Quotes & Sayings About Learning As A Teacher

My mother worked for more than a decade before marrying. She went to New York City to get a master's degree. And she continued to work as a teacher and a principal until she was forced to retire.Both she and my father instilled in my sister and me a deep love of learning. — Samuel Alito

you see it." Gurdjieff, a great spiritual teacher who taught in Europe and America in the early decades of the twentieth century, noted that if you think you're free and you don't know you are in prison, you can't escape. Gurdjieff saw us as being in a prison of our own habits of mind. Unless we understand how we are conditioned by our desires, we remain stuck in the reality they create, like a television program with an ad that keeps repeating over and over, implanting a subliminal message while we watch the show. BEYOND THOUGHT In the West we get rewarded for rational knowledge and learning. But only when you see that the assumptions you've been working under are not valid, — Ram Dass

Shall there come a day when wise men are able to unite the dreams of youth and the delights of learning as reproach brings together hearts in conflict? Shall there come a day when man's teacher is nature, and humanity is his book — Kahlil Gibran

Knowledge passes from dance teacher into the student through the process of mane, which is often translated as imitation, but learning to dance is more a process of total identification than of simple copying. We repeat the movements of our teachers until we can duplicate them exactly, until, in a sense, we have absorbed the teacher's mastery into ourselves. Artistic technique must be fully integrated into the cells of our bodies if we are to use it to express what is in our hearts, and this takes many years of practice. — Mineko Iwasaki

Shifting the focus from the teacher to the learner will take time and training, but it will also take the willingness to 'unlearn' what so many have been taught about student learning and teacher control. We can admire this dilemma for as long as we want, but the truth is, 'the train has left the station' and the learners are on it." - Jackie Johnston, Director of Alternative and Community Education, District 112, Minnesota — Barbara A. Bray

We have become obsessed with what is good about small classrooms and oblivious about what also can be good about large classes. It's a strange thing isn't it, to have an educational philosophy that thinks of the other students in the classroom with your child as competitors for the attention of the teacher and not allies in the adventure of learning. — Malcolm Gladwell

My hope emerges from those places of struggle where I witness individuals positively transforming their lives and the world around them. Educating is a vocation rooted in hopefulness. As teachers we believe that learning is possible, that nothing can keep an open mind from seeking after knowledge and finding a way to know. — Bell Hooks

The use of online assessment tools is giving teachers a more fine-grained understanding of individual students' skills, and assisting them to determine the necessary next steps to enable them to achieve their own learning goals. We are seeing more effective differentiation in classrooms as a result. — Susan Mann

We honor ambition, we reward greed, we celebrate materialism, we worship acquisitiveness, we commercialize art, we cherish success and then we bark at the young about the gentle arts of the spirit. The kids know that if we really valued learning, we would pay our teachers what we pay our lawyers and stockbrokers. If we valued art, we would not measure it by its capacity to produce profits. If we regarded literature as important, we would remove it from the celebrity sweepstakes and spend a little money on our libraries. — Russell Baker

To value learning as a gift, you have to accept pain as a teacher. — Jury Nel

The Oracle handed her a small, leather bound booklet, about as thick as a pamphlet, and said, "You are a teacher, yes?"
It was nice of the Oracle to phrase things in the form of a question and let people feel they were imparting information. "Yes, I am."
"Excellent. I know teachers value learning, and this book has very valuable information on gargoyles. If Terak remains part of your life, this you'll want to know."
Larissa weighed it in her hand. "This is a very light history."
The Oracle arched one fine brow. "Why would I bother with that? This, my dear, is about how gargoyles mate. — Danielle Monsch

I thought about this for days, just as I thought of the special-ed teacher I met in Pittsburgh. "You know," I said, "I hear those words and automatically think Handicapped, or, Learning disabled. But aren't a lot of your students just assholes?"
"You got it," she said. Then she told me about a kid - last day of class - who wrote on the blackboard, "Mrs. J is a cock master."
I was impressed because I'd never heard that term before. She was impressed because the boy had spelled it correctly. — David Sedaris

