Explore Quotes on Teaching

I'm a teacher still, but with a much larger classroom.

I love teaching. I love working with kids... maybe some day I'll go back to the classroom. I'm not ready to say it'll never happen.

I come to writing the same way I come to teaching, which is that my goal is always to create life-long readers.

These are the rules of big business. They have superseded the teachings of our parents and are reducible to a simple maxim: Get a monopoly; let Society work for you; and remember that the best of all business is politics, for a legislative grant, franchise, subsidy or tax exemption is worth more than a Kim-berly or Comstock lode, since it does not require any labor, either mental or physical, for its exploitation.

One is never just a teacher: One is always - even if not consciously - an advocate of a point of view, a critic of certain positions, an exemplar of someone trying to communicate, a purveyor of images, a practitioner of behavioral standards, a person dealing with, and indeed responsible for, others in common tasks. In teaching, at least, the role of moral agent is inescapable.

The proper end of teaching is to lead our students toward autonomy.

My teaching influences who you are and who you become, I said, because insofar as I persuade you to change what you know, I can't help but persuade you to change who you are. A vast portion of who you are just is a matter of what you know.

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.

Are our ways of teaching students to ask some questions always correlative with our ways of teaching them not to ask - indeed, to be unconscious of - others? Does the educational system exist in order to promulgate knowledge, or is its main function rather to universalize a society’s tacit agreement about what it has decided it does not and cannot know?

They said daydreaming was against the law, but some of us escaped, slipping out windows and over cyclone fences, some of us flying away with heads like balloons. We taught our dogs to love the flavor of homework and became expert forgers of our parents’ signatures. We knew they were teaching us how to die but some of us said no in our stealthy and stubborn ways.

For all the time schools devote to the teaching of mathematics, very little (if any) is spent trying to convey just what the subject is about. Instead, the focus is on learning and applying various procedures to solve math problems. That's a bit like explaining soccer by saying it is executing a series of maneuvers to get the ball into the goal. Both accurately describe various key features, but they miss the what and the why of the big picture.

All this has been very formative in both my research and my teaching, so I value it enormously in my life. It's why I'm a strong proponent of general education -- because I saw how it opened my eyes.

Dictionary: Opinion presented as truth in alphabetical order.

Should not the Bible regain the place it once held as a schoolbook? Its morals are pure, its examples are captivating and noble....In no Book is there so good English, so pure and so elegant, and by teaching all the same they will speak alike, and the Bible will justly remain the standard of language as well as of faith.

In teaching there should be no distinction of classes.

Those who use the Bible as a reference for moral behavior are simply cherry-picking those teachings, such as the Golden Rule, that they have independently decided are moral for other reasons, while ignoring those teachings with which they disagree.

Modern religious teaching have little or nothing to say about the place of prudence in life or in the hierarchy of virtues.

Barely a teenager, Elizabeth Taylor was already more beautiful and voluptuous than Miss America. When she arrived at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel for our magazine shoot, I was bowled over. I couldn't believe she was only fourteen. She filled out a swimsuit better than I did. We did the pictures, including one shot of me teaching her to float. With that superstructure of hers, she floated just fine. What she couldn't do was sink.

When it came to slaughtering sacred cows with such crude yet perfect musical precision, there was no one better than Frank. I wonder what songs he's teaching the angels right now? Good luck God! You've got your hands full this time.

Children have to be educated, but they have also to be left to educate themselves.

The main feature should be the teaching of principles through stories. Don't make it metaphysical at all.