For some students, school is the only place where they get a hot meal and a warm hug. Teachers are sometimes the only ones who tell our children they can go from an Indian reservation to the Ivy League, from the home of a struggling single mom to the White House.
Interpretation
This quote highlights the vital role that schools and teachers play in providing not just education, but essential support and encouragement to students from challenging backgrounds.
Denise Juneau's quote emphasizes the significant impact that schools and teachers can have on students, especially those who face socio-economic hardships. It acknowledges that for some students, school may be a sanctuary that provides physical nourishment and emotional support, and it celebrates the transformative power of teachers who inspire their students to aspire to greater opportunities, regardless of their circumstances.
In practice
During a school board meeting, this quote can be used to advocate for more resources for teachers.
Children are coming to school with trauma, everyday trauma, that they live under: violence in the homes, alcoholism in the community, unemployment thats 80 percent, not just during the recession. We need to help treat that before they can even go sit in a class and learn about math.
Good history is good story-telling. And good story-telling demands empathy; it requires understanding different actors, differing motivations, competing goals.
Beware of letting small faults pass unnoticed under the idea it is a little one. There are no little things in training children; all are important. Little weeds need plucking up as much as any. Leave them alone and they will soon be great.
Much education today is monumentally ineffective. All too often we are giving young people cut flowers when we should be teaching them to grow their own plants.
You have to connect your work to what people are doing. A good way is to construct a bridge between theory and practice - Amartya Sen and I tried this by founding the Human Development and Capabilities Association where practitioners meet theoreticians and their discourse influences practice.
Child psychology and child psychiatry cannot be reformed. They must be abolished.
The student who uses home made apparatus, which is always going wrong, often learns more than one who has the use of carefully adjusted instruments, to which he is apt to trust and which he dares not take to pieces.
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