Teach Teaching Quotes & Sayings

Koranic teaching still insists that the sun moves around the earth. How can we advance when they teach things like that? — Taslima Nasrin

I was ordered to go for flowers, that my mistress's house might be decorated for an evening party. I spent the day gathering flowers and weaving them into festoons, while the dead body of my father was lying within a mile of me. What cared my owners for that? he was merely a piece of property. Moreover, they thought he had spoiled his children, by teaching them to feel that they were human beings. This was blasphemous doctrine for a slave to teach; presumptuous in him, and dangerous to the masters. — Harriet Ann Jacobs

You teach me, I forget. You show me, I remember. You involve me, I understand. — Edward O. Wilson

The issue is the ethnocentric history that the New York task force, the Portland Baseline essayists, and other Afrocentric ideologues propose for American children. The issue is the teaching of bad history under whatever ethnic banner. Cn any historian justify the proposition that the five ethnic communities into which the New York state task force wishes to divide the country had equal influence on the development of the United States? Is it a function of schools to teach ethnic and racial pride? When does obsession with differences begin to threaten the idea of an overarching American nationality? — Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

Tiger is born into the home of an expert golfer and confessed "golf addict" who loves to teach and is eager to begin teaching his new son as soon as possible. — Geoff Colvin

Romans 12:6-8 TNIV
We have different gifts, according to the grace given to each of us. If your gift is prophesying, then prophesy in accordance with your faith; if it is serving, then serve; if it is teaching, then teach; if it is to encourage, then give encouragement; if it is giving, then give generously; if it is to lead, do it diligently; if it is to show mercy, do it cheerfully. — Rebecca Currington

I cannot protect my children from my weaknesses. As hard as I may try, at some point my sin will affect their lives. However, the way I deal with my failure can provide an example for them to follow. I am a sinner raising sinners. Each of my children will face the weight and sorrow of his or her own sins. Just as we teach daily hygiene habits like brushing teeth, our children need instruction on how to find cleansing for their souls. By teaching our children about confession and repentance as well as grace and forgiveness, we bless their lives for years to come. — Melissa B. Kruger

The common approach is, metaphorically speaking, to go out onto the sidewalk and to pick up all the banana skins, so that no one slips. Me, I go down early in the morning and drop more banana skins. People say, 'Well, why would you be doing that?' And I tell them, 'Teaching is not about trying to prevent people from falling down, it's about trying to get them to use their eyes.' If you take the banana skins away, you're saying that life is banana-skin free. Well, it is not. Life is full of banana skins.
I try to teach people to use their eyes, to look where they're stepping. It's my responsibility to respect people, to help them learn the lessons life teaches. When you slip on a banana skin and fall down, discuss what happened and learn from it. I think that it is actually unwise to get in between people and what life is trying to teach them, but we all have a responsibility for each other. — Johann Christoph Arnold

The years teach us much, which the days never knew. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

You don't always have to teach the the corrective lesson. Sometimes you can teach the lesson of patience and non-engagement. — Bryant McGill

You best teach others about healthy boundaries by enforcing yours on them. — Bryant McGill

At DePauw, I was teaching writing and fiction. The things I wanted to teach, more than anything else, were form and theory of the novel, of narrative. I liked those classes. — Nic Pizzolatto

Perhaps the greatest reason for missionary work is to give the world it's chance to hear and accept the gospel. The scriptures are replete with commands and promises and calls and rewards for teach the gospel. I use the word command deliberately for it seems to be an insistent directive from which we, singly and collectively, cannot escape ... I wonder if we are doing all we can. Are we complacent in our approach to teaching all the world? We have been proselyting now 144 years. Are we prepared to lengthen our stride? To enlarge our vision? — Spencer W. Kimball

You see, no one can teach anybody. The teacher spoils everything by thinking that he is teaching. Thus Vedanta says that within man is all knowledge-even in a boy it is so-and it requires only an awakening, and that much is the work of a teacher. — Swami Vivekananda

Sometimes I think that wisdoms slip from my mind like drool from the lips of an idiot ...
Where's all this stuff coming from? Is it any good? Any good in, you know, the wisdom sense? Who am I to spout this stuff anyway?
Well, here's the thing. You too can find yourself shedding wisdom like cat hair if you only allow yourself the liberty of introspection.
Think about what you alone know that no one else does. That one neat wonderful profound insight. It is fully yours. No one else on this planet of about six billion people understands it like you do.
Now, see if you can share it with someone. Bestow it, a gift of yourself.
Wisdom is like gossip. Except it's the good kind. — Vera Nazarian

