Quotes & Sayings About Teaching All Students

Befuddlement is a healthy part of the learning process. When students approach a problem and don't know how to do it, they'll often decide they're no good at the subject. Brighter students, in particular, can have difficulty in this way - their breezing through high school leaves them no reason to think that being confused is normal and necessary. But the learning process is all about working your way out of confusion. Articulating your question is 80 percent of the battle. By the time you've figured out what's confusing, you're likely to have answered the question yourself!" - Kenneth R. Leopold, Distinguished Teaching Professor, Department of Chemistry, University of Minnesota — Barbara Oakley

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

When you're teaching a hard concept and the students all have puzzled looks on their faces and then suddenly you can see that 'aha' moment, that they got it, that's just an incredible thing. — Anant Agarwal

Not long after the book came out I found myself being driven to a meeting
by a professor of electrical engineering in the graduate school I of MIT. He said that after reading the book he realized that his graduate students were using on him, and had used for the ten years and more he had been teaching there, all the evasive strategies I described in the book - mumble, guess-and-look, take a wild guess and see what happens, get the teacher to answer his own questions, etc.
But as I later realized, these are the games that all humans play when others
are sitting in judgment on them. — John Holt

In my view, all students should be given an initial opportunity to pursue the science track as far as it goes. But for those who quickly decide that track isn't for them, a different style of teaching is in order. — Philip Kitcher

We are all just humble students of the world. — Bryant McGill

The biggest mistake of past centuries in teaching has been to treat all students as if they were variants of the same individual and thus to feel justified in teaching them all the same subjects the same way. — Howard Gardner

One of my young married students has suffered all her life because she was taught in her Church that she was born so sinful that the only way the wrath of God the Father could be appeased enough for him to forgive all her horrible sinfulness was for God the Son to die in agony on the cross. Without his suffering, the Father would remain angry forever with all his Creation.
Many of us have had a least part of that horror thrust on us at one time or other inour childhood. For many reasons I never went to Sunday School, so I was spared having a lot of peculiar teaching to unlearn. It's only lately that I've discovered that it was no less a person than St. Anselm who saw the atonement in terms of appeasement of an angry God, from which follows immediately the heresy that Jesus came to save us from God the Father. — Madeleine L'Engle

With the states release today of a set of clear and consistent academic standards, our nation is one step closer to supporting effective teaching in every classroom, charting a path to college and careers for all students, and developing the tools to help all children stay motivated and engaged in their own education. The more states that adopt these college and career based standards, the closer we will be to sharing innovation across state borders and becoming more competitive as a country. — Bill Gates

In fact, healthy students often redouble their resistance to teaching as they find themselves more comprehensively manipulated. This resistance is due not to the authoritarian style of a public school or the seductive style of some free schools, but to the fundamental approach common to all schools-the idea that one person's judgment should determine what and when another person must learn. — Ivan Illich

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

What is it that teaching kills? The juice, the sap - the substance of revelation: by making even the insoluble questions & multiple possible answers take on the granite assured stance of dogma. It does not kill this quick of life in students who come, each year, fresh, quick, to be awakened & pass on - but it kills the quick in me by forcing to formula the great visions, the great collocations and cadences of words and meanings. The good teacher, the proper teacher, must be everliving in faith and ever-renewed in creative energy to keep the sap packed in herself, himself, as well as the work. I do not have the energy, or will to use the energy I have, and it would take all, to keep this flame alive. — Sylvia Plath

I am definitely a Type A personality, always rushing around, trying to do too much, not good at just lying on the beach. But I'm so thankful for everything I have: wonderfully supportive parents and sisters, the best husband in the world, terrific students I love teaching and hanging out with, and above all, my two amazing daughters. — Amy Chua

