Quotes & Sayings About Students Teaching Teachers

The narrator welcomes new students to his school by offering to tell them who the easy teachers are, or who the good ones are. — Pat Conroy

Real education happens only by failing, changing, challenging, and adjusting. All of those gerunds apply to teachers as well as students. No person is an "educator," because education is not something one person does to another. Education is an imprecise process, a dance, and a collaborative experience. — Siva Vaidhyanathan

People are attracted to teaching because they want to make a real impact. The teachers who are making the greatest difference go far beyond meeting standardised test measures. They aspire to truly level the playing field for their students, which means inspiring a love of learning, fostering the highest levels of critical thinking, building perseverance in working towards academic excellence, and so on. — Wendy Kopp

Act your age. Students do not look upon you as a buddy, pal, or peer. They expect you to be a mature adult ... Many young teachers have a tendency to seek popularity, resorting to tactics that can create endless problems. — Jim Brown

private school teachers tend to have fewer credentials and to cling to traditional teaching styles, such as lecturing while students sit in rows and take notes. Public school teachers, by contrast, are much more likely to be certified, to hold higher degrees, and to embrace research-based innovations in curriculum and pedagogy — David C. Berliner

While teachers often complain that their students seem to do very little thinking, teachers who simply follow the manual should understand that they are actually contributing to the problem. Students seldom learn to think under the tutelage of teachers who do not think either. — Donovan L. Graham

I have a hunch that little will change in the next decade because the dominant mind frame of teaching is still teachers talking, teachers controlling the flow of lessons, and teachers continually asking for more time and resources with fewer students in front of them - unless the students revolt! — Alan Bain

Master Teachers who genuinely embody an enlightened state of being never stop "doing the work". The ego is what assumes it knows enough, causing cessation of these daily practices, and therefore, Masters without attachment to ego are forever students of the Universe. The Masters attain an illuminated state of "Being" as the outcome, yet it is the consistent "doing" that promotes and maintains their enlightenment. — Alaric Hutchinson

According to a 1995 study, a sample of Japanese eighth graders spent 44 percent of their class time inventing, thinking, and actively struggling with underlying concepts. The study's sample of American students, on the other hand, spent less than 1 percent of their time in that state. "The Japanese want their kids to struggle," said Jim Stigler, the UCLA professor who oversaw the study and who cowrote The Teaching Gap with James Hiebert. "Sometimes the [Japanese] teacher will purposely give the wrong answer so the kids can grapple with the theory. American teachers, though, worked like waiters. Whenever there was a struggle, they wanted to move past it, make sure the class kept gliding along. But you don't learn by gliding. — Daniel Coyle

Teachers learn from their students' discussions — Rashi

Don't try to fix the students, fix ourselves first. The good teacher makes the poor student good and the good student superior. When our students fail, we, as teachers, too, have failed. — Marva Collins

Most subjects at universities are taught for no other purpose than that they may be re-taught when the students become teachers. — Georg C. Lichtenberg

Transfer must be the aim of all teaching in school - it is not an option - because when we teach, we can address only a relatively small sample of the entire subject matter. All teachers have said to themselves after a lesson "Oh, if only we had more time! This is just a drop in the bucket!" We can never have enough time. Transfer is our greatest and most difficult mission because we need to put students in a position to learn far more, on their own, than they can ever learn from us. — Jay McTighe

Students never appreciate their teachers while they are learning. It is only later, when they know more of the world, that they understand how indebted they are to those who instructed them. Good teachers expect no praise or love from the young. They wait for it, and in time, it comes. — Darren Shan

The more time I spent in Finland, the more I started to worry that the reforms sweeping across the United States had the equation backwards. We were trying to reverse engineer a high-performance teaching culture through dazzlingly complex performance evaluations and value-added data analysis. It made sense to reward, train, and dismiss more teachers based on their performance, but that approach assumed that the worst teachers would be replaced with much better ones, and that the mediocre teachers would improve enough to give students the kind of education they deserved. However, there was not much evidence that either scenario was happening in reality. — Amanda Ripley