To instruct calls for energy, and to remain almost silent, but watchful and helpful, while students instruct themselves, calls for even greater energy. To see someone fall (which will teach him not to fall again) when a word from you would keep him on his feet but ignorant of an important danger, is one of the tasks of the teacher that calls for special energy, because holding in is more demanding than crying out. — Robertson Davies

I loved teaching. I used to teach fourth grade. — Bruce Coville

She could not think what it would be to teach school twelve miles away from home, along among strangers. The less she thought of it the better, for she must go, and she must meet whatever happened as it came.
"Now Mary can have everting she needs, and she can come home this next summer," she said. "Oh, Pa, do you think I - I can teach school?"
"I do, Laura," said Pa. "I am sure of it. — Laura Ingalls Wilder

I do teach fiction and non-fiction, and usually I'm interested in works that confuse genre, but I'm very new to teaching creative writing, I don't have an MFA, or a PhD, I tend to approach it just through my own practice. — Kate Zambreno

In teaching for truly lifeworthy learning, might we hope to teach for wisdom? — David Perkins

Although the terms teaching and learning are typically paired, those of us who teach know that students don't always learn. When I complained about this early in my teaching career, a colleagues chided me: "Saying 'I thaught the students something, they just didn't learn it' is akin to saying 'I sold them the car, they just didn't but it'". — Elizabeth F. Barkley

We must all teach ourselves to be fine, to be poets. — Charles Webster Hawthorne

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

But one of the things I have learned during the time I have spent in the United States is an old African American saying: Each one, teach one. I want to believe that I am here to teach one and, more, that there is one here who is meant to teach me. And if we each one teach one, we will make a difference. — Marcus Samuelsson

The master said:
I come not only to teach,
but to learn.
Learn first,
then teach;
that is wisdom. — Matshona Dhliwayo

Only the brave should teach ... Teaching is a vocation. It is as sacred as priesthood; as innate a desire, as inescapable as the genius which compels a great artist. If he has not the concern for humanity, the love of living creatures, the vision of the priest and the artist, he must not teach. — Pearl S. Buck

We must approach the Scriptures with humility and patience, with our own agenda out of the way, and allow the Spirit to stir the deeper meaning for us. Otherwise we only hear what we already agree with or what we have decided to look for! Isn't that rather obvious? As Paul will say, "We must teach not in the way philosophy is taught, but in the way the Spirit teaches us: We must teach spiritual things spiritually" (1 Corinthians 2:13). As Tobin Hart says, this mode of teaching is much more about transformation than information. That changes the entire focus and goal. — Richard Rohr

We need to teach people that the environment has a direct bearing on our own benefit. — Dalai Lama

I started out as a poet who primarily wanted to write about image and moment. Over the years I've been trying to teach myself how to do plot and scene. My first story collection had the most issues with the plotlessness, and when I was writing my second collection I was teaching myself how to make things happen. — Dan Chaon

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

Teaching is a function, not a profession. Anything with something to offer can teach. — John Taylor Gatto

Abuse doesn't come from people's inability to resolve conflicts but from one person's decision to claim a higher status than another. So while it is valuable, for example, to teach nonviolent conflict-resolution skills to elementary school students - a popular initiative nowadays - such efforts contribute little by themselves to ending abuse. Teaching equality, teaching a deep respect for all human beings - these are more complicated undertakings, but they are the ones that count. — Lundy Bancroft

Instructors should not only be skilful in those sciences which they teach, but have skill in the method of teaching, and patience in the practice. — Isaac Watts

The aim of all education is, or should be, to teach people to educate themselves. — Arnold J. Toynbee

Dear God, I ask that today and every day that follows you wash any anger from my heart. I desperately want to look at the world differently. Please help me understand that this anger is hurting me more than anyone else. Teach me to find love in every situation and then to find peace in my heart for the rest of my life. In Jesus's name, amen. — Ron Baratono

In our modern world, we often separate faith from practice. But the way of Jesus rejects this notion. Only living our faith offers the credibility to teach our faith. Anything less is less that the teachings of Christ. — Dillon Burroughs

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

Some politicians are much noisier than the dogs! Just like teaching a dog how to hush, public must likewise teach those politicians to shush! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

Nobody should teach the black man in America to turn the other cheek, unless someone is teaching the white man in America to turn the other cheek. — Malcolm X