Nature without learning is like a blind man; learning without Nature, like a maimed one; practice without both, incomplete. As in agriculture a good soil is first sought for, then a skilful husbandman, and then good seed; in the same way nature corresponds to the soil, the teacher to the husbandman, precepts and instruction to the seed. — Plutarch

Just as you learn from a teacher, so you can observe and learn from the educator we call nature. — Debasish Mridha

Learning about sex was a little bit like learning grammar. Every teacher you had assumed some other teacher taught you the year before, or the year before that, as if none of them wanted to talk about it, as if grammar was a bunch of dirty words. A massive silence surrounded dangling participles and infinite clauses, and you learned to fear making mistakes you didn't know how to avoid. — Ann E. Imbrie

Teachers have had a great effect on me as a child. I've always loved school and had a great appetite for learning. I cried when it was time to go back home and tried to jump from my mother's moving car to run back there. — Alison Hawthorne Deming

Academic training actively deprives you of the qualities that make for good teaching. A good teacher speaks plainly, in vivid, accessible language, because she is addressing what amounts to a general audience. But the kind of jargon academics learn to use is designed to repel the uninitiated. A good teacher ranges widely, making connections among subjects as well as from learning to life. But academics are constrained to specialize, and increasingly, to hyperspecialize, looking neither left nor right as they plow their little corner of the field. — William Deresiewicz

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

Sometimes people claim they don't need a crutch like Jesus, but he's not a crutch, he's a teacher. If you want to be a writer, you read the classics. If you want to make great music you listen to music that's been made by great musicians who have gone before. If you're studying to be a painter, it's a good idea to study the great masters. If Picasso came into your room while you were learning to draw and said 'Hi, I have a couple of hours would you like some hints?' would you say no? So it is with spiritual masters: Jesus, Buddha or any other enlightened being. They're geniuses in the way they used their minds and hearts just as Beethoven was a genius with music, or Shakespeare a genius with words. Why not learn from them, follow their lead, study what they were doing right. — Marianne Williamson

It has truly been said that 'Humility is not so much a virtue as a necessity, in order to learn. — Idries Shah

Supposing I said there was a planet without schools or teachers, where study was unknown, and yet the inhabitants
doing nothing but live and walk about
came to know all things, to carry in their minds the whole of learning; would you not think I was romancing? Well, just this, which seems so fanciful as to be nothing but the invention of a fertile imagination, is a reality. It is the child's way of learning. — Maria Montessori

Christianity possesses the great advantage over Judaism of being represented as coming from the mouth of the first Teacher not as a statutory but as a moral religion, and as thus entering into the closest relation with reason so that, through reason, it was able of itself, without historical learning, to be spread at all times and among all peoples with the greatest trustworthiness. — Immanuel Kant

A few lessons learned as a teacher: I've learned that if you whisper, children will listen ... a scribble can be anything (I mean anything!) a monster, a cat, a mom, a dad
our job is to ask to find out and pay attention
usually the most challenging student needs the most challenges to keep them learning and engaged
most of all we must care and the rest handles itself. xo — Jill Telford

There is a difference between judgment and feedback. Your critics use you as a mirror for their own hidden darkness. Your teachers hold up a mirror to yours. — Vironika Tugaleva

When we read, another person thinks for us: we merely repeat his mental process. In learning to write, the pupil goes over with his pen what the teacher has outlined in pencil: so in reading; the greater part of the work of thought is already done for us. This is why it relieves us to take up a book after being occupied with our own thoughts. And in reading, the mind is, in fact, only the playground of another's thoughts. So it comes about that if anyone spends almost the whole day in reading, and by way of relaxation devotes the intervals to some thoughtless pastime, he gradually loses the capacity for thinking; just as the man who always rides, at last forgets how to walk. This is the case with many learned persons: they have read themselves stupid. — Arthur Schopenhauer

