quotations about teaching
None can teach admirably if not loving his task.
AMOS BRONSON ALCOTT
Table Talk
Housework is a breeze. Cooking is a pleasant diversion. Putting up a retaining wall is a lark. But teaching is like climbing a mountain.
FAWN M. BRODIE
Los Angeles Times Home Magazine, February 20, 1977
One thing that isn't a myth about teachers is that they love the actual act of teaching. However, sometimes teachers can be made to feel as if their wings are being clipped by ever-changing guidelines and standards that demand they rework, rewrite, and resubmit curricula and lesson plans for approval, when the materials and ideas they'd already developed were working well.
GINA BELLI
"8 Reasons Teaching Is More Difficult Than You Think (Not One Is About the Kids)", PayScale, October 23, 2016
I pretend not to teach, but to inquire.
JOHN LOCKE
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
To teach is to touch the heart and impel it to action.
LOUIS SULLIVAN
"Kindergarten Chats and Other Writings"
An instructor should exemplify the things he seeks to teach. It will be of great advantage if you yourself can do all you ask of your students and more.
BRUCE LEE
Tao of Jeet Kune Do
Teachers, who are really good create that environment where you can be very satisfied by the process of learning. If you do something and you find it a very satisfying experience then you want to do more of it. The great teachers somehow convey in their very attitude and their words and their actions and everything they do that this is an important thing you're learning. You end up wanting to do more of it and more of it and more of it. That's a real talent some people have to convey the importance of that and to reflect it back to the students.
JEFF BEZOS
interview, Academy of Achievement, May 4, 2001
She used to be a schoolteacher, but she has no class now.
FRED ALLEN
Much Ado about Me
I'm not a teacher: only a fellow traveler of whom you asked the way. I pointed ahead -- ahead of myself as well as you.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
Getting Married: A Disquietory Play
Once more I would adopt the graver style--
A teacher should be sparing of his smile.
WILLIAM COWPER
Charity
He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
Man and Superman
First let a man teach himself, and then he will be taught by others.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe
The very corner-stone of an education intended to form great minds, must be the recognition of the principle, that the object is to call forth the greatest possible quantity of intellectual power, and to inspire the intensest love of truth: and this without a particle of regard to the results to which the exercise of that power may lead, even though it should conduct the pupil to opinions diametrically opposite to those of his teachers. We say this, not because we think opinions unimportant, but because of the immense importance which we attach to them; for in proportion to the degree of intellectual power and love of truth which we succeed in creating, is the certainty that (whatever may happen in any one particular instance) in the aggregate of instances true opinions will be the result; and intellectual power and practical love of truth are alike impossible where the reasoner is shown his conclusions, and informed beforehand that he is expected to arrive at them.
JOHN STUART MILL
"Civilization", London and Westminster Review, April 1836
These days, teachers have it rough. Kids can be hyperactive, disobedient, and obnoxious. It must feel like being locked in a room of drunk midgets.
CRAIG FERGUSON
The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson, May 8, 2012
True teaching is not that which gives knowledge, but that which stimulates pupils to gain it.
JOHN MILTON GREGORY
The Seven Laws of Teaching
The instructor can scarcely give sensibility where it is essentially wanting, nor talent to the unpercipient block. But he can cultivate and direct the affections of the pupil, who puts forth, as a parasite, tendrils by which to cling, not knowing to what -- to a supporter or a destroyer.
MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT SHELLEY
Lodore
More than half the work of teaching is that of helping the child to gain a full and clear expression of what it already knows imperfectly. It is to aid him to lift up into full sight, and to round out into plain and adequate sentences, the dim and fragmentary ideas and perceptions of childhood.
JOHN MILTON GREGORY
The Seven Laws of Teaching