Quotes About Teaching Students

#1. 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

#2. Stop teaching students that they are the best and the brightest.

David Maister

#3. Teaching students the evidence for and against Darwinism is not the same as teaching intelligent design. The U.S. Congress has officially endorsed teaching students 'the full range of scientific views' about Darwinian evolution.

Jonathan Wells

#4. MindSparks has produced some of the best materials on the market for teaching students how to read and write history with intellectual integrity and depth. Rarely have I come across curriculum so useful in helping students become literate, thinking citizens. Bravo.

Sam Wineburg

#5. School does a great job of teaching students to do what we set out to teach them. It works. The problem is that what we're teaching is the wrong stuff. Here

Seth Godin

#6. Catholic schools carry out a great mission, to serve God by building knowledge and character ... By teaching the word of God, you prepare your students to follow a path of virtue.

George W. Bush

#7. I love dogs. I absolutely adore them. When I'm teaching in Mexico, I rescue dogs from the streets and make my students adopt them.

Mary Ellen Mark

#8. In the long run, much public opinion is made in the universities; ideas generated there filter down through the teaching profession and the students into the general public.

B. Carroll Reece

#9. The trend of offering individualized education plans, curricula, and lessons is going to help students tremendously. "Teaching to the middle" is one of the saddest concepts I've ever heard about.

Mike Lee

#10. We are all just humble students of the world.

Bryant McGill

#11. A sense of responsibility in teaching pushes us constantly to think about and promote the best interests of our students. In contrast, the demand for accountability often induces mere compliance.

Nel Noddings

#12. If their students aren't learning, then they are not teaching. Adapt to global, auditory, tactile & visual learners.

Ace Antonio Hall

#13. When we introduce new technologies into our classrooms we are teaching our students twice.

Michael Joseph Brown

#14. My task as a language arts teacher is to provide texts that are not so difficult that my students shut down in frustration and not so easy that my students don't push their thinking.

Kimberly Hill Campbell

#15. Saying you taught it but the student didn't learn it is like saying you sold it but the customer didn't buy it.

Alfie Kohn

#16. There are very few real teachers. Teaching is not a job; it is a vocation. To be a great one many qualities must be combined: love of truth, knowledge, reverence, loving concern for one's students, clarity and patience.

Alice Von Hildebrand

#17. My teaching exists in a different part of my brain. However, I am lucky enough to teach very smart graduate students.

Dana Spiotta

#18. My attitude about teaching has always been the same. From early on, I wanted to make yoga accessible so that anyone, regardless of ability, could experience its wonder, joy, and power. I encourage students to question, learn, and develop their own personal practice.

David F. Swensen

#19. Writing can be taught or learned in the vacuum. We must say to students in every area of knowledge: "This is a how other people have written about this subject. Read it; study it; think about it. You can do it too.

William Zinsser

#20. Teaching is the art of serendipity. Each of us has the experience of finding out that something we intended as only the most casual of remarks, or the stray example, changes the way some students thought to the point of changing their lives.

Greg Carlson

#21. Students view any teacher who does not bury them under work as some sort of mentally impaired kitten to be kicked aside.

Thomm Quackenbush

#22. I was a better writer when I was teaching. I was constantly going over the basics and constantly reminding myself, as I reminded my students, what made a good story, a good poem.

Gil Scott-Heron

#23. The fact that they were there as students presumed they did not know what was good or bad. That was his job as instructor ... to tell them what was good or bad. The whole idea of individual creativity and expression in the classroom was really basically opposed to the whole idea of the University.

Robert M. Pirsig

#24. Most subjects at universities are taught for no other purpose than that they may be re-taught when the students become teachers.

Georg C. Lichtenberg

#25. An exceedingly confident student would in theory make a terrible student. Why would he take school seriously when he feels that he can outwit his teachers?

Criss Jami

#26. The best answer to the question, 'What is the most effective method of teaching?' is that it depends on the goal, the student, the content, and the teacher. But the next best answer is, 'Students teaching other students.'

Wilbert J. McKeachie

#27. Effective Peer Coaches emphasize inquiry over advocacy. Too much advocacy can produce learned helplessness. Inquiry builds capacity to improve teaching and learning by helping teachers to be more effective at designing and implementing learning activities that meet the needs of their students.

Lester Joseph Foltos

#28. I was in martial arts starting at the age of 14, and I got my black belt by the time I was 18. Soon after, I was teaching an entire school, with about 150 students. It was unbelievably intense because of the self-awareness part of becoming a black belt.

Brad D. Smith

#29. My job in space will be to observe and write a journal. I am also going to be teaching a class for students on earth about life in space and on the space shuttle and conducting experiments.

Christa McAuliffe

#30. I think the most important quality of a mentor is that they are open to following students where they want to go. Not always pushing their own agenda.

Cordelia Jensen

#31. 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

#32. Let's stop teaching to the middle and start teaching to the student.

Geoffrey Canada

#33. I think the exercise of trying to figure out how to simplify concepts has been incredibly helpful to me over the last 13 years of teaching and I hope my students have benefited from it.