Mrs. Hanks taught that everybody's bodies were exactly the same. She was ignorant and didn't think much about things, but she was teaching her students to be ignorant too. She was teaching them the wrong thing. — Jesse Haubert

The very best thing you can be in life is a teacher, provided you are crazy in love with what you teach, and that your classes consist of eighteen students or fewer. Classes of eighteen students or fewer are a family, and feel and act like one. — Kurt Vonnegut

School should become the place where teachers, not just students, learn. — Vijay Dhameliya

Since her retirement from teaching Miss Beryl's health had in many respects greatly improved, despite her advancing years. An eighth-grade classroom was an excellent place to snag whatever was in the air in the way of illness. Also depression, which, Miss Beryl believed, in conjunction with guilt, opened the door to illness. Miss Beryl didn't know any teachers who weren't habitually guilty and depressed
guilty they hadn't accomplished more with their students, depressed that very little more was possible. — Richard Russo

To teach, learn. To learn, teach. — Mokokoma Mokhonoana

To encourage more top-caliber students to choose teaching, teachers should be paid a lot more, with starting salaries more in the range of $60,000 and potential earnings of as much as $150,000. — Arne Duncan

Bureaucratic solutions to problems of practice will always fail because effective teaching is not routine, students are not passive, and questions of practice are not simple, predictable, or standardized. Consequently, instructional decisions cannot be formulated on high then packaged and handed down to teachers. — Linda Darling-Hammond

I'm not sure I ever met an American teacher in Korea that hadn't volunteered at an orphanage at least once - even our resident idiot could be surprisingly decent on occasion - but I've also visited foreign countries where children are taught hatred. I've seen it up close and personal. It's antithetical to everything I believe in as a teacher. The mandate for all teachers is to instill hope, not fear and hatred. — Tucker Elliot

We are more than role models for our students; we are leaders and teachers of both an academic curriculum and a social curriculum. — Patricia Sequeira Belvel

The effects you will have on your students are infinite and currently unknown; you will possibly shape the way they proceed in their careers, the way they will vote, the way they will behave as partners and spouses, the way they will raise their kids. — Donna Quesada

What all good teachers have in common, however, is that they set high standards for their students and do not settle for anything less. — Marva Collins

Henry David Thoreau, Susan B. Anthony, W. E. B. DuBois, and Lyndon B. Johnson are just a few of the famous Americans who taught. They resisted the fantasy of educators as saints or saviors, and understood teaching as a job in which the potential for children's intellectual transcendence and social mobility, though always present, is limited by real-world concerns such as poor training, low pay, inadequate supplies, inept administration, and impoverished students and families. These teachers' stories, and those of less well-known teachers, propel this history forward and help us understand why American teaching has evolved into such a peculiar profession, one attacked and admired in equal proportion. — Dana Goldstein

Teaching, therefore, asks first of all the creation of a space where students and teachers can enter into a fearless communication with each other and allow their respective life experiences to be their primary and most valuable source of growth and maturation. It asks for a mutual trust in which those who teach and those who want to learn can become present to each other, not as opponents, but as those who share in the same struggle and search for the same truth. — Henri J.M. Nouwen

All good teachers will tell you that the most important quality they bring to their teaching is their love for the children. But what does that mean? It means that before we can teach them, we need to delight in them. Someone once said that children need one thing in order to succeed in life: someone who is crazy about them. We need to find a way to delight in all our students. We may be the only one in their lives to do so. We need to look for the best, expect the best, find something in each child that we can truly treasure ... If children recognize that we have seen their genius, who they really are, they will have the confidence and resilience to take risks in learning. I am convinced that many learning and social difficulties would disappear if we learned to see the genius in each child and then created a learning environment that encourages it to develop. — Steven Levy

