Quotes About Teaching

Children are sponges—they are going to absorb whatever is around them, so we need to be intentional about what surrounds them.

The day you decide to lock yourself in your prayer closet to spend some quality time with the Lord in prayer — that is the day you will enter Heaven's classroom here on earth with the Holy Spirit as your Teacher.

If the father call us to act, mothers call us to be.

It is, after all, hard to imagine placing a full-time teaching career atop a full-time artmaking career without something going awry in the process. As the old proverb cautions: if you chase two rabbits, you catch neither.

Translation-?based language teaching is no longer in fashion, but its ghost still inhabits a number of misconceptions about what translation is or should be.

There are many different ways of teaching languages. The Ottomans rounded up youngsters in conquered lands and brought them back as slaves to be trained as dil oglan, or "language boys," in Istanbul. Modern direct methods are gentler but rely on the same understanding of how languages are best learned—through total immersion in a bain linguistique, a kind of baptism of the brain.

Life is meaningless, but it also has meaning—or, more accurately, meanings. There is no such thing as the meaning of life. Many different meanings are possible. One can transcend the self and make a positive mark on the lives of others in myriad ways. These include nurturing and teaching the young, caring for the sick, bringing relief to the suffering, improving society, creating great art or literature, and advancing knowledge.

I'm just not a natural teacher.

When I discipline, I am helping my people, teaching them and coaching them, to be the best they can be. When I see a gap between how they are performing and how they should be performing, I look at it as an opportunity to help them raise their game. It's another opportunity to serve them.

But all these systems of 'education' lack provisions for freedom of experiment, for training and for expression of creative abilities by those who are to be taught. In this respect also all our pedagogues are behind the times.

Jesus was the only point. Imitation was the point.

it's hard to imagine a more tedious approach, practically guaranteed to deaden the enthusiasm of 12-year-olds.

Krashen's insistence that a sheltered classroom consists of second language learners only.

Immersion teachers adjusted their use of French to make it accessible to students. They did this through careful choice of vocabulary, syntax, pacing, and intonation, and by avoiding needless complexity, making points directly rather than elliptically, and adding redundancy. Other techniques included contextual cues such as gestures, facial expressions, and body language.

Teachers needed to emphasize the message, not the medium. Ideally, the curriculum should be so engaging that students would forget which language the teacher was using!

not focusing on language turns out to be an effective way to teach language in sheltered classrooms, especially the kind of academic language that students need for school.

A highly structured, prescriptive model of sheltering and scaffolding is not necessary for effectively educating English learners. In fact, mandating any approach that allows for little deviation is likely to be counterproductive. Just as explicit instruction encourages passive learning, tightly scripted lessons encourage passive teaching.

educators of English learners should be well-versed in theories of second language acquisition and in methodologies such as sheltering and scaffolding. Their work should be informed by professional development and coaching from experienced colleagues on effective techniques in the classroom. But is there no room for diversity in teaching styles and techniques? Is there really just one way to shelter instruction?

What's your job occupation? I am a zookeeper teaching sign language to blind Gorillas.

You need to do more than practice as only when you do will you have the right to preach it

Save all your questions till the end, children.

Children are not casual guests in our home. They have been loaned to us temporarily for the purpose of loving them and instilling a foundation of values on which their future lives will be built.

Pianist Clifford Curzon tells about his celebrated teacher Artur Schnabel cautioning his piano students: " 'Play nothing before you hear it'—or, 'First hear, then play.' He knew that only certainty of conception could produce clarity of presentation." And it is so in mining a text for its meaning and message.

I think it is most important for a teacher to play the pieces and studies that are being played by the student.