Joel Greenblatt

#34. 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

#35. Teaching does allow me to keep one foot in the youthful waters I tend to occupy in my novels, so I'm thankful for that. My students also remind me on a daily basis that the stories I collected during my district attorney days are actually interesting to people who haven't had that experience.

Alafair Burke

#36. I love teaching poetry writing. Students come into the class thinking poetry has to be one way, then leave having created pieces that are wholly original, that have - quite literally - never been made before.

Cate Marvin

#37. Part of teaching is helping students learn how to tolerate ambiguity, consider possibilities, and ask questions that are unanswerable.

Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot

#38. You [the teacher] do not merely insert a lot of facts, if you teach them [the students] properly. It is not like injecting 500 cc. of serum, or administering a year's dose of vitamins.

Gilbert Highet

#39. Students quickly receive the message that they can only be smart when they are not who they are. This, in many ways, is classroom colonialism; and it can only be addressed through a very different approach to teaching and learning.

Christopher Emdin

#40. I have a hunch that little will change in the next decade because the dominant mind frame of teaching is still teachers talking, teachers controlling the flow of lessons, and teachers continually asking for more time and resources with fewer students in front of them - unless the students revolt!

Alan Bain

#41. Take a child & teach him physics his first 7 grades of education, I submit he'd excel to a savant-like level. Imagine adult focus for 7 yrs.

Ace Antonio Hall

#42. 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

#43. I find that teaching and the students keep life going, and I would never accept any position in which somebody has invented a happy situation for me where I don't have to teach. Never.

Richard P. Feynman

#44. The truth of the matter is that about 99 percent of teaching is making the students feel interestedin the material. Then the other 1 percent has to do with your methods. And that's not just true of languages. It's true of every subject.

Noam Chomsky

#45. Four things will shame the students of knowledge: Criticizing people, praising themselves, not teaching the knowledge,and not practicing what they know.

Luqman

#46. Teaching is not about information. It's about having an honest intellectual relationship with your students.

Paul Lockhart

#47. It's the rich who get the biggest tax breaks. It's the best students who get the best teaching and most attention. And

Malcolm Gladwell

#48. The only teaching that a professor can give, in my opinion, is that of thinking in front of his students.

Henri Lebesgue

#49. The proper end of teaching is to lead our students toward autonomy.

Marshall Gregory

#50. Seventy-seven percent of teachers admit that their teaching would be more effective if they did not have to spend so much time dealing with disruptive students (Public Agenda, 2004).

Lee Canter

#51. 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

#52. I've invented several games for use as teaching tools in my classroom: one of them, a game called 'Iron Age: Council of the Clans,' got so popular among my students that they encouraged me to publish it, which I did.

Brendan Myers

#53. Ineffective substitute teaching is a problem that means thousands of hours of lost learning for America's students. It cannot be dismissed with a sigh and 'Just wait for the teacher to come back on Monday.'

Adora Svitak

#54. The best educators are the ones that inspire their students. That inspiration comes from a passion that teachers have for the subject they're teaching. Most commonly, that person spent their lives studying that subject, and they bring an infectious enthusiasm to the audience.

Neil DeGrasse Tyson

#55. Year after year students tumble along like the waters of a river. They flow away, and only the teacher is left behind, like some deeply buried rock at the bottom of the current.

Kobo Abe

#56. 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

#57. Forward-thinking teachers and school administrators across the country are creating a whole range of alternatives to cookie-cutter teaching and evaluation methods, such as the use of student portfolios and exhibitions in addition to conventional exams to assess students' progress.

Hillary Rodham Clinton

#58. 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

#59. Let's not automatically turn to the next page in the textbook because it's the next page of the textbook, but because that page best serves the students we are teaching. And if the next page isn't as good as the one 57 pages later, let's go to the one 57 pages away without guilt.

Rick Wormeli

#60. In those days [the 1790s],the students paid their professors directly for the lectures-typically about three guineas a class (a guinea was worth slightly more than a pound).

Joshua Kendall

#61. The mass education in high schools reflects the mass production of the real world. The teaching style has one teacher (supervisor) lecturing (leading) 20-25 students (workers) sitting in rows, much like a manager and his employees.

Jacob Lund Fisker

#62. No man can instruct more than half-a-dozen students at once. The whole problem of education is one of its cost in money.

Henry Adams

#63. It's a matter of the heart ... I take teaching at Harvard very seriously and supervision of my students very seriously. Harvard should have a bona fide commitment to me.

Margaret Geller

#64. Enthusiasm is highly contagious, so what are you waiting for? Contaminate your students

J.D. Crighton

#65. In an undergraduate business environment, the best learning experience is the interaction students have with each other. They need to learn from each other as much as from professors and lectures and other teaching tools.

Gerry Schwartz

#66. Don't try to fix the students, fix ourselves first. The good teacher makes the poor student good and the good student superior. When our students fail, we, as teachers, too, have failed.

Marva Collins

#67. Students deserve our care and concern on the grounds of principle, not personality.