Most problems of teaching are not problems of growth but helping cultivate growth. As far as I know, and this is only from personal experience in teaching, I think about ninety percent of the problem in teaching, or maybe ninety-eight percent, is just to help the students get interested. Or what it usually amounts to is to not prevent them from being interested. Typically they come in interested, and the process of education is a way of driving that defect out of their minds. But if children['s] ... normal interest is maintained or even aroused, they can do all kinds of things in ways we don't understand. — Noam Chomsky

The uninitiated often assumed that undergraduate students were at the bottom rung, but undergrads were the paying customers, or at least their parents were. And paying customers needed to be kept happy. Grad students worked for the school as teaching and research assistants--TAs and RAs--but weren't really proper employees, and as such they weren't entitled to the benefits that, say, a cataloger in the Coffey Library received. Then there was the fact that they had to learn to leave behind passive studying and test taking, which was what most of them had been taught in their school careers up to that point, and learn how to actively attack research problems and come up with new ideas, all while being poorly paid. Like Helen had said, a not insignificant number of grad students left after a year instead of sticking around to work on obtaining their PhDs. Who could blame them? Industry paid more and had better benefits. — Neve Maslakovic

Economics ought to be a magpie discipline, taking in philosophy, history and politics. But heterodox approaches have long since been banished from most faculties, claims Tony Lawson. In the 1970s, when he started teaching at Cambridge, the economics faculty still boasted legends such as Nicky Kaldor and Joan Robinson. "There were big debates, and students would study politics, the history of economic thought." And now? "Nothing. No debates, no politics or history of economic thought and the courses are nearly all maths."
How do elites remain in charge? If the tale of the economists is any guide, by clearing out the opposition and then blocking their ears to reality. The result is the one we're all paying for. — Aditya Chakrabortty

Many things went on at Unseen University and, regrettably, teaching had to be one of them. The faculty had long ago confronted this fact and had perfected various devices for avoiding it. But this was perfectly all right because, to be fair, so had the students. — Terry Pratchett

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

When I'm teaching, I tell my students: It's all process. Don't even think of product. — Maxine Hong Kingston

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

To teach successfully we must tell all we know, but only what is adaptable to the student. — Jean-Francois De La Harpe

Teaching I realized took up a lot of my time. I was a kind of a teacher that spent time with students, spoke to them after class, tried to help them out. I'd talk with them personally about their work and try to get out of them what they were thinking about, forcing them to thinking seriously and not just falling back on all the ideas that they had picked up someplace. And so I took my job teaching very seriously and that - as a result, it took up a lot of time. — Robert Barry

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

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

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

Princeton has made an enormous difference in my life, and I am delighted to be able to express my gratitude in such a tangible way. The generosity of earlier generations of donors made it possible for me to attend Princeton as a young student from Hong Kong, and I have always wanted to do all I could to assure that students in the future.. from the United States and around the world.. will have the same kinds of opportunities I had to learn from faculty members who are leaders in their fields at a university that remains second to none in its commitment to teaching. — Gordon Wu

Dear Bea - I've been wading through a pile of "Due before 3" mimeos - but now at last I know what to do with them: into the wastebasket! I'm also hep to the jargon. I know that "illustrative material" means magazine covers, "enriched curriculum" means teaching "who and whom," and that "All evaluation of students should be predicated upon initial goals and grade level expectations" means if a kid shows up, pass him. Right? — Bel Kaufman

An essential pedagogic step here is to relegate the teaching of mathematical methods in economics to mathematics departments. Any mathematical training in economics, if it occurs at all, should come after students have at the very least completed course work in basic calculus, algebra and differential equations (the last being one about which most economists are woefully ignorant). This simultaneously explains why neoclassical economists obsess too much about proofs and why non-neoclassical economists, like those in the Circuit School, experience such difficulties in translating excellent verbal ideas about credit creation into coherent dynamic models of a monetary production economy. — Steve Keen

The single problem plaguing all students in all schools everywhere is the crisis of disconnection. Meaningful Student Involvement happens when the roles of students are actively re-aligned from being the passive recipients of schools to becoming active partners throughout the educational process. — Adam Fletcher

