Teaching Quotes

“John was the smartest and most amazing comedian I've ever worked with. I think more than teaching me about acting or comedy, he taught me about life and the love of people and respect of people.”

“A teacher who cannot explain any abstract subject to a child does not himself thoroughly understand his subject; if he does not attempt to break down his knowledge to fit the child's mind, he does not understand teaching.”

“Fiction challenges us and works its miracles by placing us in the skin of another human being and teaching us empathy.”

“I served as Dean until 1974, when I stepped down to return to full time teaching and research.”

“I loved teaching. It was my world. I only left because I was overwhelmed with three careers - teaching, writing, and my family.”

“Are we not all books waiting for someone to pick us up and read the pages that people missed?”

“Where were the scientific pamphlets that taught a woman how to listen to herself die?”

“True education kindles the student's mind but teaching fills the mind with information.”

“I need to stress that I could not be more supportive of great teachers and great teaching, no matter what kind of delivery vehicle they are teaching through. We have to support great teachers. They just have to be freed up to do what they do best.”

“I'm very much a Christian in ideals and ethics, especially in terms of belief in fairness, a deep set obligation to others, and the virtues of charity, tolerance and generosity that we associate with traditional Christian teaching.”

“Try ONE behavior strategy and be consistent. Watch what happens.”

“In 1978, I entered the Tokyo Institute of Technology. I would have loved to study videogame programming, but nobody was teaching it then. So I went to classes on engineering and early computer science.”

“Sciences can only be validly constituted as ‘sacred sciences’ by those who, before all else, are in full possession of principia! Knowledge and are thereby qualified to carry out, in conformity with the strictest traditional orthodoxy, all the adaptations required by circumstances of time and place. However, when these sciences have been so established, their teaching may follow an inverse order: they then serve as it were as 'illustrations’ of pure doctrine, which they render more easily accessible to certain minds, and the fact that they are concerned with the world of multiplicity gives them an almost indefinite variety of points of view, adapted to the no less great variety of the individual aptitudes of those whose minds are still limited to that same world of multiplicity. The ways leading to knowledge may be extremely different at the lowest degree, but they draw closer and closer together as higher levels are reached. This is not to say that any of these preparatory degrees are absolutely necessary, since they are mere contingent methods having nothing in common with the end to be attained; it is even possible for some persons, in whom the tendency to contemplation is predominant, to attain directly to true intellectual intuition without the aid of such means; but this is a more or less exceptional case, and in general it is accepted as being necessary to proceed upward gradually. The whole question may also be illustrated by means of the traditional image of the 'cosmic wheel’: the circumference in reality exists only in virtue of the center, but the beings that stand upon the circumference must necessarily start from there or, more precisely, from the point thereon at which they actually find themselves, and follow the radius that leads to the center. Moreover, because of the correspondence that exists between all the orders of reality, the truths of a lower order can be taken as symbols of those of higher orders, and can therefore serve as 'supports’ by which one may arrive at an understanding of these; and this fact makes it possible for any science to become a sacred science, giving it a higher or 'anagogical’ meaning deeper than that which it possesses in itself.”

“Increasingly, over the past ten years, I've come to take the view that a cultural perspective is intrinsic to the future of language teaching and learning, especially in the case of English, as it becomes increasingly global.”

“We spend the first year of a child's life teaching it to walk and talk and the rest of its life to shut up and sit down. There's something wrong there.”

“I played Miley Cyrus' grandma on 'Hannah Montana,' and the first time I was on, they said, 'We love having veterans like you on because she's like a little sponge, and she's really appreciative of all the veterans that are coming on the show, and we just love that you're teaching her.'”

“I've done admin work, preaching and teaching, youth ministry, marital counseling, etc.”

“I think that my research is valuable to my teaching. I think that the two complement each other and I'm able to present somewhat more stimulating lectures because of what's happening in research, so it's a good complement.”

“But Lao Tzu’s teaching suffers from the major problem endemic to such visionaries. In the intervening two and a half millennia, his words have been misinterpreted and distorted by generations of adherents until his message is riddled with meaningless ritual and dogma. Taoism contracted the conceptual plague: it became a religion.”

“But why bother? Why exert all this effort to focus totally on the boring prattlings of a six-year-old?First, your willingness to do so is the best possible concrete evidence of your esteem you can give your child. If you give your child the same esteem you would give a great lecturer, then the child will know him- or herself to be valued and therefore will feel valuable. There is no better and ultimately no other way to teach your children that they are valuable people than by valuing them.Second, the more children feel valuable, the more they will begin to say things of value. They will rise to your expectation of them.Third, the more you listen to your child, the more you will realize that in amongst the pauses, the stutterings, the seemingly innocent chatter, your child does indeed have valuable things to say. The dictum that great wisdom comes from "the mouths of babes" is recognized as an absolute fact by anyone who truly listens to children. Listen to your child enough and you will come to realize that he or she is quite an extraordinary individual. And the more extraordinary you realize your child to be, the more you will be willing to listen. And the more you will learn.Fourth, the more you know about your child, the more you will be able to teach. Know little about your children, and usually you will be teaching things that either they are not ready to learn or they already know and perhaps understand better than you.Finally, the more children know that you value them, that you consider them extraordinary people, the more willing they will be to listen to you and afford you the same esteem. And the more appropriate your teaching, based on your knowledge of them, the more eager your children will be to learn from you. And the more they learn, the more extraordinary they will become. If the reader senses the cyclical character of this process, he or she is quite correct and is appreciating the truth of the reciprocity of love. Instead of a vicious downward cycle, it is a creative upward cycle of evolution and growth. Value creates value. Love begets love. Parents and child together spin forward faster and faster in the pas de deux of love.”