Teaching

Sunday, August 18, 2013 – Teaching

Everybody who is incapable of learning has taken to teaching. ~ Oscar Wilde

Good teaching is one-fourth preparation and three-fourths pure theater. ~ Gail Godwin

The whole art of teaching is only the art of awakening the natural curiosity of young minds for the purpose of satisfying it afterwards. ~ Anatole France

A teacher who is not dogmatic is simply a teacher who is not teaching. ~ Gilbert K. Chesterton

Teaching is the only major occupation of man for which we have not yet developed tools that make an average person capable of competence and performance. In teaching we rely on the “naturals” – the ones who somehow know how to teach. ~ Peter Drucker

Many societies have educated their male children on the simple device of teaching them not to be women. ~ Margaret Mead

Modern education has devoted itself to the teaching of impudence, and then we complain that we can no longer control our mobs. ~ John Ruskin

If you’re teaching today what you were teaching five years ago, either the field is dead or you are. ~ Noam Chomsky

History is Philosophy teaching by example. ~ Thucydides

Good teaching is creating really interesting generalizations out of war stories. ~ Derek Bok

TV is bigger than any story it reports. It’s the greatest teaching tool since the printing press. ~ Fred W. Friendly

All television is educational television. The question is: what is it teaching? ~ Nicholas Johnson

What office is there which involves more responsibility, which requires more qualifications, and which ought, therefore, to be more honorable, than that of teaching? ~ Harriet Martineau

Teaching is not a lost art, but the regard for it is a lost tradition. ~ Jacques Barzun

All the ills from which America suffers can be traced to the teaching of evolution. ~ William Jennings Bryan

The causes of youth violence are working parents who put their kids into daycare, the teaching of evolution in the schools, and working mothers who take birth control pills. ~ Tom DeLay

The country is making a big mistake not teaching kids to cook and raise a garden and build fires. ~ Loretta Lynn

In teaching man, experimental science results in lessening his pride more and more by proving to him every day that primary causes, like the objective reality of things, will be hidden from him forever and that he can only know relations. ~ Claude Bernard

There is all the difference in the world between teaching children about religion and handing them over to be taught by the religious. ~ Polly Toynbee

The vanity of teaching doth oft tempt a man to forget that he is a blockhead. ~ George Savile

The proper method for hastening the decay of error is by teaching every man to think for himself. ~ William Godwin

The processes of teaching the child that everything cannot be as he wills it are apt to be painful both to him and to his teacher. ~ Anne Sullivan Macy

I believe in the social contract; therefore, I teach. I believe that the university is one of the last places that protects and preserves freedom; therefore, teaching is also a sociopolitical act, among other things. ~ John Hejduk

“The best thing for being sad,” replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, “is to learn something. That’s the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honor trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then – to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn.” ~ T. H. White, The Once and Future King

Kids don’t remember what you try to teach them. They remember what you are. ~ Jim Henson

I’ve come to a frightening conclusion that I am the decisive element in the classroom. It’s my personal approach that creates the climate. It’s my daily mood that makes the weather. As a teacher, I possess a tremendous power to make a child’s life miserable or joyous. I can be a tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration. I can humiliate or heal. In all situations, it is my response that decides whether a crisis will be escalated or de-escalated and a child humanized or dehumanized. ~ Haim G. Ginott

When you want to teach children to think, you begin by treating them seriously when they are little, giving them responsibilities, talking to them candidly, providing privacy and solitude for them, and making them readers and thinkers of significant thoughts from the beginning. That’s if you want to teach them to think. ~ Bertrand Russell

Wisdom cannot be imparted. Wisdom that a wise man attempts to impart always sounds like foolishness to someone else… Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom. One can find it, live it, do wonders through it, but one cannot communicate and teach it. ~ Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people together to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea. ~ Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Don’t fuck with an English major. They keep lots of useless crap trapped in their heads. Once in a while they let some of it out and it bites you square on the ass. ~ P. C. Cast

One has only to spend a term trying to teach college literature to realize that the quickest way to kill an author’s vitality for potential readers is to present that author ahead of his time as “great” or “classic.” Because then the author becomes for the students like medicine or vegetables, something the authorities have declared “good for them” that they “ought to like,” at which point the students’ nictitating membranes come down, and everyone just goes through the requisite motions of criticism and paper-writing without feeling one real or relevant thing. It’s like removing all oxygen from the room before trying to start a fire. ~ David Foster Wallace

True teachers are those who use themselves as bridges over which they invite their students to cross; then, having facilitated their crossing, joyfully collapse, encouraging them to create their own. ~ Nikos Kazantzakis

Experience teaches only the teachable. ~ Aldous Huxley

Great teachers had great personalities and that the greatest teachers had outrageous personalities. I did not like decorum or rectitude in a classroom; I preferred a highly oxygenated atmosphere, a climate of intemperance, rhetoric, and feverish melodrama. And I wanted my teachers to make me smart. A great teacher is my adversary, my conqueror, commissioned to chastise me. He leaves me tame and grateful for the new language he has purloined from other kings whose granaries are filled and whose libraries are famous. He tells me that teaching is the art of theft: of knowing what to steal and from whom. Bad teachers do not touch me; the great ones never leave me. They ride with me during all my days, and I pass on to others what they have imparted to me. I exchange their handy gifts with strangers on trains, and I pretend the gifts are mine. I steal from the great teachers. And the truly wonderful thing about them is they would applaud my theft, laugh at the thought of it, realizing they had taught me their larcenous skills well. ~ Pat Conroy

In a completely rational society, the best of us would be teachers and the rest of us would have to settle for something else. ~ Lee Iacocca