Thing About Teaching Quotes & Sayings

I thought I would teach my students a thing or two from the text books once I got a job in school but to my surprise my students teach me things about life and myself every single day. — Kavita Bhupta Ghosh

I asked him what, if anything, got him down about teaching. He said he didn't think that anything about it got him exactly down, but there was one thing, he thought, that frightened him: reading the pencilled notations in the margins of books in the college library. — J.D. Salinger

Teaching in Providence and Oakland, I realized that the first thing is that it wasn't good enough to come in and assume that I had what my students needed in terms of knowledge and skills. I also had to show them that I was their ally. I had to show them that I was concerned about them, wanted to relate to them, and that I was fundamentally on their side. — Pedro Noguera

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

It is one thing to speak kindly to an irritating stranger on Monday. It is quite another thing to go on speaking kindly to the same irritating relative, or irritating employee, or irritating child day after day, week after week, year after year and come to see in that what God is asking of me, what God is teaching me about myself in this weary, weary moment. — Joan D. Chittister

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

The hardest thing about choosing good names is that it requires good descriptive skills and a shared cultural background. This is a teaching issue rather than a technical, business, or
management issue. — Robert C. Martin

Lightly men talk of saying what they mean. Often when he was teaching me to write in Greek the Fox would say, "Child, to say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean; that's the whole art and joy of words." A glib saying. When the time comes to you at which you will be forced at last to utter the speech which has lain at the centre of your soul for years, which you have, all that time, idiot-like, been saying over and over, you'll not talk about joy of words. — C.S. Lewis

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

Regardless of subject matter, this is the only thing worth teaching: how to uncover that original center and how to live there once it is restored. We call the filming over a deadening of heart, and the process of return, whether brought about through suffering or love, is how we unlearn our way back to God. Close your eyes and breathe your way beneath your troubles, the way a diver slips to that depth of stillness that is always waiting beneath the churning of the waves. Now, consider two things you love doing, such as running, drawing, singing, bird-watching, gardening, or reading. Meditate on what it is in each of these that makes you feel alive. Hold what they have in common before you, and breathing slowly, feel the spot of grace these dear things mirror within you. — Mark Nepo

My parents were language teachers. They talked about teaching all the time and all their friends were teachers. It was considered a pre-ordained thing that I would go into teaching. — Joanne Harris

That's the thing about independently minded children. You bring them up teaching them to question authority, and you forget that the very first authority they question is you. — Susan Sarandon

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

The toughest thing about homework is getting mom and pop to agree on the same answer. — Joey Lauren Adams

I would love to write more children's books. There is such a high standard out there for children's books; there are really amazing writers. It is a fantastic creative outlet and such an amazing teaching tool. The thing I love about kids, too, is it is so imaginative and poetic. — Jewel

To be Queen Elizabeth within a definite area, deciding sales, banquets, labours, and holidays; to be Whitely within a certain area, providing toys, boots, cakes and books; to be Aristotle within a certain area, teaching morals, manners, theology, and hygiene; I can imagine how this can exhaust the mind, but I cannot imagine how it could narrow it. How can it be a large career to tell other people about the Rule of Three, and a small career to tell one's own children about the universe? How can it be broad to be the same thing to everyone and narrow to be everything to someone? No, a woman's function is laborious, but because it is gigantic, not because it is minute. — G.K. Chesterton

And do you know the oddest thing about murder and war and violence?'
'Oh, Mary Shelley, please stop talking about those types of things.'
'The oddest thing is that they all go against the lessons that grown-ups teach children. Don't hurt anyone. Solve your problems with language instead of fists. Share your things. Don't take something that belongs to someone else without asking. Use your manners. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Why do mothers and fathers bother spending so much time teaching children these lessons when grown-ups don't pay any attention to the words themselves? — Cat Winters

I spent as much time as I could with Ghosh. I wanted every bit of wisdom he could impart to me. All sons should write down every word of what their fathers have to say to them. I tried. Why did it take an illness for me to recognize the value of time with him? It seems we humans never learn. And so we relearn the lesson every generation and then want to write epistles. We proselytize to our friends and shake them by the shoulders and tell them, "Seize the day! What matters is THIS moment!" Most of us can't go back and make restitution. We can't do a thing about our should haves and our could haves. But a few lucky men like Ghosh never have such worries; there was no restitution he needed to make, no moment he failed to seize.
Now and then Ghosh would grin and wink at me across the room. He was teaching me how to die, just as he'd taught me how to live. — Abraham Verghese

Change is the very nature of Nature. if there's one thing that doesn't change, it is the fact that everything changes. In the Korean tradition of Tao, this is called impermanence. The teaching about impermanence can be summarized like this: Anything that has a beginning must have an end. Anything that is created will change. Impermanence is the very nature of things. Realizing that nothing is permanent is the true beginning of enlightenment. Suffering comes from attachment that wants to hold something permanently that is not permanent in its intrinsic nature. Awakening to the truth of impermanence frees you from attachment. — Ilchi Lee

From Hunayn ibn-Ishak (Diogenes,8), we learn about his view of women and education: when he saw a man teaching a girl how to read and write, he advised him not to make a bad thing even worse. — Luis E. Navia

My students still don't know what they will never be. Their hope is so bright I can almost see it.

