Stephenie Hollyman Selected Quotations on Teaching
Ye great teachers: listen to what you say!
Goethe
Tell me and I forget. Show me and I remember. Involve me and I understand.
Chinese proverb
Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.
Everyone who remembers his own education remembers teachers, not methods and techniques. The teacher is the heart of the educational system.
Sidney Hook
"A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influences stops."
Henry Adams
Everything good that I know was taught to me by great teachers and I feel like giving back and sharing the technique is the thing to do.
The teachers who get "burned out" are not the ones who are constantly learning, which can be exhilarating, but those who feel they must stay in control and ahead of the students at all times.
Frank Smith
Every truth has four corners: as a teacher I give you one corner, and it is for you to find the other three.
Confucius
Teaching is truth mediated by personality.
Phyllis Brooks
But I like the teaching because it keeps you on your toes all the time. You can't back off, and some teachers say, "Oh, give them busy work." Well, when you're with bright kids you can't give them busy work, but..it keeps you... in a sense it's like Hemingway talking about grace under pressure. You're facing the bull, and that moment that the bull's horn comes close to you is the moment at which you could die. That's what it's like going into the classroom -- you could die in there.
Frank McCourt
Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten.
B. F. Skinner (1904 - 1990), New Scientist, May 21, 1964
G. M. Trevelyan (1876 - 1962), English Social History (1942)
How can the child learn to be a free and responsible citizen when the teacher is bound?
John Dewey, Philosopher of Education, 1918
Good teaching is one-fourth preparation and three-fourths theater.
There's really nothing more rewarding than seeing a student who has incredible potential being reborn as a good student.
Alex White, Teacher, New York, 2000
But in any case, I did poorly on the tests and so, in the first three years of school, I had teachers who thought I was stupid and when people think you're stupid, they have low expectations for you.
At school I was always trying to con my teachers into letting me act out book reports instead of writing them.
Failure is instructive. The person who really thinks learns quite as much from his failures as from his successes.
The pen is mightier than the sword, and considerably easier to write with.Marty Feldman
There were kids in those classes who were on the football team, and would've broken me in two. But I would become frustrated and I would yell at them, I'd say to them, "You better keep up now, you're not doing the work, you're not bringing in your textbooks," and so on, and I'd rant and rave. 'Til one day there was a little African-American girl sitting in the front row -- Sylvia -- and she was beautiful and always impeccably dressed. And one day she said, "Mr. McCourt!" "What?" "Mr. McCourt." "What?" "Chill Out!" So, that was the first time I ever heard that expression, but I knew what it meant, so I chilled. What that meant was I became more and more of a human being. I dropped the Irish schoolmaster mask. It didn't work anymore. What I learned then was the main device, if you want to call it that for a successful teacher, was honesty. I said look, we're in this together, I'm learning, I would say that, I'm learning. This is what I discovered years and years and years later, I was the big learner out of this teaching experience.
Frank McCourt
Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.
H. G. Wells (1866 - 1946), Outline of History (1920)
It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare, it is because we do not dare that they are difficult.
Seneca
The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.
Dorothy Parker (1893 - 1967), (attributed)
One can never consent to creep when one feels an impulse to soar.
Helen Keller
It was a long, slow process, because there's no, there's no method or technique by which you can become a successful teacher overnight. It takes years. And it's like writing I suppose, or like any art, or any human endeavor -- you have to find your own way. You have to find your own style, techniques and style. So, I found my own style after a while, and sometimes I would imitate other teachers who had certain ways of dealing with classes. Didn't work, never worked. It's like being a writer. You imitate Faulkner, you imitate Hemingway, you imitate Scott Fitzgerald, but in the end you find your own voice, and your own style, and that's what I had to do as a teacher.
Frank McCourt
The pen is mightier than the sword, and considerably easier to write with.Marty Feldman
Good teaching is one-fourth preparation and three-fourths theater.
Just think of the tragedy of teaching children not to doubt.
Clarence Darrow (1857 - 1938)
Anatole France (1844 - 1924)
By learning you will teach; by teaching you will learn.
Teaching was the hardest work I had ever done, and it remains the hardest work I have done to date.
TEACHING: the earth doesn't move every time, but when it does, what a RUSH!
Cameron Beatty
Teaching should be such that what is offered is perceived as a valuable gift and not as a hard duty.
Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955)
Thought flows in terms of stories - stories about events, stories about people, and stories about intentions and achievements. The best teachers are the best story tellers. We learn in the form of stories.
Frank Smith
The task of the excellent teacher is to stimulate "aparently ordinary" people to unusual effort. The tough proplem is not in identifying winners: it is in making winners out of ordinary people.
K. Patricia Cross
Teachers who cannot keep students involved and excited for several hours in the classroom should not be there.
John Roueche
Teaching is the highest form of understanding.
Aristotle
The Tao of Teaching
Effective teaching may be the hardest job there is.
William Glasser
We teach what we like to learn and the reason many people go into teaching is vicariously to re-experience the primary joy experienced the first time they learned something they loved.
Stephen Brookfield
Every truth has four corners: as a teacher I give you one corner, and it is for you to find the other three.
Confucius
Teaching is truth mediated by personality.
Phyllis Brooks
It's not what is poured into a student that counts, but what is planted.
Linda Conway
A mind is a fire to be kindled, not a vessel to be filled.
Plutarch
Men must be taught as if you taught them not, And things unknown proposed as things forgot.
Alexander Pope
The vanity of teaching often tempteth a man to forget he is a blockhead.
George Savile
Setting an example is not the main means of influencing another, it is the only means.
Albert Einstein
Memorization is what we resort to when what we are learning makes no sense.
Anonymous
No man can be a good teacher unless he has feelings of warm affection toward his pupils and a genuine desire to impart to them what he himself believes to be of value.
Bertrand Russell
If a doctor, lawyer, or dentist had 40 people in his office at one time, all of whom had different needs, and some of whom didn't want to be there and were causing trouble, and the doctor, lawyer, or dentist, without assistance, had to treat them all with professional excellence for nine months, then he might have some conception of the classroom teacher's job.
Donald D. Quinn
