expect no praise or love from the young. They wait for it, and in time, it comes.”
“the calling of the teacher. There is no craft more privileged. To awaken in another human being powers, dreams beyond one’s own; to induce in others a love for that which one loves; to make of one’s inward present their future; that is a threefold adventure like no other.”
“To a teacher of languages there comes a time when the world is but a place of many words and man appears a mere talking animal not much more wonderful than a parrot.”
“To make someone an icon is to make him an abstraction, and abstractions are incapable of vital communication with living people.10 10 One has only to spend a term trying to teach college literature to realize that the quickest way to kill an author s vitality for potential readers is to present that author ahead of his time as great or classic. Because then the author becomes for the students like medicine or vegetables, something the authorities have declared good for them that they ought to like, at which point the students nictitating membranes come down, and everyone just goes through the requisite motions of criticism and paper-writing without feeling one real or relevant thing. It s like removing all oxygen from the room before trying to start a fire.”
“People who teach you cram old ideas, old views, old ways, into you. Like covering plants with layer after layer of old earth; it s no wonder the poor things so rarely come up fresh and green.”
“[T]eaching has been for me an education (Lord knows what it has been for my students).”
“My first semester I had only nine students. Hoping they might view me as professional and well prepared, I arrived bearing name tags fashioned in the shape of maple leaves.”
“She knew—it was her job as a teacher of history to know—how many horrors are legitimated in public daylight, against the will of most of the people.”