Teaching Is Hard Quotes & Sayings

A child is imprinted not by simply teaching. But their attention is like soft clay. The attention field of adults is stratified. They are like hard clay and we push them on each side of the child's attention field. — Frederick Lenz

The germ of an idea doesn't make the sculpture that stands up ... so the next stage is hard work — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

But it is a hard, it's a hard profession teaching acting. — Dabney Coleman

It's difficult to teach how to write novels, but teaching swimming is just as hard. — Haruki Murakami

I was aware that the teaching of drawing was being stopped almost 30 years ago. And I always said, 'The teaching of drawing is the teaching of looking.' A lot of people don't look very hard. — David Hockney

For them it's out-of-date and outmoded to perform miracles; teaching the people is too like hard work, interpreting the holy scriptures is for schoolmen and praying is a waste of time; to shed tears is weak and womanish, to be needy is degrading; to suffer defeat is a disgrace and hardly fitting for one who scarcely permits the greatest of kings to kiss the toes of his sacred feet; and finally, death is an unattractive prospect, and dying on a cross would be an ignominious end. — Desiderius Erasmus

The idea that somehow "no self, no problem"- I don't exist because I don't have a self- would be a mistaken understanding. However, the selflessness teaching is not that hard to understand. What it means is a type of self that people feel they have, like a fixed, unchanging identity. Either they know they have it, or for some, they feel they need to seek it, and possibly have an experience where they feel like they found something. That type of fixed, unchanging, essential self, or absolute self doesn't exist. That's what "no self" means. — Robert Thurman

It's hard for these athletes to stay healthy. They are constantly being bombarded with unhealthy advertising. Peer pressure can override the body's demand for health. Being healthy goes beyond 'not being sick' (where all lab reports indicate health), to feeling optimistic, energetic, strong and happy with their bodies. Teaching them to take charge of their bodies is a job of coaching. Help them gain discipline in conditioning, nutrition and attitude/emotional control. — John Kessel

This is precisely why I loathed being a teacher! Young people are so infernally convinced that they are absolutely right about everything. Has it not occurred to you, my poor puffed-up poppinjay, that there might be an excellent reason why the Headmaster of Hogwarts is not confiding every tiny detail of his plans to you? Have you never paused, while feeling hard-done-by, to note that following Dumbledore's orders has never yet led you into harm? No. No, like all young people, you are quite sure that you alone feel and think, you alone recognise danger, you alone are the only one clever enough to realise what the Dark Lord may be planning. — J.K. Rowling

If a plethora of learning with a paucity of teaching is an approach to heaven and a plethora of teaching with a paucity of learning an approach to hell, the devil is hard at work in our educational systems. — Dee Hock

It is a libel to suggest that children need rewards for attending to tasks, apart from intrinsic interest and satisfaction. Children work very hard in their purposeful endeavors in the world, when they have ends they want to accomplish themselves. It is meaningless teaching, not learning, that demands irrelevant incentives. — Frank Smith

Most men are followers, and implicitly rely upon the judgment of others. They mistake solemnity for wisdom, and regard a grave countenance as the title page and Preface to a most learned volume. So they are easily imposed upon by forms, strange garments, and solemn ceremonies. And when the teaching of parents, the customs of neighbors, and the general tongue approve and justify a belief or creed, no matter how absurd, it is hard even for the strongest to hold the citadel of his soul. In each country, in defence of each religion, the same arguments would be urged. — Robert Green Ingersoll

Don't you sometimes find it hard to remember God all through your work?" asked Clementina.
"I don't try to consciously remember Him every moment. For He is in everything, whether I am thinking of it or not. When I go fishing, I go to catch God's fish. When I take Kelpie out, I am teaching one of God's wild creatures. When I read the Bible or Shakespeare, I am listening to the word of God, uttered in each after its own kind. When the wind blows on my face, it is God's wind. — George MacDonald

Most people have heard of the Eastern teaching that it is important to exist in the moment. It can be hard to train yourself to observe what is right now (and not to bog down in thoughts of what was and what will be), but the philosophical teaching that underlies that idea - the reason that staying in the moment is so vital - is equally important: Everything is changing. All the time. And you can't stop it. And your attempts to stop it actually put you in a bad place. — Ed Catmull