I used to value the truth of whether this student or that one would achieve the desired thing. I don't value that truth anymore as much as I value their untested hope. I don't care that one in two hundred of them will ever become what they feel they must become. I care only that I am able to witness their faith in what's coming next.

I no longer believe in anything other than the middle, but my students still believe in beginnings. Ask them, and they will tell you that everything is about to start in just a moment, just one more moment. — Sarah Manguso

I think there's only one [thing] that anybody teaches, and this is character. And I think that whether you are teaching history, math, or biology, or music, what you are really doing is, you are helping to shape the character of that person who is your student ... Music is such a wonderful teaching tool, because while you are developing musical skills, that student can learn a lot about discipline [and] cooperation. — Rich Mullins

Barbara is on what is called the woman's trip to the exclusion of almost everything else. When she and Tom and Max and Sharon need money, Barbara will take a part-time job, modeling or teaching kindergarten, but she dislikes earning more than ten or twenty dollars a week. Most of the time she keeps house and bakes. "Doing something that shows your love that way," she says, "is just about the most beautiful thing I know." Whenever I hear about the woman's trip, which is often, I think a lot about nothin'-says-lovin'-like-something-from-the-oven and the Feminine Mystique and how it is possible for people to be the unconscious instruments of values they would strenuously reject on a conscious level, but I do not mention this to Barbara. — Joan Didion

Why were American kids consistently underestimated in math? In middle school, Kim and Tom had both decided that math was something you were either good at, or you weren't, and they weren't. Interestingly, that was not the kind of thing that most Americans said about reading. If you weren't good at reading, you could, most people assumed, get better through hard work and good teaching. But in the United States, math was, for some reason, considered more of an innate ability, like being double-jointed. — Amanda Ripley

Teaching, I find, is not the most amusing thing on earth; in fact, with a stupid lump for a Pupil, it is about the most irksome. — Jane Welsh Carlyle

Well, for one thing, the culture we have does not make people feel good about themselves. We're teaching the wrong things. And you have to be strong enough to say if the culture doesn't work, don't buy it. Create your own. Most people can't do it. — Mitch Albom

For a southern belle, my grandmother was remarkably modern. She threw my grandfather out, for one thing - some kind of argument about bourbon whiskey - shortly after the birth of their third child, and then went back to school to get herself a teaching certificate. — Preston Sturges

Probably the most dangerous thing about an academic education, at least in my own case, is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualize stuff, to get lost in abstract thinking instead of simply paying attention to what's going on in front of me. Instead of paying attention to what's going on inside of me. As I'm sure you guys know by now, it is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive instead of getting hypnotized by the constant monologue inside your head. What you don't yet know are the stakes of this struggle. In the twenty years since my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand these stakes, and to see that the liberal arts cliche about "teaching you how to think" was actually shorthand for a very deep and important truth. "Learning how to think" really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. — David Foster Wallace

The only thing that mattered was what you were to do in life, and it wasn't about money. It was about teaching, or learning. — Maya Lin

God's given me a fierce passion for teaching girl's my age and younger, maybe even older, about purity, and the fact that it is not a physical thing but in fact that of the heart. — Abigail Ford

If you just do something, then you're a five-year wonder and, goodbye, you're gone. But if people feel it's worthwhile, not only do they copy but they want to learn how to do it To me, that's what it's all about. If someone were to ask me, 'What's the number one thing, in essence, that you left behind?' It was the teaching of others so that they could take my work and take it further. — Vidal Sassoon

I was raised to think about philosophy and religious thought and the soul and the spirit of humankind in a different way, also really socially progressive teachings of the Baha'i faith, the equality of men and women, the elimination of racial prejudice, the equality of science and religion, so it was a big cauldron of big ideas in my household. And we were weird and unhappy family, but nonetheless that was a really positive thing that came out of it. — Rainn Wilson

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

LET A MAN THINK AND CARE ever so little about God, he does not therefore exist without God. God is here with him, upholding, warming, delighting, teaching him-making life a good thing to him. God gives him himself, though the man knows it not. — George MacDonald

