On This Thing Called Teaching:
I'm not a teacher, but an awakener.
Robert Frost
Teaching is the greatest act of optimism.
Colleen Wilcox
I am not a teacher; only a fellow traveler of whom you asked the way.
I pointed ahead--ahead of myself as well as you.
George Bernard Shaw
Education is not the filling of a bucket, but the lighting of a fire.
William Butler Yeats
Kids don't remember what you try and teach them. They remember what you are.
Jim Henson
It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge.
Albert Einstein
A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.
Henry Adams
The future of the world is in my classroom today, a future with the potential for good and bad...Several future presidents are learning from me today; so are the great writers of the next decades, and so are all the so-called ordinary people who will make the decisions in a democracy. I must never forget these same young people could become the thieves and murderers of the future. Only a teacher? Thank God I have a calling to the greatest profession of all! I must be vigilant everyday, lest I lose one fragile opportunity to improve tomorrow.
Ivan Welton Fitzwater
On Why I Teach:
Don't ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.
One person can make a difference, and everyone should try.
John F. Kennedy
((Pssst! Teaching Is Hard.)) On Refusing to Give Up:
Whatever course you decide upon, there is always someone to tell you that you are wrong.
There are always difficulties arising which tempt you to believe that your critics are right.
To map out a course of action and to follow it to an end requires courage.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Hope is not blind optimism. It's not ignoring the enormity of the task ahead, or the roadblocks that stand in our path. It's not sitting on the sidelines or shirking from a fight. Hope is that thing inside us that insists, despite all evidence to the contrary, that something better awaits us if we have the courage to reach for it, work for it, fight for it.
Barack Obama
On Children:
If we are to reach real peace in the world, we shall have to begin with the children.
And if they will grow up in their natural innocence, we won't have to struggle, we won't have to pass fruitless resolutions, but we shall go from love to love and peace to peace.
Gandhi
A Poem to Consider:
"Undivided attention"
By Taylor Mali
A grand piano wrapped in quilted pads by movers,
tied up with canvas straps - like classical music's
birthday gift to the insane -
is gently nudged without its legs
out an eighth-floor window on 62nd street.
It dangles in April air from the neck of the movers' crane,
Chopin-shiny black lacquer squares
and dirty white crisscross patterns hanging like the second-to-last
note of a concerto played on the edge of the seat,
the edge of tears, the edge of eight stories up going over, and
I'm trying to teach math in the building across the street.
Who can teach when there are such lessons to be learned?
All the greatest common factors are delivered by
long-necked cranes and flatbed trucks
or come through everything, even air.
Like snow.
See, snow falls for the first time every year, and every year
my students rush to the window
as if snow were more interesting than math,
which, of course, it is.
So please.
Let me teach like a Steinway,
spinning slowly in April air,
so almost-falling, so hinderingly
dangling from the neck of the movers' crane.
So on the edge of losing everything.
Let me teach like the first snow, falling.
By Taylor Mali
A grand piano wrapped in quilted pads by movers,
tied up with canvas straps - like classical music's
birthday gift to the insane -
is gently nudged without its legs
out an eighth-floor window on 62nd street.
It dangles in April air from the neck of the movers' crane,
Chopin-shiny black lacquer squares
and dirty white crisscross patterns hanging like the second-to-last
note of a concerto played on the edge of the seat,
the edge of tears, the edge of eight stories up going over, and
I'm trying to teach math in the building across the street.
Who can teach when there are such lessons to be learned?
All the greatest common factors are delivered by
long-necked cranes and flatbed trucks
or come through everything, even air.
Like snow.
See, snow falls for the first time every year, and every year
my students rush to the window
as if snow were more interesting than math,
which, of course, it is.
So please.
Let me teach like a Steinway,
spinning slowly in April air,
so almost-falling, so hinderingly
dangling from the neck of the movers' crane.
So on the edge of losing everything.
Let me teach like the first snow, falling.