I can't go back. The past won't go away in this family.
Frank MccourtRead
Early in my teaching days, the kids asked me the meaning of a poem. I replied, 'I don't know any more than you do. I have ideas. What are your ideas?' I realized then that we're all in the same boat. What does anybody know?
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the shared journey of learning between teachers and students.
Frank McCourt highlights the idea that knowledge is a collective experience, suggesting that neither teachers nor students have all the answers. The quote reflects the notion that education is a collaborative process where ideas are exchanged and that teaching involves exploring thoughts together, rather than simply dispensing knowledge from one party to another.
In practice
During a teacher training workshop, to highlight the importance of collaboration, one could say this quote.
I can't go back. The past won't go away in this family.
Sit and quiet yourself. Luxuriate in a certain memory and the details will come. Let the images flow. You'll be amazed at what will come out on paper. I'm still learning what it is about the past that I want to write. I don't worry about it. It will emerge. It will insist on being told.
Kids all want to look cool, as if knowledge is a great burden, but they're always looking around. They remember.
That's what kept us going - a sense of absurdity, rather than humor.
A mother's love is a blessing No matter where you roam. Keep her while you have her, You'll miss her when she's gone -- Angela's Ashes.
You might be poor, your shoes might be broken, but your mind is a palace.
Teaching literature is teaching how to read. How to notice things in a text that a speed-reading culture is trained to disregard, overcome, edit out, or explain away; how to read what the language is doing, not guess what the author was thinking; how to take evidence from a page, not seek a reality to substitute for it.
I think it’s the books that you read when you’re young that live with you forever.
To learn anything other than the stuff you find in books, you need to be able to experiment, to make mistakes, to accept feedback, and to try again. It doesn't matter whether you are learning to ride a bike or starting a new career, the cycle of experiment, feedback, and new experiment is always there.
In Kenya, I met wonderful girls; girls who wanted to help their communities. I was with them in their school, listening to their dreams. They still have hope. They want to be doctor and teachers and engineers.
People from my sort of background needed Grammar schools to compete with children from privileged homes like Shirley Williams and Anthony Wedgwood Benn.
The object we call a book is not the real book, but its potential, like a musical score or seed. It exists fully only in the act of being read; and its real home is inside the head of the reader, where the symphony resounds, the seed germinates. A book is a heart that only beats in the chest of another.
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