First day of your teaching you are to stand at your classroom door and let your students know how happy you are to see them. Stand, I say. Any playwright will tell you that when the actor sits down the play sits down. The best move of all is to establish yourself as a presence and to do it outside in the hallway. Outside, I say. That's your territory and when you're out there you'll be seen as a strong teacher, fearless, ready to face the swarm. That's what a class is, a swarm. And you're a warrior teacher. It's something people don't think about. Your territory is like your aura, it goes with you everywhere, in the hallways, on the stairs and, assuredly, in the classroom. — Frank McCourt

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

Education can help all Americans live longer, healthier lives. Teaching students to make healthy decisions can improve habits now and instill healthy eating habits for a lifetime. — Matt Cartwright

As with most voluntary school integration programs, dispersal of the black children was the norm. In Portland, no more than forty-five black children were bused to any single elementary school, and white schools of four-hundred to five-hundred pupils received as few as four and in most instances only ten to fifteen black students. Brush Elementary, the all-white school Rist selected for daily observation, received about thirty black children.
The principal, along with most of his all-white teaching staff, had never taught a black child. He hired a black school aide because he felt that most of the white students had never spoken to a black person. His lack of racial sensitivity was illustrated in a staff discussion about the collection of milk money, when he said, "I guess we had better not call it chocolate milk any longer. It would probably now be more appropriate to refer to it as black milk. — Derrick A. Bell

In my teaching, I try to expose my students to the widest range of aesthetic possibilities, so I'll offer them stories from Anton Chekhov to Denis Johnson, from Flannery O'Connor to A.M. Homes, and perhaps investigating all that strange variation of beauty has rubbed off on me. Or perhaps that's why I enjoy teaching literature. — Chang-rae Lee

When I think of the most able students I have encountered in my teaching - I mean those who have distinguished themselves not only by skill but by independence of thought - then I must confess that all have had a lively interest in epistemology. — Albert Einstein

Policy makers and politicians want more STEM; educators want more STEAM. Both, in ways that are eerily similar, are engaging in social engineering to support an ideology. At the macro-level, in both worlds, it's all about teaching a point of view, rather than teaching students to learn. We seem hell bent on an arbitrarily linear approach to engineering a "useful" or job-securing education, from which we continue to get mixed results. — Henry Doss

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

As long as you know 'to let' means to rent and not a place to pee, you're all set to travel in the UK. The lifts and the boots and everything else don't really matter. — Tucker Elliot

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

I would not have majored in English and gone on to teach literature had I not been able to construct a counterargument about the truthfulness of fiction; still, as writers turn away from the industrious villages of George Eliot and Thomas Hardy, I learn less and less from them that helps me to ponder my life. In time, I found myself agreeing with the course evaluations written by my testier freshman students:'All the literature we read this term was depressing.' How naive. How sane. — Mary Rose O'Reilley

I got so tired of hearing those proverbs when I was a child. Now I use them all the time. Sometimes they are the best way to say what needs to be said. I teach them to my students. I have a collection of proverbs for class discussion and writing assignments. — Marva Collins

In short, we much struggle with the meaning of learning within our discipline and how best to cultivate and recognize it. For that task, we don't need routine experts who know all the right procedures but adaptive ones who can apply fundamental principles to all the situations and students they are likely to encounter, recognizing when invention is both possible and necessary and that there is no single 'best way' to teach. — Ken Bain

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

I love the students - they are remarkable, inspiring people. I would miss teaching if I stopped doing it. The kind of work I do is pretty diverse: I can cast a play while doing a polish of a screenplay, while thinking about a new play and revising another. In other words, the kind of work that I do during my work day is not just writing, yet it is all part of the job of being a playwright. — Donald Margulies