The New Groupthink is also practiced in our schools, via an increasingly popular method of instruction called "cooperative" or "small group" learning. In many elementary schools, the traditional rows of seats facing the teacher have been replaced with "pods" of four or more desks pushed together to facilitate countless group learning activities. Even subjects like math and creative writing, which would seem to depend on solo flights of thought, are often taught as group projects. In one fourth-grade classroom I visited, a big sign announced the "Rules for Group Work," including, YOU CAN'T ASK A TEACHER FOR HELP UNLESS EVERYONE IN YOUR GROUP HAS THE SAME QUESTION. — Susan Cain

The more you know, the more you don't know," the further you go in your training, learning, and experience as a yoga teacher, the more you'll realize that there's an infinite universe of knowledge and wisdom to bring to the practice. — Mark Stephens

As places of learning, schools have a responsibility to also educate on nutrition, which we all can agree is far more important than algebra, no matter what your third-period teacher claims. — Lynda Resnick

[E]ducation is a thing you get past and forget about as quickly as possible. This is particularly true of elementary and secondary education, of course ... . I began to remember what it had been like: the tremendous excitement of the first couple of years, when kids imagine that great secrets are going to be unfolding before them, then the disappointment that gradually sets in when you begin to realize the truth: There's plenty of learning to do, but it's not the learning you wanted. It's learning to keep your mouth shut, learning how to avoid attracting the teacher's attention when you don't want it, learning not to ask questions, learning how to pretend to understand, learning how to tell teachers what they want to hear, learning to keep your own ideas and opinions to yourself, learning how to look as if you're paying attention, learning how to endure the endless boredom. — Daniel Quinn

As a teacher and parent, I've had a very personal interest in seeking new ways of teaching. Like most other teachers and parents, I've been well aware painfully so, at times that the whole teaching/learning process is extraordinarily imprecise, most of the time a hit-and-miss operation. Students may not learn what we think we are teaching them and what they learn may not be what we intended to teach them at all. — Betty Edwards

Each day becomes as a learning environment that provides an unexpected teachings:
. Everything you see is an opportunity to learn.
. Every word you hear is an opportunity to learn.
. Good or bad decisions you make each day are the opportunity to learn. Every experience you come across becomes a lesson of the day. Every failure you encounter can be your teacher. — Euginia Herlihy

I am a teacher and the reason I'm a teacher is because I'm learning as hard as I can. I'm not any different from anybody else. I am searching and having some success finding answers. — Andy Andrews

Schools in which students and teachers relate as partners-where Rosenberg's Nonviolent Communication is part of every interaction are communities of learning, rather than top-down, impersonal factories. Young people begin to see school as a safe and exciting place of exploration where they can share feelings and ideas, and where each child is recognized, valued and nurtured. — Riane Eisler

In every human society of which we have any record, there are those who teach and those who learn, for learning a way of life is implicit in all human culture as we know it. But the separation of the teacher's role from the role of all adults who inducted the young into the habitual behavior of the group, was a comparatively late invention. Furthermore, when we do find explicit and defined teaching, in primitive societies we find it tied in with a sense of the rareness or the precariousness of some human tradition. — Margaret Mead

GOVERNOR. And then I must call your attention to the history teacher. He has a lot of learning in his head and a store of facts. That's evident. But he lectures with such ardor that he quite forgets himself. Once I listened to him. As long as he was talking about the Assyrians and Babylonians, it was not so bad. But when he reached Alexander of Macedon, I can't describe what came over him. Upon my word, I thought a fire had broken out. He jumped down from the platform, picked up a chair and dashed it to the floor. Alexander of Macedon was a hero, it is true. But that's no reason for breaking chairs. The state must bear the cost. — Nikolai Gogol

When children are very young, they have natural curiosities about the world and explore them, trying diligently to figure out what is real. As they become "producers " they fall away from exploration and start fishing for the right answers with little thought. They believe they must always be right, so they quickly forget mistakes and how these mistakes were made. They believe that the only good response from the teacher is "yes," and that a "no" is defeat. — John Holt

