Quotes About Learning

Teachers are wonderful beings who inspire the spirit and open the mind. Nobody at Padua High School fits that description.

After a year, Peter and Neil feel they are beyond the discovery phase. But we're sure that they will continually discover this not to be the case. There's always something new to learn about the person you love.

Failure is always louder than success. But there is an accumulation of all the things you don't do wrong, and that becomes your confidence. You can even get to the point where that confidence lasts longer than the dance. Seconds at first. Then minutes. Then maybe it'll be there when you're walking into a party, or meeting people after a show. You know you have something desirable, and you know you can move.

I thought I was smart," I said all of a sudden. "I really thought I was smart. But after the last couple of months, I'm not sure. And that's paralyzing, isn't it? to discover you're bad at the one thing you thought you had going for you?

i have no idea why anyone would want to become a teacher. i mean, you have to spend the day with a group of kids who either hate your guts or are kissing up to you to get a good grade.

Will, he says, do you have a sec to talk in the living room? I spin around in the desk chair and stand up. My stomach flips a bit because the living room is the room least likely to be lived in, the room where the nonexistence of Santa is revealed, where grandmothers die, where grades are frowned upon, and where one learns that a man's station wagon goes inside a woman's garage, and then exits the garage, and then enters again, and so on until an egg is fertilized, and etc.

I was once in the body of a blind girl,' I tell her. 'When I was eleven. Maybe twelve. I don't know if she was my favorite, but I learned more from being her for a day than I'd learn from most people over a year. It showed me how arbitrary and individual it is, the way we experience the world. Not just that the other senses were sharper. But that we find ways to navigate the world as it is presented to us. For me, it was this huge challenge. But for her, it was just life.

There were so many other people in my life. I had spent all of my time listening, learning the longings we all have in common. I never took the time to hear them in myself and I heard them speaking to him. The desire for desire, that hope for hope, the possibility of everything truly possible. I had so many friends, so many nods and conversations, so many things I'd always wanted to say to someone.

My Alma mater is the Chicago Public Library.

One hour of going to see things with your own eyes is more worthwhile than twenty hours of talking about things.

Eleanor Roosevelt on the changes in John F. Kennedy that led her to drop her opposition to his nomination for president: He has the qualities of a scholar, and a sense of history. I had the feeling that he was the man who can learn. I like him better than I ever had before because he seemed so little caulk-sure, and I think he has a mind that is open to new ideas.

In some cases, it seems in retrospect that there was actually this unconscious purpose behind the event, as though our unconscious knew that something important had to be learned and, painful as it was, it was the only way it could be brought into experience.

Childrens ilogic can be an exquisitely structured mistake.

Intelligent and educated people are less likely to learn from their mistakes, for instance, or take advice from others. And when they do err, they are better able to build elaborate arguments to justify their reasoning, meaning that they become more and more dogmatic in their views. Worst still, they appear to have a bigger bias blind spot, meaning they are less able to recognize the holes in their logic.

Our mistakes and regrets are not barriers to becoming who we can be; they are a necessary ingredient.

I thought about this for days, just as I thought of the special-ed teacher I met in Pittsburgh. You know, I said, I hear those words and automatically think Handicapped, or, Learning disabled. But aren't a lot of your students just assholes? You got it, she said. Then she told me about a kid - last day of class - who wrote on the blackboard, Mrs. J____ is a cock master. I was impressed because I'd never heard that term before. She was impressed because the boy had spelled it correctly.

I spent months searching for some secret code before I realized that common sense has nothing to do with it. Hysteria, psychosis, torture, depression: I was told that if something is unpleasant it's probably feminine. This encouraged me, but the theory was blown by such masculine nouns as murder, toothache, and rollerblade. I have no problem learning the words themselves, it's the sexes that trip me up and refuse to stick.

The way I saw it, if my students were willing to pretend I was a teacher, the least I could do was return the favor and pretend that they were writers.

My sister Amy lives above a deaf girl and has learned quite a bit of sign language. She taught some to me and so now I am able to say, "SANTA HAS A TUMOR IN HIS HEAD THE SIZE OF AN OLIVE. MAYBE IT WILL GO AWAY TOMORROW BUT I DON'T THINK SO.

the beauty of an art school: as long as you can pay the tuition, they will never, even in the gentlest way, suggest that you have no talent.

the lower bunks, both of us longing to be pinned. "You kids think you invented sex," my mother was fond of saying. But hadn't we? With no instruction manual or federally enforced training period, didn't we all come away feeling we'd discovered something unspeakably modern?

Adrienne started teaching a few months ago in Denver and wrote that it leaves you with a constant feeling of deceiving people. That you know nothing they don't, or couldn't learn on their own if they cared to.

On a recent flight from Tokyo to Beijing, at around the time that my lunch tray was taken away, I remembered that I needed to learn Mandarin. "Goddamnit," I whispered. "I knew I forgot something.

Though harsh in other respects, prison would be an excellent place to learn a foreign language - total immersion, and you'd have the new slang before it even hit the streets.