Quotes & Sayings About Classroom Discipline

Poetry was a discipline grounded in experience that drew its life and worth from a source much greater than oneself, and as it realized its potential to touch others in their innermost being, what [Kathleen] Fraser has termed their "yearning side," it could be a profoundly communal act. Poetry, when it succeeded, did so in ways that were not quantifiable, and did not look much like worldly success, but that might be summed up as the joy on the face of a girl in a dingy classroom who finds a kindred spirit in a poem by Garcia Lorca. — Kathleen Norris

The number one problem in the classroom is not discipline; it is the lack of procedures and routines. — Harry Wong

Most of us are still in some small way victims of the Industrial Revolution. Whether through our grandparents, our parents, or our own experience, we were raised to believe that our place in life required compliance and conformity rather than creativity and uniqueness. We have been raised in a world where information is deemed far more important than imagination. Adults replaced dreams with discipline when they were finally ready to grow up and be responsible for their lives. Whether this contrast was reinforced on an assembly line, in a cubicle, or in a classroom, the surest path to acceptance in society is accepting standardization. And we more than willingly, relinquish our uniqueness. — Erwin Raphael McManus

People are more motivated and confident when they believe they have more control over their environment. "People with low-power mindsets do less than they otherwise could," said one motivation researcher (Rigoglioso, 2008). Inviting students to have a voice in classroom decisions - where they sit, what day a test takes place, in what order units are studied, or even where a plant should be placed in the classroom - can help them develop that greater sense of control. An added benefit to this strategy could be fewer discipline issues. William Glasser suggests that power is a key need of students, and that 95% of classroom management problems happen because students are trying to fulfill that need (Ryan & Cooper, 2008, p. 85). — Larry Ferlazzo

If complex organisms demand an explanation, so does a complex designer. And it's no solution to raise the theologian's plea that God (or the Intelligent Designer) is simply immune to the normal demands of scientific explanation. To do so would be to shoot yourself in the foot. You cannot have it both ways. Either ID belongs in the science classroom, in which case it must submit to the discipline required of a scientific hypothesis. Or it does not, in which case, get it out of the science classroom and send it back to church, where it belongs. — Richard Dawkins

The most essential thing in dance discipline is devotion, the steadfast and willing devotion to the labor that makes the classwork not a gymnastic hour and a half, or at the lowest level, a daily drudgery, but a devotion that allows the classroom discipline to become moments of dancing too ... — Merce Cunningham

You will be doing your students a much greater service by reducing the amount of material that you are covering and actually ensuring that students are learning it, rather than making sure that you are ticking off everyone checkpoint in your ideal syllabus. Learning comes from practice, and you have to help and teach your students to practice just as you help and team them the basic knowledge and skills of your discipline. — James M. Lang

If you had walked through the pleasant Tuscan countryside in the 1890's, you might have come upon a somewhat long-haired teenage high school dropout on the road to Pavia. His teachers in Germany had told him that he would never amount to anything, that his questions destroyed classroom discipline, that he would be better off out of school. So he left and wandered, delighting in the freedom of Northern Italy, where he could ruminate on matters remote from the subjects he had been force-fed in his highly disciplined Prussian schoolroom. His name was Albert Einstein, and his ruminations changed the world. — Carl Sagan

Every good rowing coach, in his own way, imparts to his men the kind of self-discipline required to achieve the ultimate from mind, heart, and body. Which is why most ex-oarsmen will tell you they learned more fundamentally important lessons in the racing shell than in the classroom. — Daniel James Brown

Most Christian teachers would profess to believe that their students are made in the image of God. . .Classroom practices, however, often reveal that students are not treated accordingly. They are not challenged to think through issues and carefully examine the various positions relevant to the issue. Instead they are simply given information as correct answers to be remembered and reproduced on a test or in some other written form. Rather than create an art project that reveals something about the way they view the world, they are given specific instructions for completing each step of the project and criticized, for example, if the trees are not green. While verbally teaching Johnny that he is an important person, a teacher may employ a learning model or classroom discipline system that clearly treats him as on object to be shaped and controlled by a system. . . (p18) — Donovan L. Graham

Just as novice musicians must spend many hours practicing basic skills like playing scales or mastering difficult passages--and frequently do so in the presence of their teacher, receiving immediate and individualized feedback--so must our students spend many hours practicing the basic intellectual skills of our discipline. — James M. Lang