Learning takes a lifetime and even the geniuses among us die ignorant. You should always want to learn, to grow, to improve. Otherwise what's the point? You may as well just give up and die. There's always new things to see, people to meet, lessons to learn. Life is both a classroom and a teacher. We'll always be the students, never the professors. — A.J. Compton

A certain man who was learning archery faced the target with two arrows in his hand. But his instructor said, ' A beginner ought never to have a second arrow; for as long as he relies upon the other, he will be careless with his first one. At each shot he ought to think that he is bound to settle it with this particular shaft at any cost.' Doubtless he would not intentionally act foolishly before his instructor with one arrow, when he has but a couple. But, though he may not himself realize that he is being careless, his teacher knows it.
You should bear this advice in mind on every occasion. (In the same way) he who follows the path of learning thinks confidently in the evening that the morning is coming, and in the morning that the evening is coming, and that he will then have plenty of time to study more carefully ; less likely still is he to recognize the waste of a single moment. How hard indeed is it to do a thing at once-now, the instant that you think of it ! — Yoshida Kenko

When teachers are forced to teach to the test, students get bored and genuine education ceases, no matter what the test scores may say ... The examination as a test of the past is of no value for increased learning ability. Like all external motivators, it can produce a short term effect, but examinations for the purpose of grading the past do not hook a student on learning for life. — Myron Tribus

As a teacher with over thirty years of experience, I've found that students are hungry for material that goes beyond simply learning tune after tune. In fact, my students suggested a good portion of the material presented here. This lesson should be an indispensable aid to the aspiring bluegrass banjoist. — Tony Trischka

Differentiation is simply a teacher attending to the learning needs of a particular student or small groups of students, rather than teaching a class as though all individuals in it were basically alike. — Carol Ann Tomlinson

I attended the High School of Industrial Arts and studied with many great artists as painting is something that you never stop learning about. Actually, in high school there was a time that I was thinking about just concentrating on painting and I asked my music teacher, Mr. Sondberg, for advice and he encouraged me to stick with the music as well. So all my life I have been singing and painting. — Tony Bennett

I saw as a teacher how, if you take that spark of learning that those children have, and you ignite it, you can take a child from any background to a lifetime of creativity and accomplishment. — Paul Wellstone

Failure is a great teacher, and I think when you make mistakes and you recover from them and you treat them as valuable learning experiences, then you've got something to share. — Steve Harvey

Sisyphus,' is an interpretation of the unavoidable limits to which everyone who is human is condemned. The constructive way of dealing with anxiety in this sense consists of learning to live with it, accepting it as a 'teacher,' to borrow Kirkegaard's phrase, to school us in confronting our human destiny. — Rollo May

I believe it would be much better for everyone if children were given their start in education at home. No one understands a child as well as his mother, and children are so different that they need individual training and study. A teacher with a roomful of pupils cannot do this. At home, too, they are in their mothers care. She can keep them from learning immoral things from other children. — Laura Ingalls Wilder

For weeks Octavio returned to the shelter of the trees. The woman would appear as the sun reached midday. She would walk to the edge of the trees, find her chair and drag it to the boat pond. Every Sunday the same chair, the same spot. Every Sunday a book.
He needed only one word to imagine a hundred stories: she -
was a dancer; cooling her feet after a morning of twists and leaps.
was the daughter of a sea captain, remembering her childhood as the toy boats crossed the pond.
was an empress hiding among her subjects, shielding her face with a scarf made from the silk of ten thousand worms. Five thousand green, five thousand blue.
was a teacher, a lover of learning, patient and gentle with her students.
She - was a reader.
He had a library. — C.S. Richardson

This is a very challenging moment for educators. Our children are headed for a much more networked existence, one that allows for learning to occur 24, 7, 365, one that renders physical space much less important for learning, one that will challenge the relevance of classrooms as currently envisioned, and one that challenges our roles as teachers and adult learners. — Will Richardson