Marshall Gregory

#68. I have learned that, although I am a good teacher, I am a much better student, and I was blessed to learn valuable lessons from my students on a daily basis. They taught me the importance of teaching to a student - and not to a test.

Erin Gruwell

#69. What we want ... is for students to get more interested in things, more involved in them, more engaged in wanting to know; to have projects that they can get excited about and work on over long periods of time, to be stimulated to find things out on their own.

Howard Gardner

#70. However, I should perhaps add that during the 20 years I have been back in Cambridge, I have been actively involved in the teaching of undergraduates, as well as of course supervising research students.

Aaron Klug

#71. While I enjoy teaching people on the basic and intermediate levels to work them up to advanced levels, my real talent is for the advanced students. You could say that I'm like a ninth-degree black belt in martial arts.

Frederick Lenz

#72. At first, students tend to freeze at the first effort. The breakthrough comes when they realize that they can make it better - can identify what their purposes were and realize better ways to achieve those purposes.

M.H. Abrams

#73. To develop judgment, you need to not only read theory but also apply it, and discussion-based or case-based teaching is a way to simulate business situations and have students ask themselves, "What would I do if I were in this specific situation?

Espen Anderson

#74. Act your age. Students do not look upon you as a buddy, pal, or peer. They expect you to be a mature adult ... Many young teachers have a tendency to seek popularity, resorting to tactics that can create endless problems.

Jim Brown

#75. Teachers see coldness in the world and light fires in the minds of their students, hoping for a warm summer. Sadly, some cannot bear the flame, some turn away from the heat, and some twist the fire to burn.

Lance Conrad

#76. Study depends on the goodwill of the student, a quality that cannot be secured by compulsion.

Quintilian

#77. Spiritual learners too slowly graduate like students of normal education. If you are mentally elevated, you can grasp and appreciate complex teachings.

Girdhar Joshi

#78. 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.

Fulton J. Sheen

#79. 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

#80. School should become the place where teachers, not just students, learn.

Vijay Dhameliya

#81. My first semester I had only nine students. Hoping they might view me as professional and well prepared, I arrived bearing name tags fashioned in the shape of maple leaves.

David Sedaris

#82. We as educators need to reconsider our roles in students' lives, to think of ourselves as connectors first and content experts second.

Will Richardson

#83. The narrator welcomes new students to his school by offering to tell them who the easy teachers are, or who the good ones are.

Pat Conroy

#84. There is something particularly appealing about teaching a subject that seems to deal with the lowest kind of relationships-accidents, ambulance chasing-because you can show students that these raise the most fundamental questions about the structure of society.

Guido Calabresi

#85. I seem to get totally wrapped up in teaching and working with students during the school year. During the summer, I try to spend time in the real world, writing code for therapy and perhaps for some useful purpose.

Brian Kernighan

#86. The act of learning itself is no longer seen as simply a matter of information transfer, but rather as a process of dynamic participation, in which students cultivate new ways of thinking and doing, through active discovery and discussion, experimentation and reflection.

Susan C. Aldridge

#87. Teaching is a funny business; you want to share these glimpses of something real and profound, but half the time students want only to know their next assignment and what they will need to study for the test.

Azar Nafisi

#88. Not only is this teacher educating her children in violence, she also has to continuously escalate her own violence to keep control. Her method of teaching breeds disrespect and prejudice. Her students have been dehumanized.

Arun Gandhi

#89. ...a school's worth should be measured not by how its students perform on standardized tests but by how well they function as adult graduates of the school...

Terry Roberts

#90. The educational process must again provide the opportunity for students to make choices and live with the consequences of these choices. Teaching is not simply telling people what to believe and do.

Donovan L. Graham

#91. When students have thanked me in the past for being their teacher, I have always felt that it was actually my love for the art of teaching they were speaking to.

Taylor Mali

#92. [T]eaching has been for me an education (Lord knows what it has been for my students).

Howard Nemerov

#93. I do not teach students anything. I learn along with them.

John Marmysz

#94. When spontaneity and individuality and really good original stuff occurred in a classroom it was in spite of the instruction, not because of it. This seemed to make sense. He was ready to resign. Teaching dull conformity to hateful students wasn't what he wanted to do.

Robert M. Pirsig

#95. As any good teacher knows, the methods of instruction and the range of material covered are matters of small importance as compared with the success in arousing the natural curiosity of the students and stimulating their interest in exploring on their own.

Noam Chomsky

#96. It is sinful for students to badmouth their teachers and sinful for teachers to mislead their students.

Igor Babailov

#97. The effects you will have on your students are infinite and currently unknown; you will possibly shape the way they proceed in their careers, the way they will vote, the way they will behave as partners and spouses, the way they will raise their kids.

Donna Quesada

#98. 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

#99. Whoever our students may be, whatever the subject we teach, ultimately we teach who we are.

Parker J. Palmer

#100. Miss Kirwin was that rare educator who was in love with information. I will always believe that her love of teaching came not so much from her liking for students but from her desire to make sure that some of the things she knew would find repositories so that they could be shared again.

Maya Angelou