Teaching Quotes - Page 74

I pray that each one of us stays awake as we fall. I pray that we choose to go into the abyss willingly and that our fall is cushioned by faith--faith that at the bottom we will be caught and taught and turned toward the light. I pray that we don't waste precious energy feeling ashamed of our mistakes, or embarrassed by our flaws. After years of teaching, I know only a few things for sure. One of them is this: We are chunks of dense matter that need to be cracked open. Our errors and failings are chinks in the heart's armor through which our true colors can shine.

The only points in which I differ from all ecclesiastical teaching is that I do not believe that any man ever saw or talked with God, I do not believe that God inspired the Mosaic code, or told the historians what they say he did about woman, for all the religions on the face of the earth degrade her, and so long as woman accepts the position that they assign her, her emancipation is impossible.

It is no secret that the fruits of language study are in no sort of relation to the labour spent on teaching and learning them.

The infinite in mathematics is always unruly unless it is properly treated.

The method of teaching which approaches most nearly to the method of investigation is incomparably the best.

The teaching arises out of the stillness. But when I'm alone, there's only the stillness, and that is my favorite place.

It is normal for politicians in all countries to profess themselves the pupils of history, anxious to draw the right lessons from her teaching.

Everybody's a teacher if you listen.

I am a teacher at heart. My goal is to inspire and energize audiences with ideas and possibilities that will challenge them to expand their perceptions of teaching and learning and dare to consider our professional future with optimism and excitement.

We know at lot more now than the 'last time around the 1960s and 1970s - about how to work for smart schools... ' 'The smart school finds it's foundation in a rich and evolving set of principles about human thinking and learning.'

One barrier... is the impoverishment of classroom language, the failure to cultivate a common vocabulary about inquiry, explanation, argument and problem solving.

Education ultimately depends on what happens in classrooms... between teachers and learners. That is fundamental.'... 'I hope that teachers will discover the optimism and direction to combat the energy - draining pressures and frustrations of most educational settings.

The key to teaching anything is to remember what it was like not to understand that thing. That's a very hard thing to do. Every time you come to understand something you didn't understand before, you are transformed. You become a different person from who you were before. The key to teaching someone else to understand that same thing is to remember your former, untransformed self. If you can do that, I think you can teach anything, even physics.

If I'm teaching girls that do love to make cookies and do love fashion - that they can use math as a part of that - you think that's me saying, come on girls you belong in the kitchen, you belong shopping? Or, do you think it's me showing them how math is part of all their life, even the part they thought it had nothing to do with?

It started 25 years ago, when I was teaching elementary school in a small town in Missouri

To be a good Zen Buddhist it is not enough to follow the teaching of its founder; we have to experience the Buddha's experience.

Ten minutes is short if it's a recess and long if it's a punishment.

Kong Qiu, or Master Kong as he was known, did not live to see his days of glory. During his lifetime, his views were received with scorn. But that was about two thousand five hundred years ago. A handful of his dedicated followers passed on Confucius' teachings to future generations. After Confucius' death, his followers published his teachings in the book, The Analects of Confucius.

In teaching there should be no distinction of classes.

John Paul II made it clear that... liberation theology based on the teaching of Jesus Christ was necessary, but liberation theology that used a Marxist analysis was unacceptable.

The trouble today is that many Christians live in a kind of bubble of assumptions about what their Christianity means, especially if it places them comfortably among "the good guys," - assumptions that are likely to be drawn as much from folk-Christianity, surrounding political culture, popular pulp-books about the "End Times," or their favourite guru writer or therapist, than from sober and comprehensive reading of the Bible as a whole. Prophets and preachers have the unwelcome task of pricking that bubble with the sharpness of actual texts and teachings of the Bible itself.

But these days there are a lot of younger people who would like to go into teaching but don't because the economic opportunities are sometimes elsewhere.

In education, I'm going to try to find what works. One thing I want to do is improve the quality of teachers. There are a lot of people who want to go into teaching; it's fundamentally a very fulfilling profession. But people don't feel they have financial support. We pay starting teachers in particular too little to attract the quality people that we need. I want to make it easier for good people who want to go into teaching to do that.

As for what's the most challenging aspect of teaching, it's convincing younger writers of the importance of reading widely and passionately.

He said, "You have pigs in this poem; pigs are not poetic." I got up and walked out of that class and never went back.