One time, when we'd been discussing martial arts, Murphy told me that eventually, no-one can teach you anything more about them. Once you reach that state of knowledge, the only way to keep learning and increasing your own skill is to teach what you know to others. That's why she teaches a children's class and a rape-defence course every spring and fall at one of her neighbourhood's community centres.
It sounded kind of flaky-Zen to me at the time, but Hell's bells, she'd been right. Once upon a time, it would have taken me an hour, if not more, to attain the proper frame of mind. In the course of teaching Molly to meditate, though, I had found myself going over the basics again for the first time in years, and understanding them with a deeper and richer perspective than I'd had when I was her age. I'd been getting almost as much insight and new understanding of my knowledge from teaching Molly as she'd been learning from me. — Jim Butcher

The key to fixing education is better teaching, and the key to better teaching is figuring out who can teach and who can't. — Jonathan Alter

People don't want children to know what they need to know. They want their kids to know what they ought to need to know. If you're a teacher you're in a constant battle with mildly deluded adults who think the world will get better if you imagine it is better. You want to teach about sex? Fine, but only when they're old enough to do it. You want to talk politics? Sure, but nothing modern. Religion? So long as you don't actually think about it. Otherwise some furious mob will come to your house and burn you for a witch. — Nick Harkaway

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

There are probably other things in the world that the sheep can't teach me, thought the boy as he regarded the old merchant. All they ever do, really, is look for food and water. And maybe it wasn't that they were teaching me, but that I was learning from them. — Paulo Coelho

An alarming number of parents appear to have little confidence in their ability to "teach" their children. We should help parents understand the overriding importance of incidental teaching in the context of warm, consistent companionship. Such caring is usually the greatest teaching, especially if caring means sharing in the activites of the home. — Raymond S. Moore

The goal is to teach in such a way as to produce the most learning from the least teaching. — Seymour Papert

So you'll teach me?" Val asked.
Ravus nodded agin. "I will make you as terrible as you desire."
"I don't want to be - ," she started, but he held up his hand.
"I know you're very brave," he said.
"Or stupid."
"And stupid. Brave and Stupid." Ravus smiled, but then his smile sagged. "But nothing can stop you from being terrible once you've learned how. — Holly Black

Fables should be taught as fables, myths as myths, and miracles as poetic fancies. To teach superstitions as truths is a most terrible thing. The child mind accepts and believes them, and only through great pain and perhaps tragedy can he be in after years relieved of them. In fact, men will fight for a superstition quite as quickly as for a living truth - often more so, since a superstition is so intangible you cannot get at it to refute it, but truth is a point of view, and so is changeable. — Hypatia

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

There are two types of teachers. The ones who teach you to use the text to find answers, and the ones who teach you to use the text to find another whole world of answers. — Anonymous

If there is no one around you that you can teach, it is time to leave to another place where you can teach; if there is no one around you to teach you, it is time to leave to another place where you can be taught! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

Stories don't teach us to be good; it isn't as simple as that. They show us what it feels like to be good, or to be bad. They show us people like ourselves doing right things and wrong things, acting bravely or acting meanly, being cruel or being kind, and they leave it up to our own powers of empathy and imagination to make the connection with our own lives. Sometimes we do, sometimes we don't. It isn't like putting a coin in a machine and getting a chocolate bar; we're not mechanical, we don't respond every time in the same way ...
The moral teaching comes gently, and quietly, and little by little, and weighs nothing at all. We hardly know it's happening. But in this silent and discreet way, with every book we read and love, with every story that makes its way into our heart, we gradually acquire models of behaviour and friends we admire and patterns of decency and kindness to follow.
Philip Pullman from his Award Lecture, Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award Recipient 2005 — Philip Pullman

Whoever would be a teacher of men let him begin by teaching himself before teaching others; and let him teach by example before teaching by word. For he who teaches himself and rectifies his own ways is more deserving of respect and reverence than he who would teach others and rectify their ways. — Khalil Gibran

If you want to use television to teach somebody, you must first teach
them how to use television. — Umberto Eco

When our responses turn into reactions and we set out to teach people a lesson, we lose. We lose because the act of teaching someone a lesson rarely succeeds at changing them, and always fails at making our day better, or our work more useful. — Seth Godin

I love teaching. If I made a trillion dollars, I would still teach. It's different every day. You get to meet intelligent people all the time - or at least most of the time. — Richard Bausch

[Kids] don't remember what you try to teach them. They remember what you are. — Jim Henson