How has the world of the child changed in the last 150 years?" The answer is. "It's hard to imagine any way in which it hasn't changed.They're immersed in all kinds of stuff that was unheard of 150 years ago, and yet if you look at schools today versus 100 years ago, they are more similar than dissimilar. — Peter Senge

Sometimes it can be really hard in our fast paced society to slow ourselves down enough to begin to listen to God's voice. The dilemma exists in my position as well. To be a follower of Christ is to emulate Him. When He went off alone into the desert to pray, He was teaching a valuable lesson. — Jon Foreman

I'm taking drama classes, they say I'm a natural actress. I think it's just because I talk a lot. I'm also learning how to play guitar and piano. Piano is really hard though. My dad is teaching me and I just get so confused because the chords are so different, but by learning I hope to be able to be a songwriter as well. — Lindsay Pagano

There's a lot wrong [with American universities]. I'd remove 3/4 of the faculty - everything but the hard sciences. But nobody's going to do that, so we'll have to live with the defects. It's amazing how wrongheaded [the teaching is]. There is fatal disconnectedness. You have these squirrelly people in each department who don't see the big picture. — Charlie Munger

I think what I do differently from a lot of TV chefs is that I break down barriers and make fine food more accessible to the regular person, who might be intimidated. I try hard, particularly with wine, to make it not intimidating. It's sort of a teaching job. — Ted Allen

I don't like the idea of teaching religion in schools, and creation is not my thing, but that's a trivial point compared to saving the creation. I'd much rather have half of the people in the country be creationists and work really hard to save the creation than have everybody be evolutionists and be destroying the planet. — Paul R. Ehrlich

On one hand she seems so agile, so athletic, and yet I've seen her appear so awkward that it embarrassed me. She gives the impression of a hard, worldly adroitness, and in some situations she's like an adolescent: rigid with ancient, middle class attitudes, unable to think for herself, falling back on old verities ... victim of her family teaching, shocked by what shocks people, wanting what people usually want. She wants a home, a husband, and her idea of a husband is a man who earns a certain amount of money, helps around the garden, does the dishes ... the idea of a good husband that's found in This Week magazine; a viewpoint from the most ordinary stratum, that great ubiquitous world of family life, transmitted from generation to generation. Despite her wild language. — Philip K. Dick

It is hard to be an apprentice to an unfriendly professor, or even one whose warmth or tolerance wears thin when the going gets hard for the student and help is needed. — Robert Audi

I have an aunt who believed strongly that teaching kids that Shakespeare is 'hard' is wrong, so she handed me 'Hamlet' when I was in kindergarten to see what would happen. What happened was I did a book report on 'Hamlet' and caused quite a lot of trouble! — Seanan McGuire

My mom is like this hard-core, liberal feminist. She's a professor in Boston, and she's been teaching women's studies for 30 years and international politics. — Eliza Dushku

Churches are notorious for creating competing systems, wherein unclear direction and conflicting information threaten to cause a breakdown and paralyze the ministry. Instead of replacing old systems, we tend to just download and add whatever is new to what already exists. Soon our capacity becomes fragmented and we find ourselves confronted with the signs of ineffectiveness: some ministries seem routine and irrelevant; the teaching feels too academic; calendars are saturated with mediocre programs; staff members pull in opposite directions; volunteers lack motivation; departments viciously compete for resources; and it becomes harder and harder to figure out if we are really being successful. Too many churches desperately need an upgrade. They need to reformat their hard drives and install a clean system. They need to rewrite their code so everyone is clear about what is important and how they should function. — Andy Stanley

I do a lot of teaching ... and so I think I know how hard it is for young writers, how they have to work two jobs to survive. — Erica Jong

I've noticed a fascinating phenomenon in my thirty years of teaching: schools and schooling are increasingly irrelevant to the great enterprises of the planet. No one believes anymore that scientists are trained in science classes or politicians in civics classes or poets in English classes. The truth is that schools don't really teach anything except how to obey orders. This is a great mystery to me because thousands of humane, caring people work in schools as teachers and aides and administrators, but the abstract logic of the institution overwhelms their individual contributions. Although teachers to care and do work very, very hard, the institution is psychopathic
it has no conscience. It rings a bell and the young man in the middle of writing a poem must close his notebook and move to a different cell where he must memorize that humans and monkeys derive from a common ancestor. — John Taylor Gatto

