Middle-class families know education begins at birth.
Geoffrey CanadaRead
Kids who are poor often have families that have not really been kept informed about... how important it is to read to your child, to reduce stresses in their life, to use positive incentives and words.
Interpretation
Reading to children and using positive reinforcement can significantly impact their well-being and development.
Geoffrey Canada highlights the crucial role of education and support for children from low-income families. He emphasizes the importance of engaging parents in their children's literacy development and emotional well-being, suggesting that informed families can better support their children through reading and positive communication.
In practice
During a community workshop for parents on child development.
Middle-class families know education begins at birth.
I want to be a children’s hero… Children need heroes because heroes give hope; without hope they have no future.
Why is it that when we had rotary phones, when we were having folks being crippled by polio, that we were teaching the same way then that we're doing right now?
When kids know that you refuse to let them fail ... they don't give up as easy. So sometimes they don't have it inside, [but] they're like,'You know, I don't want to do this, but I know my mother's going to be mad.'That matters to kids, and it helps get them through.
I want my kids to graduate from high school. But that's not enough. I also want them to go to college. Why? Because rich people's kids go to college. And if that's good enough for them, it's good enough for my kids. Because you know what? College graduates don't tend to go to jail as frequently as nongraduates.
People don't believe or understand that a community can lose hope. You can have a whole community where hopelessness is the norm, where folks don't have faith that things will get better because history and circumstances have proven over 30, 40, or 50 years that things don't get better.
A fondness for reading, which, properly directed, must be an education in itself.
Schools shouldn't have to choose between serving a student with special needs or cutting an art class, laying off teachers or using outdated textbooks. But these are the positions that far too many schools have been placed in, and only a meaningful acknowledgment of the problem can begin the process of getting them out.
Whatever may be the merits of a religious system, its effects upon the mass of mankind must depend in an important degree upon its teachers. All instruction and all truth, except simple mathematical truth, is modified by the medium through which it is conveyed.
I believe in teaching just a few students, as teaching requires a constant alert observation on each individual in order to establish a direct relationship. A good teacher cannot be fixed in a routine, and many are just that. During teaching, each moment requires a sensitive mind that is constantly changing and constantly adapting.
Sleep is good, he said, And books are better.
I've noticed a fascinating phenomenon in my twenty-five years of teaching - that schools and schooling are increasingly irrelevant to the great enterprises of the planet. No one believes anymore that scientists are trained in science classes or politicians in civics classes or poets in English classes. The truth is that schools don't really teach anything except how to obey orders.
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