One of the hallmarks of great teachers is that they rejoice when their students surpass them. Encouraging an atmosphere of questioning and inviting people to grow within your classroom isn't necessarily easy; which must explain why people who want to create cults or die hard followers discourage questioning in general. They would rather have people reciting their dogma than asking hard questions. — Gudjon Bergmann

To us, to the everyday teachers of everyday students, neither of whom is writing the book of the universe but who both have their fullest life only when they align themselves with its truths, working out our own commitment to and our own vision of agape, in however homely or personal a form, is a life long task that both guides us in our teaching endeavors and honors those endeavors at the same time. — Marshall Gregory

There are very few real teachers. Teaching is not a job; it is a vocation. To be a great one many qualities must be combined: love of truth, knowledge, reverence, loving concern for one's students, clarity and patience. — Alice Von Hildebrand

As students, we have all known two types of teachers, the pedantic and the inspiring. The former have a definite method and operate according to well-established habits; the latter need neither, because they know the subject through and through, Indeed, we may say that teaching methods, which generate subjective habits, are but poor substitutes for the kind of objective intimacy with the subject matter to be taught, which we call 'habitus — Yves Simon

Tom had never found any difficulty in discerning a pointer from a setter, when once he had been told the distinction, and his perceptive powers were not at all deficient. I fancy they were quite as strong as those of the Rev. Mr Stelling; for Tom could predict with accuracy what number of horses were cantering behind him, he could throw a stone right into the centre of a given ripple, he could guess to a fraction how many lengths of his stick it would take to reach across the playground, and could draw almost perfect squares on his slate without any measurement. But Mr Stelling took no note of those things: he only observed that Tom's faculties failed him before the abstractions hideously symbolized to him in the pages of the Eton Grammar, and that he was in a state bordering on idiocy with regard to the demonstration that two given triangles must be equal - though he could discern with great promptitude and certainty the fact that they were equal. — George Eliot

...[T]he teaching of writing is fraught with difficulties. Teaching well, in my experience and that of my students, can be very time-consuming, demanding, frustrating, and, given institutional constraints, sometimes infuriating. It demands the recognition that, in Burns's words, 'The best laid plans of mice and men gang aft aglay.' At the same time, composition lies at the heart of education. When students make gains as writers, the gains are likely to affect other educational endeavors. And for teachers, the joy of seeing students create some new part of themselves, and do it well, washes the difficulties to insignificance and provides the impetus to try, like the Bruce's unrelenting spider, again, and again, and again. — George Hillocks

In some circumstances, a focus on extrinsic rewards (money) can actually diminish effort. Most (or at least many) teachers enter their profession not because of the money but because of their love for children and their dedication to teaching. The best teachers could have earned far higher incomes if they had gone to banking. It is almost insulting to assume that they are not doing what they can to help their students learn, and that by paying them an extra $500 or $1,500, they would exert greater effort. Indeed, incentive pay can be corrosive: it reminds teachers of how bad their pay is, and those who are led thereby to focus on money may be induced to find a better paying job, leaving behind only those for whom teaching is the only alternative. (Of course, if teachers perceive themselves to be badly paid, that will undermine morale, and that will have adverse incentive effects) — Joseph E. Stiglitz

The number one goal of teachers should be to help students learn how to learn. — Randy Pausch

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

Teachers are often, and understandably, impatient for their students to develop clear and adequate ideas. But putting ideas in relation to each other isn't a simple job. It's confusing and this confusion does take time. All of us need time for our confusion if we are to build the breadth and depth that give significance to our knowledge. — Eleanor Duckworth

Everyday more educators are showing that they value students by involving them in meaningful ways in school. These teachers and administrators say that it is not about 'making students happy' or allowing students to run the school. Their experience shows that when educators partner with students to improve learning, teaching and leadership in schools, school change is positive and effective. — Adam Fletcher