I would teach how science works as much as I would teach what science knows. I would assert (given that essentially, everyone will learn to read) that science literacy is the most important kind of literacy they can take into the 21st century. I would undervalue grades based on knowing things and find ways to reward curiosity. In the end, it's the people who are curious who change the world. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

We don't teach flowers to bloom; we ensure they have the best conditions in which to do so. — Dane R. Pascoe

Teach your children not to strive for high self-esteem. This is nothing less than teaching them arrogance, conceit and superiority feelings. — Paul Hauck

Regardless of what we think we're teaching, we teach what we are. — Nathaniel Branden

To the shepherds alone was given all power to teach, to judge, to direct; on the faithful was imposed the duty of following their teaching, of submitting with docility to their judgment, and of allowing themselves to be governed, corrected, and guided by them in the way of salvation. Thus, it is an absolute necessity for the simple faithful to submit in mind and heart to their own pastors, and for the latter to submit with them to the Head and Supreme Pastor. — Pope Leo XIII

Take a child & teach him physics his first 7 grades of education, I submit he'd excel to a savant-like level. Imagine adult focus for 7 yrs. — Ace Antonio Hall

I believe it is the responsibility of each of us to pass on whatever we have learned in our time here. If I reach enlightenment after meditating in a cave for 10 years, but do not pass on this teaching and it dies with me, this was a wasted life. I believe we are here to help one another, and each of us has a unique wisdom that we should do our best to convey to others. — Chris Matakas

I have spent over half my life teaching love and brotherhood, and I feel that it is better to continue to try to teach or live equality and love than it would be to have hatred or prejudice. Everyone living together in peace and harmony and love - that's the goal that we seek, and I think that the more people there are who reach that state of mind, the better we will all be. — Rosa Parks

I used to teach kids when I was younger. When I was about 14 or 15 I started teaching children drama and something that I used to say to them was, 'Don't be afraid.' People would be afraid of forgetting their lines or something. — Stephen Moyer

Jean Valjean had undertaken to teach her to read. Sometimes, as he made the child spell, he remembered that it was with the idea of doing evil that he had learned to read in prison. This idea had ended in teaching a child to read. Then the ex-convict smiled with the pensive smile of the angels. He felt in it a premeditation from on high, the will of some one who was not man, and he became absorbed in revery. Good thoughts have their abysses as well as evil ones. — Victor Hugo

The key to teaching anything is to remember what it was like not to understand that thing. That's a very hard thing to do. Every time you come to understand something you didn't understand before, you are transformed. You become a different person from who you were before. The key to teaching someone else to understand that same thing is to remember your former, untransformed self. If you can do that, I think you can teach anything, even physics. — David Goodstein

My grandma, Mrs Grace Ayorkor Acquah said 'Educating the child is everybody's business. — Lailah Gifty Akita

The best way to teach is how you live your life. — Gina Greenlee

Necessity demands that one should carefully examine who it is that comes to the position of spiritual authority; and coming solemnly to this point, how he should live; and living well, how he should teach; and teaching rightly, with what kind of self-examination he should learn of his own weakness. — Gregory The Great

Besides the actual reading in class of many poems, I would suggest you do two things: first, while teaching everything you can and keeping free of it, teach that poetry is a mode of discourse that differs from logical exposition. — A.R. Ammons

Teach them the quiet words of kindness, to live beyond themselves. Urge them toward excellence, drive them toward gentleness, pull them deep into yourself, pull them upward toward manhood, but softly like an angel arranging clouds. Let your spirit move through them softly. — Pat Conroy

Men, your primary responsibility in your home, after your wife, is you to disciple your own children. And if you don't do it, you're in sin; you are in sin. And if you turn it over to a Sunday school teacher, you are in sin. And you are to be teaching these children more than just stories about animals that went into Noah's ark. You're to be teaching them about God, about radical depravity, about blood atonement, about propitiation, expiation, justification, sanctification; you are to teach your children! — Paul Washer

You can't tell anyone anything. You have to teach people for them to remember. Let the person experience what you are teaching and they will learn. — Benjamin Franklin

Any school for free citizens must begin by teaching distrust, not trust. It must teach questioning, not acceptance of stock answers. — Brian Herbert

A warning is in order. Reject any teaching that even suggests material wealth, physical health, or favorable circumstances have anything to do with the amount of faith you have or how pleased God happens to be with you. And beware those who teach that financial donations will unlock an endless abundance of God's blessings. They are false shepherds who will rob you of your money and destroy your relationship with God. The "faith" they proclaim is a toxic faith. — Charles R. Swindoll