I want students to engage the way a clutch on a car gets engaged: an engine can be running, making appropriate noises, burning fuel and creating exhaust fumes, but unless the clutch is engaged, nothing moves. It's all sound and smoke, and nobody gets anywhere. — Robert L. Fried

You know what I was thinking? [Ruthie] got so excited when she was spouting this ahistorical countertextual nonsense, and I caught myself thinking, 'What an idiot her teacher must be,' and thinking about her teacher made me realize - the kind of excitement she was showing as she mindlessly spouted back the nonsense she learned in college, that's just like the excitement some of my own students show. And it occurred to me that what we professors think of as a 'brilliant student' is nothing but a student who is enthusiastically converted to whatever idiotic ideas we've been teaching them."
"Self-knowledge is a painful thing," said Esther. "To learn that your best students are parrots after all. — Orson Scott Card

The all-or-nothing quality of Poonja-ji's teaching obliged him to acknowledge the full enlightenment of any person who was grandiose or manic enough to claim it. Thus, I repeatedly witnessed fellow students declare their complete and undying freedom, all the while appearing quite ordinary - or worse. In certain cases, these people had clearly had some sort of breakthrough, but Poonja-ji's insistence upon the finality of every legitimate insight led many of them to delude themselves about their spiritual attainments. Some left India and became gurus. From what I could tell, Poonja-ji gave everyone his blessing to spread his teachings in this way. — Sam Harris

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

Although, as the Latin verb to educate, educate, indicates, it is not a question of putting something in but drawing it out, if it is there to begin with ... I want all of my students and all of my dancers to be aware of the poignancy of life at that moment. I would like to feel that I had, in some way, given them the gift of themselves. — Martha Graham

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

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

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 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

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

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

It still amazes me that we insist on teaching algebra to all students when only about 20 percent will ever use it and fail to teach anything about parenting when the vast majority of our students will become parents. — Nel Noddings

One of the most painful parts of teaching mathematics is seeing students damaged by the cult of the genius. The genius cult tells students it's not worth doing mathematics unless you're the best at mathematics, because those special few are the only ones whose contributions matter. We don't treat any other subject that way! I've never heard a student say, "I like Hamlet, but I don't really belong in AP English - that kid who sits in the front row knows all the plays, and he started reading Shakespeare when he was nine!" Athletes don't quit their sport just because one of their teammates outshines them. And yet I see promising young mathematicians quit every year, even though they love mathematics, because someone in their range of vision was "ahead" of them. — Jordan Ellenberg

I often notice how students can gain the capacity to use certain critical methodologies through engaging with very different texts - how a graphic novel about gentrification and an anthology about Hurricane Katrina and a journalistic account of war profiteering might all lead to very similar classroom conversations and critical engagement. I'm particularly interested in this when teaching law students who often resist reading interdisciplinary materials or materials they interpret as too theoretical. — Dean Spade

They [academy writing programs] have no concept that the world has changed, that publishing has changed, that filmmaking has changed, and if you're not constantly looking at your education model and adjusting for the change, you'll find yourself teaching antiquity. Like all of these programs that won't accept students who are writing genre fiction - what an institutional ego! — Tod Goldberg

The first and foremost duty of the high school in teaching mathematics is to emphasize methodical work in problem solving ... The teacher who wishes to serve equally all his students, future users and nonusers of mathematics, should teach problem solving so that it is about one-third mathematics and two-thirds common sense. — George Polya

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 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

Those institutes can develop research-based teaching initiatives in which they work with colleagues across the university to tackle problems. They might focus on why certain groups of students (defined by whatever demography) do not achieve the kind of learning expected, or about how to help all students achieve a new level of development. The initiative would refine the questions; explore the existing literature; and fashion a hypothesis about what might work, a program to implement that hypothesis, and a systematic assessment of the result, ultimately contributing to a growing body of literature on university learning. — Ken Bain

Find a way to delight in all students. Look for the best, expect the best, and find something in each child [you] can treasure. — Steven Levy

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