The essence of physical education in Naperville 203 is teaching fitness instead of sports. The underlying philosophy is that if physical education class can be used to instruct kids how to monitor and maintain their own health and fitness, then the lessons they learn will serve them for life. And probably a longer and happier life at that. What's being taught, really is a lifestyle. The students are developing healthy habits, skills, and a sense of fun, along with a knowledge of how their bodies work. Naperville's gym teachers are opening up new vistas for their students by exposing them to such a wide range of activities that they can't help but find something they enjoy. They're getting kids hooked on moving instead of sitting in front of the television. — John J. Ratey

Teaching methods are often inadequate for the goals faculties are trying to achieve. Important courses such as expository writing and foreign languages are frequently taught by untrained graduate students and underpaid adjunct teachers. — Derek Bok

Teachers are reservoirs from which, through the process of education, students draw the water of life. — Sathya Sai Baba

Teaching is a dialogue, and it is through the process of engaging students that we see ideas taken from the abstract and played out in concrete visual form. Students teach us about creativity through their personal responses to the limits we set, thus proving that reason and intuition are not antithetical. Their works give aesthetic visibility to mathematical ideas. — Martha Boles

What all great teachers appear to have in common is love of their subject, an obvious satisfaction in rousing this love in their students, and an ability to convince them that what they are being taught is deadly serious — Joseph Epstein

For teachers, getting annual test scores several months after taking the test and in most cases long after the students have departed for the summer sends a message: Here's the data that would have helped you improve your teaching based on the needs of these students if you would have had it in time, but since it's late and there's nothing you can do about it, we'll just release it to the newspapers so they can editorialize again about how bad our schools are. — Douglas B. Reeves

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that in 1975, 31 percent of college teachers were female; by 2009, the number had grown to 49.2 percent.7 There are more women teaching in college than ever, and it is quite possible that their presence, coupled with our discovery of the postmodern narrative, has had a feminizing effect on the collective unconscious of faculty thought. Strong winds of compassion blow across campus quads. Women are more empathetic than men, more giving, simply more bothered by anyone's underdog status. Many of the female adjuncts I have spoken to seem blessed and cursed by feelings of maternity toward the students. Women think about their actions, and the consequences of their actions, in a deeper way than do men. — Professor X.

Nglish teachers often take a right-wrong stance. I'd rather my students take a thinking stance. — Jeff Anderson

Moreover, with the possible exception of high school - level math teachers, there is little evidence that better students make better teachers. Some nations, such as Finland, have been able to build a teaching force made up solely of star students. But other places, such as Shanghai, have made big strides in student achievement without drastically adjusting the demographics of who becomes a teacher. — Dana Goldstein

Unfortunately, parents who put a priority on saving kids from frustration and teachers who put a priority on challenging their students often butt heads, and consequently, the parent-teacher partnership has reached a breaking point. Teaching has become a push and pull between opposing forces in which parents want teachers to educate their children with increasing rigor, but reject those rigorous lessons as "too hard" or "too frustrating" for their children to endure. Parents rightly feel protective of their children's self-esteem, but teachers too often bear the brunt of parental ire. — Jessica Lahey

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

The teachers were focused on helping these students. The students benefited from hands-on teaching and a faculty who cared about them and their success in life and soon the students began to believe in themselves and the reality that they could make something of their lives. — Michael N. Castle

It would be good if teachers could genuinely understand that black English is not mistakes, it's just different English, and that what you want to do is add an additional dialect to black students' repertoire rather than teaching them out of what's thought of as a bad habit, like sloppy posture or chewing with your mouth open. — John McWhorter

No one likes to feel used. When the perceived focus becomes the content over the person, people feel used. When teachers are valued only for the test scores of their students, they feel used. When administrators are "successful" only when they achieve "highly effective school" status, they feel used. Eventually, "used" people lose joy in learning and teaching. Curriculum does not teach; teachers do. Standards don't encourage; administrators do. Peaceable schools value personnel and students for who they are as worthy human beings. ... If your mission statement says you care, then specific practices of care should be habits within your school. — Lorraine Stutzman Amstutz