Many of the slaves believe such stories, and think it is not worth while to exchange slavery for such a hard kind of freedom. It is difficult to persuade such that freedom could make them useful men, and enable them to protect their wives and children. If those heathen in our Christian land had as much teaching as some Hindoos, they would think otherwise. They would know that liberty is more valuable than life. They would begin to understand their own capabilities, and exert themselves to become men and women. — Harriet Jacobs

School is the worst choice, it teach us that we can focus on a lot of stuff at first view it's like preparing to work hard as a villager use to do or somebody else with such type hard work. From other it's selfish and from last it's full of obstacles... — Deyth Banger

We are taught to reinvent ourselves all the time. And nature is teaching us. What is necessary for us to do to create sustainability? There's a shift that has to take hold in our thinking, and it's hard to know when it's going to click for the larger percentage of us. — Horst Rechelbacher

Often at shelters, we hear, 'I told my child she could get a pet, but she will have to take care of him.' That is an unrealistic expectation and often results in the pet being returned days, weeks, or months later. It is hard for pets to go in and out of a home. They bond with their humans and when they find themselves at a shelter, they become stressed at being taken away from home and the people they love. When an 'easy-way-out' decision is made to give up a pet, we are teaching our children that animals can be given away, turned away, and gotten rid of at the drop of a hat. If you are considering getting a cat or kitten, go into it fully aware that the adults in the home will have to help with the care of the pet. — Carol Griglione

We then return our gaze to the mirror-boxed future-towns circling us-the hard drives of our culture, where the human tribe is making flesh its deepest needs and fears; teaching machines to think; accelerating the pace of obsolescence; designing new animals to replace the animals we've erased; value adding; reconstructing the future. — Douglas Coupland

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

you cannot be friends either with boy or man unless you give yourself away in the process, and Mr. Pembroke did not commend this. He, for "personal intercourse," substituted the safer "personal influence," and gave his junior hints on the setting of kindly traps, in which the boy does give himself away and reveals his shy delicate thoughts, while the master, intact, commends or corrects them.
Originally Rickie had meant to help boys in the anxieties that they undergo when changing into men: at Cambridge he had numbered this among life's duties. But here is a subject in which we must
inevitably speak as one human being to another, not as one who has authority or the shadow of authority, and for this reason the elder school-master could suggest nothing but a few formulae. Formulae, like kindly traps, were not in Rickie's line, so he abandoned these
subjects altogether and confined himself to working hard at what was easy. — E. M. Forster

It is a hard thing to let your children near danger, and yet, I remember my Papa teaching me to fire a rifle before I could even hold it with my own strength. And if he hadn't trusted me to be careful, I would have never had faith in myself to do it. — Nancy E. Turner

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

Teaching should be such that what is offered is perceived as a valuable gift and not as hard duty. Never regard study as duty but as the enviable opportunity to learn to know the liberating influence of beauty in the realm of the spirit for your own personal joy and to the profit of the community to which your later work belongs. — Albert Einstein

The closer I got to my finish line, that rubbley (ph) rocky coast of Ross Island, the more I started to realize that the biggest lesson that this very long, very-hard walk might be teaching me is that happiness is not a finish line and that if we can't feel content on our journeys amidst the mess and the striving that we all inhabit - the open loops, the half-finished to-do lists, the could-do-better-next-times - then we might never feel it. — Ben Saunders

For me, the hardest part is taking lessons, and it's hard teaching an old dog new tricks, so part of my re-teaching myself is opening my mind too. I just want to get better and I think there's nothing wrong with wanting to get better. — Eric Hernandez

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

The matron glanced at the old man and suppressed a smile. "He is absolutely miserable."
"I enjoy miserable. It gives one a contrast to all the delectabilities of life. But is he housebroken, inpala? He is rather rumpled. He will look well on my ship, but will he wash well? Do professors fray as a general rule? I will not have my ship looking ragged."
"They do tend to fade after a few years of hard use. — Michelle Franklin

When someone is hard on you it may have very little to do with you. — Bryant McGill

