Famous Quotes & Sayings

Nicholas Lemann

In the current environment, attributing low student performance to teacher tenure is one of the great unproven causal links out there. The relationship just hasn't been examined very carefully, but we should all recognize that in higher education the strongest institutions generally have the most robust tenure systems, and in elementary and secondary, the states with the strongest teacher unions (and tenure systems) tend to have the highest student performance.

Mose Allison

I started going to a piano teacher at 5 years old, but pretty soon I started picking things out on my own and stopped taking music lessons. I never could read music very well, but I've still been doing it.

Mortimer Adler

Reading a book should be a conversation between you and the author. Presumably he knows more about the subject than you do; if not, you probably should not be bothering with his book. But understanding is a two-way operation; the learner has to question himself and question the teacher, once he understands what the teacher is saying. Marking a book is literally an expression of your differences or your agreements with the author. It is the highest respect you can pay him.

Mortimer Adler

Books are absent teachers.

Mortimer Adler

If you ask a living teacher a question, he will probably answer you. If you are puzzled by what he says, you can save yourself the trouble of thinking by asking him what he means. If, however, you ask a book a question, you must answer it yourself. In this respect a book is like nature or the world. When you question it, it answers you only to the extent that you do the work of thinking an analysis yourself.

Mortimer Adler

The teacher's role in discussion is to keep it going along fruitful lines - be moderating, guiding, correcting and arguing like one more students.

Mortimer Adler

Teachers may think they are stuffing minds, but all they are ever affecting is the memory. Nothing can ever be forced into anyone's mind except by brainwashing, which is the very opposite of genuine teaching.

Mortimer Adler

A lecture has been well described as the process whereby the notes of the teacher become the notes of the student without passing through the mind of either.

Mortimer Adler

All genuine learning is active, not passive. It involves the use of the mind, not just the memory. It is a process of discovery, in which the student is the main agent, not the teacher.

Missi Pyle

I used to audition for musicals when I was in New York before I moved to L.A., but I couldn't quite hit a certain note, so I saw a teacher in L. A. who helped me get better at it. She showed me how to use a different part of my voice. You are never too old.

Paulo Freire

The teacher is no longer merely the-one-who-teaches, but one who is him/herself taught in dialogue with the students, who in turn while being taught also teach. They become jointly responsible for a process in which all grow.

Paulo Freire

The educator has the duty of not being neutral.

Paulo Freire

Although the teachers or the students are not the same, the person in charge of education is being formed or re-formed as he/she teaches, and the person who is being taught forms him/herself in the process. ...There is, in fact, no teaching without learning.

Paulo Freire

Whether the teacher is authoritarian, undisciplined, competent, incompetent, serious, irresponsible, involved, a lover of people and of life, cold, angry with the world, bureaucratic, excessively rational, or whatever else, he/she will not pass through the classroom without leaving his or her mark on the students.

Paulo Freire

Teacher preparation should go beyond the technical preparation of teachers and be rooted in the ethical formation both of selves and of history.

Paulo Freire

... there is no valid teaching from which there does not emerge something learned and through which the learner does not become capable of recreating and remaking what has been taught.

Paulo Freire

Teachers and students (leadership and people), co-intent on reality, are both Subjects, not only in the task of unveiling that reality, and thereby coming to know it critically, but in the task of re-creating that knowledge. As they attain this knowledge of reality through common reflection and action, they discover themselves as its permanent re-creators.

Paulo Freire

In the banking concept of education, knowledge is a gift bestowed by those who consider themselves knowledgeable upon those whom they consider to know nothing... The teacher presents himself to his students as their necessary opposite; by considering their ignorance absolute, he justifies his own existence.

Paulo Freire

... there are moments in which the teacher, as the authority talks to the learners, says what must be done, establishes limits without which the very freedom of learners is lost in lawlessness, but these moments, in accordance with the political options of the educator, are alternated with others in which the educator speaks with the learner.

Paulo Freire

Sometimes a simple, almost insignificant gesture on the part of a teacher can have a profound formative effect on the life of a student.

Paulo Freire

Teachers who do not take their own education seriously, who do not study, who make little effort to keep abreast of events have no moral authority to coordinate the activities of the classroom.

Paulo Freire

Authentic thinking, thinking that is concerned about reality, does not take place in ivory tower isolation, but only in communication. If it is true that thought has meaning only when generated by action upon the world, the subordination of students to teachers becomes impossible.

Paulo Freire

Through dialogue, the teacher-of-the-students and the students-of-the-teacher cease to exist and a new term emerges: teacher-student with students-teachers.

Paul O'Grady

My primary school teacher once poured a bottle of curdled school milk forcefully down my throat. Then I threw it up all over her suede shoes. I'd rather have drunk from the spittoon in Barney's barber shop.

Paul Newman

I certainly never expected to be a professional actor. I never expected to be in movies. I thought I would probably become a teacher.

Matt Groening

People go into cartooning because they're shy and they're angry. That's when you're sitting in the back of a classroom drawing the teacher.

Marya Hornbacher

My students know I have a life, they know I've written about my life. They know some detail, probably more than they know about their physics teacher, but I would've told them anyway!

Martha Beck

If you see failure as a monster stalking you, or one that has already ruined your life, take another look. That monster can become a benevolent teacher, opening your mind to successes you cannot now imagine.

Marshall McLuhan

Nowadays there is no conversation at all. Teachers distrust talk as much as business men.

Marisa Tomei

I've sought out several dance teachers-shaman-like women dance teachers-to get in touch with the mystical through movement.

Oswald Chambers

If Jesus is a teacher only, then all He can do is to tantalize us by erecting a standard we cannot come anywhere near. But if by being born again from above we know Him first as Savior, we know that He did not come to teach us only. He came to make us what He teaches we should be. The Sermon on the Mount is a statement of the life we will live when the Holy Spirit is having His way with us.

Paul Harvey

Yoga is a product of Eastern thought. A further complication is that the early Yoga teachers were both Indian and Hindu. So from the late 1800's and early 1900's the Yoga teachers who came across were as interested in Hinduism as in Yoga. Often what we were being taught was a mixture of two different systems.

Paul Goodman

A good teacher feels his way, looking for response.