I had assumed 'a man's character is his fate' meant if my students worked hard they would get good grades, and if they were lazy they would fail - but any idiot could have seen that interpretation. It took no thought whatsoever, and it isn't at all what Joe was trying to teach me. No, what Joe meant was this: my character shapes what my students become, and what they become is my fate. I began to see teaching in a whole new light. From that day forward, I knew everything that happened to my students would haunt me or bless me - and I began to teach as if my happiness depended on their happiness, my successes depended on their successes, and their world was the most important part of my world. — Tucker Elliot

Differentiated Instruction is a teaching philosophy based on the premise that teachers should adapt instruction to student differences. Rather than marching students through the curriculum lockstep, teachers should modify their instruction to meet students' varying readiness levels, learning preferences, and interests. Therefore, the teacher proactively plans a variety of ways to 'get it' and express learning. — Carol Ann Tomlinson

It is said, in a fire, everyone runs away from it save for the fireman who run towards it. When dealing with students, be the fireman. — Patricia Sequeira Belvel

Effective Peer Coaches emphasize inquiry over advocacy. Too much advocacy can produce learned helplessness. Inquiry builds capacity to improve teaching and learning by helping teachers to be more effective at designing and implementing learning activities that meet the needs of their students. — Lester Joseph Foltos

Progressive white teachers seem to say to their black students 'Let me help you find your voice. I promise not to criticize one note as you search for your song'. But the black teachers say 'I've heard your song loud and clear. Now I want to teach you to harmonize with the rest of the world. — Lisa Delpit

optimal literacy teaching and learning can only be achieved when skillful, knowledgeable, and dedicated teachers are given the freedom and latitude to use their professional judgment to make instructional decisions that enable students to achieve their full literacy potential. — Linda B. Gambrell

Forward-thinking teachers and school administrators across the country are creating a whole range of alternatives to cookie-cutter teaching and evaluation methods, such as the use of student portfolios and exhibitions in addition to conventional exams to assess students' progress. — Hillary Rodham Clinton

To improve our schools, we have to humanize them and make education personal to every student and teacher in the system. Education is always about relationships. Great teachers are not just instructors and test administrators. They are mentors, coaches, motivators, and lifelong sources of inspiration to their students. Teaching is an art form. Great teachers know they have to cultivate curiosity, passion and creativity in their students. — Ken Robinson

To benefit from what the best teachers do, however, we must embrace a different model, one in which teaching occurs only when learning takes place. Most fundamentally, teaching in this conception is creating those conditions in which most
if not all
of our students will realize their potential to learn. That sounds like hard work, and it is a little scary because we don't have complete control over who we are, but it is highly rewarding and obtainable. — Ken Bain

Teachers need the freedom to teach - freedom they can't have if they're only teaching so their students can pass tests. I'm pretty sure my students won't find anything about Hector on the Common Core tests. I'm equally sure that what they learned about Wisdom, Justice, Courage, and Temperance may stay with them for the rest of their lives. - Mr. Browne — R.J. Palacio

The best educators are the ones that inspire their students. That inspiration comes from a passion that teachers have for the subject they're teaching. Most commonly, that person spent their lives studying that subject, and they bring an infectious enthusiasm to the audience. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

When all good and great teachers die, ignorance will awake and teach so well, with an understandable vigor, and all students of ignorance will do all things because of ignorance, with an unthinkable joy and vigor! — Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

Teachers see coldness in the world and light fires in the minds of their students, hoping for a warm summer. Sadly, some cannot bear the flame, some turn away from the heat, and some twist the fire to burn. — Lance Conrad

