Famous Quotes & Sayings

Jonathan Kozol

Children, of course, don't understand at first that they are being cheated. They come to school with a degree of faith and optimism, and they often seem to thrive during the first few years. It is sometimes not until the third grade that their teachers start to see the warning signs of failure. By the fourth grade many children see it too.

Jonathan Kozol

My goal is to connect the young teachers to the old, to reignite their sense of struggle.

Jonathan Kozol

The contrasts between what is spent today to educate a child in the poorest New York City neighborhoods, where teacher salaries are often even lower than the city averages, and spending levels in the wealthiest suburban areas are daunting challenges to any hope New Yorkers might retain that even semblances of fairness still prevail.

Jonathan Kozol

I write books to change the world. Perhaps I can only change one little piece of that world. But if I can empower teachers and good citizens to give these children, who are the poorest of the poor, the same opportunity we give our own kids, then I'll feel my life has been worth it.

Jonathan Kozol

The future teachers I try to recruit are those show have refused to let themselves be neutered in this way, either in their private lives or in the lives that they intend to lead in school. When they begin to teach, they come into their classrooms with a sense of affirmation of the goodness and the fullness of existence, with a sense of satisfaction in discovering the unexpected in their students, and with a longing to surprise the world, their kids, even themselves, with their capacity to leave each place they've been ... a better and more joyful place than it was when they entered it.

Jonathan Kozol

I encourage teachers to speak in their own voices. Don't use the gibberish of the standards writers.

Jonathan Kozol

Wonderful teachers should never let themselves be drill sergeants for the state.

Jonathan Kozol

Good teachers don't approach a child of this age with overzealousness or with destructive conscientiousness. They're not drill-masters in the military or floor managers in a production system. They are specialists in opening small packages. They give the string a tug but do it carefully. They don't yet know what's in the box. They don't know if it's breakable.

Jonathan Kozol

I emphasize teachers because they are largely left out of the debate. None of the bombastic reports that come from Washington and think tanks telling us what needs to be 'fixed' - I hate such a mechanistic word, as if our schools were automobile engines - ever asks the opinions of teachers.

Jonathan Lethem

It wasn't for children, seventh grade. You could read the stress of even entering the building in the postures of the teachers, the security guards. Nobody could relax in such a racial and hormonal disaster area.

Jonathan Edwards

Teachers and learners are correlates, one of which was never intended to be without the other.

Jon Secada

I was a teacher for a long time. I taught at a community college: voice, theory, humanities. And nowadays, music education is a dying thing. Funding is being cut more and more and more.

Jon Secada

Even before I became a recording artist, I did other things in music. I was a teacher, I did studio work, and I was an arranger and a producer.

Jonah Lehrer

The vocational approach at NOCCA (New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts) helps build grit in students. It teaches them how to be single-minded in pursuit of a goal, to sacrifice for the sake of a passion. The teachers demand hard work from their kids because they know, from personal experience, that creative success requires nothing less.

Jon Stewart

I remember having a grade-school teacher I thought was a hard-ass. When you're that age, you think the guy is Himmler. Then you visit him eight years later and he's wearing polyester pants, he's four foot eight, you think he's gay, and you're like, 'Are you the guy I was afraid of?

Jon Stewart

I thought we were out of money!? You can't simultaneously fire teachers AND tomahawk missiles.

Joyce Carol Oates

As a teacher at Princeton, I'm surrounded by people who work hard so I just make good use of my time. And I don't really think of it as work - writing a novel, in one sense, is a problem-solving exercise.

Katha Pollitt

In a better world, science teachers would teach creationism along with evolution as an exercise in critical thinking.

Katarina Witt

I started the class late. The teacher said I would have to learn as much in half a year that the others learned in a year. I did it.

Kate Beckinsale

I still feel like the person who shouldn't be doing this and everyone is acting around me as if I'm a badass all the time. And this still feels like a stretch. I realize this is something that is incredible. I get to do this and I get wonderful teachers to help me and it's amazing.

Justin Trudeau

I was a snowboard instructor, I was a bouncer in a nightclub, I was a whitewater river guide for many years. I worked as a teacher. I make no apologies for a very varied set of life experiences.

Justin Trudeau

For me, to represent people who represent the future of Canada and the great challenges we will face over the coming decades - this is where I wanted to start. ... I'm a teacher; I'm a convenor; I'm a gatherer; I'm someone who reaches out to people and is deeply interested in what they have to say. And people see that I'm not faking it. I'm actually genuinely committed to this dialogue that we're opening up, and this understanding that needs to happen in order to be an effective MP.

Justin Townes Earle

I've always written. When I was in school, the only teacher who ever liked me was my creative writing teacher. I used to enter poetry competitions, and I don't think I ever lost one. So I had the idea for a while of being some kind of poet.

Justin Timberlake

The teachers that we actually learn more from are the ones that taught us life lessons more than trigonometry. And they have such a huge responsibility and they're under-appreciated and underpaid. So that's my opinion of teachers.

Justin Timberlake

We gotta figure out a way to pay our teachers more. They're like surrogate parents away from home. They have such a huge responsibility and they're underappreciated and underpaid.

Lenny Bruce

That's where the conflict starts. We all want for a wife a combination Sunday school teacher and a $500-a-night hooker.

Laurie Halse Anderson

My English teacher has no face. She has uncombed stringy hair that droops on her shoulders. The hair is black from her part to her ears and then neon orange to the frizzy ends. I can't decide if she had pissed off her hairdresser or is morphing into a monarch butterfly. I call her Hairwoman.

Laurie Halse Anderson

I picked up one of the books and flipped through it. Don't get me wrong, I like reading. But some books should come with warning labels: Caution: contains characters and plots guaranteed to induce sleepiness. Do not attempt to operate heavy machinery after ingesting more than one chapter. Has been known to cause blindness, seizures and a terminal loathing of literature. Should only be taken under the supervision of a highly trained English teacher. Preferably one who grades on the curve.

L. Ron Hubbard

If anyone is getting industrious trying to enturbulate [sic] or stop Scientology or its activities, I can make Captain Bligh look like a Sunday-school teacher. There is probably no limit on what I would do to safeguard Man's only road to freedom against persons who ... seek to stop Scientology or hurt Scientologists.

Thomas Aquinas

We are like children, who stand in need of masters to enlighten us and direct us; God has provided for this, by appointing his angels to be our teachers and guides.

Tertullian

Nature is schoolmistress, the soul the pupil; and whatever one has taught or the other has learned has come from God - the Teacher of the teacher.

Terry Tempest Williams

But, today, the idea of faith returns to me. Faith defies logic and propels us beyond hope because it is not attached to our desires. Faith is the centerpiece of a connected life. It allows us to live by the grace of invisible strands. It is a belief in a wisdom superior to our own. Faith becomes a teacher in the absence of fact.

Terry Pratchett

'Educational' refers to the process, not the object. Although, come to think of it, some of my teachers could easily have been replaced by a cheeseburger.