My favorite thing about coaching? Teaching. Being around young people, just watching a player grow and develop. You know, a young man comes in with dreams and goals and ambitions and just helping him reach (them). It's like your dad watching you grow up and like me watching my boys grow. — Tubby Smith

Once more he became silent, staring before him with sombre eyes. Following his gaze, I saw that he was looking at an enlarged photograph of my Uncle Tom in some sort of Masonic uniform which stood on the mantlepiece. I've tried to reason with Aunt Dahlia about this photograph for years, placing before her two alternative suggestions: (a) To burn the beastly thing; or (b) if she must preserve it, to shove me in another room when I come to stay. But she declines to accede. She says it's good for me. A useful discipline, she maintains, teaching me that there is a darker side to life and that we were not put into this world for pleasure only. — P.G. Wodehouse

You've never seen me debate anybody. On anything. Ever. 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 another. What the laws of physics say. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

One good thing about teaching calculus is that you develop a hardened attitude towards repeating yourself. — Philip J. Hanlon

It is quaint that people talk about separating dogma from education. Dogma is actually the only thing that cannot be separated from education. It IS education. A teacher who is not dogmatic is simply a teacher who is not teaching. — G.K. Chesterton

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

Socrates, Plato, Jesus, Buddha and countless other mystics, in countless cultures, have preached the same thing
that we all exist amid a blur of uncertainty. That one can never know complete truth about physical reality via our senses alone. Much is made of the differences between their systems ... Socrates teaching reason, Buddha urging meditation, and Jesus prescribing faith. But what they all had in common was far more important. Each of those sage-prophets worried that the power of human egotism tends to make us lie to ourselves, leading to error, hypocrisy, and all too often, the rationalization of evil actions. — David Brin

I'd have to say, and I think that most Christians would hold the view, that there is such a thing as evil, and there are evil forces at work. You can articulate that by talking about Satan or the Devil; that's sound, Scriptural teaching. — Peter Hollingworth

My secret for writing is going back to clarity. I'm very clear about what I want to accomplish-the goal-and then the next two are focus and concentration. And I've probably spent my whole life both practicing those two and teaching them. Focus. Focus on a single point and concentration. And concentrating on a single thing till it's done. — Brian Tracy

The best thing for being sad," replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, "is to learn something. That's the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then - to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn. — T.H. White

Most of us would agree that the important thing about Jesus is not his supposed miraculous birth or the claim that he was resurrected from death, but rather how he lived. The power of his love, the penetrating simplicity of his teachings, and the force of his example of service on behalf of the disenfranchised and downtrodden are what is crucial. — Forrest Church

The thing I loved the most - and still love the most about teaching - is that you can connect with an individual or a group, and see that individual or group exceed their limits. — Mike Krzyzewski

At what age did I start to think that where I was going was more important than where I already was? When was it that I began to believe that the most important thing about what I was doing was getting it over with? Knowing how to live is not something we have to teach children. Knowing how to live is something we have to be careful not to take away from them. — Colin Beavan

The wonderful thing about learning is that you
deprive no one else by taking what you learn. The wonderful thing about teaching is that you don't lose what you give away. Teaching is also the only gift you can give that will live on into eternity. Something you teach becomes another's who teaches it to another and to another, and on and on and on. — Mark Darrah

I am adamant that we must not cut back on funding of the teaching of the arts in the schools: music, painting, theater, dance, all of it. The great thing about the arts is that the only way you learn how to do it is by doing it. — David McCullough

God's conception and purpose, in giving us a being at all, is HIS LIKENESS - an expression of Himself. This must be an adjusting factor in our mentality, in our conversation, in our teaching. We must not be taken up with efforts to get the church according to a certain technique and order and conception. Our message must not be the message of the Body of Christ as a truth, as a doctrine, as a procedure. All these things come within this encircling conception. What is the Body of Christ for, if it is not to express what Christ is like? What is the church for, if it is not to manifest the presence of Christ? This must adjust our thoughts, our ideas, our teaching and our talk. The thing about which we have to be concerned is - not this and that aspect of truth - but: How much is the Lord seen, recognised, understood, as to what He is like? — T. Austin-Sparks

I believe God is doing a new thing in the world. God is always moving us to include more people in the kingdom. God has taught us that about people of color, about women, and now I think God is teaching that about gay and lesbian folk. And I am humbled and privileged that I might be playing a very small part in that grand and wonderful plan of God's. — Gene Robinson

Want to know the best thing about teaching? Seeing that moment when a kid discovers his or her gift. There's no feeling on earth like it. — Stephen King