Classroom teaching withholds nothing. I say to my young students every year, "I know how to add two numbers, but I'm not going to tell you." And they laugh and shout, "No!" That's so absurd, so unthinkable. What do I have that I would not give to you?
Bringing nothing, producing nothing, expecting nothing, withholding nothing
what does that remind you of?
Is this a bizarre occurrence that will go into The Journal of Irreproducible Results?
Or is it something that happens every day, all the time, all over the world,
and is based not on gain and fame, but on love. — Margaret Edson

Seventy-seven percent of teachers admit that their teaching would be more effective if they did not have to spend so much time dealing with disruptive students (Public Agenda, 2004). — Lee Canter

I am aware that teachers in modern societies often face tremendous challenges. Classes can be very large, the subjects taught can be very complex, and discipline can be difficult to maintain. Given the importance, and the difficulty, of teachers' jobs, I was surprised when I heard that in some western societies today teaching is regarded as a rather low-status profession. That is surely very muddled. Teachers must be applauded for choosing this career. They should congratulate themselves, particularly on days when they are exhausted and downhearted. They are engaged in work that will influence not just students' immediate level of knowledge but their entire lives, and thereby they have the potential to contribute to the future of humanity itself. — Dalai Lama XIV

I received comments on how extraordinary it was that I could keep up speaking for exactly 45 minutes. Indeed, in an age of soundbites lasting some seconds and of quick quotes in the news, all those minutes do seem like an eternity, easy to get lost in. Yet, wait a moment. Television is not the only place where speeches are given. Some hundred thousand teachers teach every day. They all speak 45 minutes, more times a day. They have been doing this for years. Every teacher knows exactly when the time will be over and that by then his speech will need to come to a natural end. It is this tension that determines the success of a lesson. It is a sign of the times that we forget these daily achievements in education. A million students daily attend several 'live' lectures and this in secondary education alone. These are high ratings! — Robbert Dijkgraaf

If teaching is reduced to mere data transmission, if there is no sharing or excitement and wonder, if teachers themselves are passive recipients of information and not creators of new ideas, what hope is there for their students? — Paul Lockhart

Teachers knew every one of the students, their secrets, their grades, their home situations. And all the students knew the teachers. It was like teachers were people who finally were the most popular at school. — Victoria Kahler

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

You seemed to be listening to me, not to find out useful information, but to try to catch me in a logical fallacy. This tells us all that you are used to being smarter than your teachers, and that you listen to them in order to catch them making mistakes and prove how smart you are to the other students. This is such a pointless, stupid way of listening to teachers that it is clear you are going to waste months of our time before you finally catch on that the only transaction that matters is a transfer of useful information from adults who possess it to children who do not, and that catching mistakes is a criminal misuse of time. — Orson Scott Card

An exceedingly confident student would in theory make a terrible student. Why would he take school seriously when he feels that he can outwit his teachers? — Criss Jami

It is sinful for students to badmouth their teachers and sinful for teachers to mislead their students. — Igor Babailov

Anyone still attempting to argue that Ebonics is a problem for black students or that it is somehow connected to a lack of intelligence or lack of desire to achieve is about as useful as a Betamax video cassette player, and it's time for those folks to be retired, be they teachers, administrators, or community leaders, so the rest of us can try to do some real work in the service of equal access for black students and all students. (15) — Adam J. Banks

When I took over as chair of the fashion program, I was horrified that only the faculty member was allowed to speak in a critique. I'm talking about perfectly nurturing teachers. But the rule was there would be no call of hands for students to contribute their feedback. It was embedded in the department's culture. That was alarming to me. When I was teaching, I was the least important person in the room as far as I was concerned
my students' points of view mattered most. I wanted to learn who they were and teach them to respect one another's perspectives.
I would start off by saying something like, I am having trouble understanding how this work solves the problem at hand. Here are some things about the work that I appreciate: X, Y, Z. But I see these virtues independent of the problem we're solving. — Tim Gunn

Teachers' working conditions are students' learning conditions — Diane Ravitch