None can teach admirably if not loving his task. — Amos Bronson Alcott

So many teachers teach us but we shall always remember certain teachers — Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

[T]he young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.
He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed - love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands. — William Faulkner

A man who knows a subject thoroughly, a man so soaked in it that he eats it, sleeps it and dreams it- this man can always teach it with success, no matter how little he knows of technical pedagogy. — H.L. Mencken

My job is to teach someone something they never knew, but it should not be like you're in a prisoner-of-war camp. I'm supposed to be teaching you but also entertaining you. You're giving me an hour of your time. It should be lively. We're on a hunt, it's a mystery, and it's amazing. — Bonnie Bassler

Every book that anyone sets out on is a voyage of discovery that may discover nothing. Any voyager may be lost at sea, like John Cabot. Nobody can teach the geography of the undiscovered. All he can do is encourge the will to explore, plus impress upon the inexperienced a few of the dos and don'ts of voyaging. — Wallace Stegner

I used to say I didn't want to teach. I was still excited about dancing. It's hard to do both. It's as exhausting teaching as it is to dance. — Patricia McBride

For every person wishing to teach there are thirty not wanting to be taught. — W.C. Sellar

You cannot teach a man anything, you can only help him find it within himself. — Galileo Galilei

Apprenticeship assumes that knowing a trade not only comes by numbers and outlines but also by watching and inhabiting. Knowing is found in these forms, because teaching is. We teach not only by our words and assignments but also by the manner of our words and the ways we ourselves already embody the assignments we give. — Zack Eswine

My investment of time, as an educator, in my judgment, is best served teaching people how to think about the world around them. Teach them how to pose a question. How to judge whether one thing is true versus the other. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Though I've never met a teacher who was not happy in retirement, I rarely meet one who thinks that their teaching life was not a grand way to spend a human life. The unhappy ones are the young ones, those who must teach in public schools when the whole nation seems at war with the very essence of teaching. — Pat Conroy

In fact, the very phrase "teaching creative writing" sounds to me oxymoronic. How can you teach someone to be creative? — Yuriy Tarnawsky

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

The passion to teach, to share deeply
experienced "lessons from life," is embedded in all literature. — Vera B. Williams

As children's inquiries are not to be slighted, so also great care is to be taken, that they never receive deceitful and illuding answers. They easily perceive when they are slighted or deceived, and quickly learn the trick of neglect, dissimulation, and falsehood, which they observe others to make use of. We are not to intrench upon truth in any conversation, but least of all with children; since, if we play false with them, we not only deceive their expectation, and hinder their knowledge, but corrupt their innocence, and teach them the worst of vices. — John Locke

Let such teach others who themselves excel, And censure freely who have written well. — Alexander Pope

Sacred scripture wishes simply to declare that the world was created by God, and in order to teach this truth it expressed itself in terms of the cosmology in use at the time of the writer. Any other teaching about the origin and makeup of the universe is so alien to the intentions of the Bible, which does not wish to teach how heaven was made but how one goes to heaven. — Pope John Paul II

I'm happy for you Agastya,you're leaving for a more meaningful context. This place is like a parody, a complete farce, they're trying to build another Cambridge here. At my old University I used to teach Macbeth to my MA English classes in Hindi.English in India is burlesque. But now you'll get out of here to somehow a more real situation. In my time I'd wanted to give this Civil Service exam too, I should have. Now I spend my time writing papers for obscure journals on L. H. Myers and Wyndham Lewis, and teaching Conrad to a bunch of half-wits. — Upamanyu Chatterjee

People respond when they are taught, and that primarily by example, rather than preached at. Jesus modeled just this approach in His life."

~R. Alan Woods [2013] — R. Alan Woods

I think women should have choices and should be able to do what they like, and I think it's a great choice to stay at home and raise kids, just as it's a great choice to have a career. But I don't entirely approve of people who get advanced degrees and then decide to stay at home. I think if society gives you the gift of one of those educations and you take a spot in a very competitive institution, then you should do something with that education to help others ... But I also don't approve of working parents who look down on stay-at-home mothers and think they smother their children. Working parents are every bit as capable of spoiling children as ones who don't work - maybe even more so when they indulge their kids out of guilt. The best think anyone can teach their children is the obligation we all have toward each other - and no one has a monopoly on teaching that. — Will Schwalbe

The modern university does not exist to teach alone ... It exists also to serve the democracy of which it is a product and an ornament ... The university rests on the public will and on public appreciation. — Nicholas Murray Butler