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

The man (or woman) who can make hard things easy is the educator. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Three days ago, I was fired from my job teaching at a college because one of my students
bet me that you don't cum when you get a prostate exam and it took me seven minutes
to prove that dumb fucking kid wrong. It was hard to touch my own prostate, but
ultimately, I was correct. I came onto the floor and onto the person in the desk up front.
I said, "Kids, that is what is known as 'empirical evidence'. — Sam Pink

A prize-winning science reporter, Simons had become the number-two editor at the Post a year before. An intent, sensitive man with a large nose, thin face and deep-set eyes, he looks like the kind of Harvard teaching assistant who carries a slide ruler strapped to his belt. But he is skillful with fragile egos, and also the perfect counterpoint to Bradlee. Bradlee is more like Woodward: he wants hard information first and is impatient with theories.

-- Carl Bernstein, Bob Woodward — Carl Bernstein

while he emphasized that peace is wonderful, Rogers was not altogether starry-eyed in this first week. In fact, he seemed quite the political realist in teaching us that peacemaking will be hard work. It will certainly require the most creative thoughts our moral imagination can muster. Like Daniel Striped Tiger, we will have to move beyond typical options and come up with creative strategies that surprise and shock the warmongers we seek to influence. Peacemaking will also no doubt be time-consuming. It will require us, as it did Lady Aberlin, to take time off from our regular work to create and carry out unique plans we would not normally even consider. And peacemaking will lead us into moments of doubt and uncertainty. Like Lady Aberlin and Mister Rogers, we will find ourselves wondering whether our ideas will really work. — Michael G. Long

One destructive mind-set that must be altered in our society is the thought that work is a curse. Some people advocate that if you are truly blessed you don't need to work hard. Because as they say "the race is not to the swift", I even had statements like "a day of favour is better than a thousand years of labour". To make things worse, this type of teachings are actually coming from our pulpits. We call ourselves Protestants, but we have totally departed from the teachings of the early Protestants. Martin Luther, John Wesley and John Calvin would turn in their graves, if they hear the kind of teachings we are now feeding the people of God with. — Sunday Adelaja

Teaching is hard enough, and no one should have to feel violated in his or her classroom. — Katie Ashley

My love is thine to teach; teach it but how, And thou shalt see how apt it is to learn. Any hard lesson that may do thee good. — William Shakespeare

The child will grow up and find out things for herself. She will know that I lied. She will be disappointed."
"That is what is called learning the truth. It is a good thing to learn the truth one's self. To first believe with all your heart, and then not to believe, is good too. It fattens the emotions and makes them to stretch. When as a woman life and people disappoint her, she will have had practice in disappointment and it will not come so hard. In teaching your child, do not forget that suffering is good too. It makes a person rich in character. — Betty Smith

The Islamic teachings have left great traditions for equitable and gentle dealings and behavior, and inspire people with nobility and tolerance. These are human teachings of the highest order and at the same time practicable. These teachings brought into existence a society in which hard-heartedness and collective oppression and injustice were the least as compared with all other societies preceding it ... Islam is replete with gentleness, courtesy, and fraternity. — H.G.Wells

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

Week before last I went to Wesleyan and read "A Good Man Is Hard to Find." After it I went to one of the classes where I was asked questions. There were a couple of young teachers there and one of them, an earnest type, started asking the questions. "Miss O'Connor," he said, "why was the Misfit's hat black?" I said most countrymen in Georgia wore black hats. He looked pretty disappointed. Then he said, "Miss O'Connor, the Misfit represents Christ, does he not?" "He does not," I said. He looked crushed. "Well, Miss O'Connor," he said, "what is the significance of the Misfit's hat?" I said it was to cover his head; and after that he left me alone. Anyway, that's what's happening to the teaching of literature. — Flannery O'Connor

In 1971, Bossier City, Louisiana, there was a teenage girl who was pregnant with her second child. She was a high school dropout and a single mom, but somehow she managed to make a better life for herself and her children. She encouraged her kids to be creative, to work hard, and to do something special. That girl is my mother and she's here tonight. And I just want to say, I love you, Mom. Thank you for teaching me to dream. — Jared Leto

It can be said unequivocally that good teaching is far more complex, difficult, and demanding than mediocre research, which may explain why professors try so hard to avoid it. — Page Smith