The death penalty not only takes away the life of the person strapped to the table - it takes away a little bit of the humanity in each of us.
Clint SmithRead
In an effort to create a culture within my classroom where students feel safe sharing the intimacies of their own silences, I have four core principles posted on the board that sits in the front of my class, which every student signs at the beginning of the year: read critically, write consciously, speak clearly, tell your truth.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote emphasizes the importance of creating a safe and open environment for students to express themselves authentically and thoughtfully.
Clint Smith highlights the significance of fostering a classroom culture where students feel secure in sharing their thoughts and experiences. By establishing core principles such as reading critically, writing consciously, speaking clearly, and telling their truth, he encourages students to engage deeply with their learning and express their individual voices. This approach not only enhances their educational experience but also promotes personal growth and self-awareness.
Themes
EducationSafetyExpressionTruthCritical Thinking
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be used to inspire teachers during a professional development workshop on classroom management.
More from Clint Smith
All quotes →One does not read a poem by Gwendolyn Brooks with hopes that it will grant him a career in engineering; he does so because poetry helps him see something in the world that he might not have seen before.
Clint SmithRead
History has proven that art depicting black people cannot be disentangled from the political implications that such art has on their lives. As Africans were being stripped from the continent and sailed across the Atlantic to the Western world, depictions of black people in Western art changed in order to further render them racialized caricatures.
Clint SmithRead
Photography, sculpture, and painting were wielded as cultural weapons over the course of generations to substantiate the idea that black people were inherently subordinate beings; they were used to make slavery acceptable and to make black subjugation more palatable.
Clint SmithRead
In my hometown of New Orleans, grief is a public spectacle that, somewhat paradoxically, necessitates celebration. The dead are not mourned so much as they are posthumously venerated with music and dance.
Clint SmithRead
My parents raised me and my siblings in an armor of advice, an ocean of alarm bells so someone wouldn't steal the breath from our lungs, so that they wouldn't make a memory of this skin.
Clint SmithRead
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One glance at a book and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for 1,000 years. To read is to voyage through time.
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I guess that’s the beauty of books. When they finish they don’t really finish.
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They're all so highly educated, you know. Education is a great shield against experience. It offers so much, ready-made and all from the best shops, that there's a temptation to miss your own life in pursuing the lives of your betters. It makes you wise in some ways, but it can make you a blindfolded fool in others.
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The child's mind is not the type of mind we adults possess. If we call our type of mind the conscious type, that of the child is an unconscious mind. Now an unconscious mind does not mean an inferior mind. An unconscious mind can be full of intelligence. One will find this type of intelligence in every being, and every insect has it.
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Young film makers should learn how to deal with the money and learn how to deal with the power structure. Because it is like a battle.
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It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations. Bartlett's Familiar Quotations is an admirable work, and I studied it intently. The quotations when engraved upon the memory give you good thoughts. They also make you anxious to read the authors and look for more.
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