Quotes About A Teacher's Classroom

“If a seminary or Christian college has a wise provost or dean or department chair, he or she will realize that they need some faculty who are master teachers but publish little, and some scholars who can both teach and publish, and some who would be better just being research professors. It takes a variety of faculty to make up a good school. But alas, even in schools that have such administrators, promotion and sabbaticals are often based on publications or planned publications, not just on reviews of one's classroom performances. Thus, some scholars who find research and writing a huge cross to bear are forced to carry that cross all the way to Golgotha Publishing House in order to get promoted. It really ought not to be that way at a Christian school, where the main goal should be training students or budding clergy in the way that they should go.”

— Ben Witherington III

“An eternal question about children is, how should we educate them? Politicians and educators consider more school days in a year, more science and math, the use of computers and other technology in the classroom, more exams and tests, more certification for teachers, and less money for art. All of these responses come from the place where we want to make the child into the best adult possible, not in the ancient Greek sense of virtuous and wise, but in the sense of one who is an efficient part of the machinery of society. But on all these counts, soul is neglected.”

— Thomas Moore

“Universal education through schooling is not feasible. It would be no more feasible if it were attempted by means of alternative institutions built on the style of present schools. Neither new attitudes of teachers toward their pupils nor the proliferation of educational hardware or software (in classroom or bedroom), nor finally the attempt to expand the pedagogue's responsibility until it engulfs his pupils' lifetimes will deliver universal education. The current search for new educational funnels must be reversed into the search for their institutional inverse: educational webs which heighten the opportunity for each one to transform each moment of his living into one of learning, sharing, and caring.”

— Ivan Illich

“Feminist education - the feminist classroom - is and should be a place where there is a sense of struggle, where there is visible acknowledgment of the union of theory and practice, where we work together as teachers and students to overcome the estrangement and alienation that have become so much the norm in the contemporary university.”

— Bell Hooks

“Teachers say their schools of education did not adequately prepare them for the classroom. They would have welcomed more mentoring and feedback in their early years.”

— Arne Duncan

“The influence of teachers extends beyond the classroom, well into the future. It is they who shape and enrich the minds of the young, who touch their hearts and souls. It is they who shape a nation's future.”

— F. Sionil Jose

“I don't believe some teachers consider whether their classroom instruction fosters the development of reading habits in their students. Reflecting on the landslide of crossword puzzles, dioramas, annotations, and reading logs assigned to their students for every book they read, teachers might realize that instead of encouraging students to read, these mindless assignments make kids hate reading. Primarily assigned to generate grades and give teachers a false sense that they are holding students accountable for reading, these counterfeit activities-that no wild reader completes on his or her own-guarantee that their students will avoid reading. If we care about our students' reading lives, we must foster their lifelong reading habits and eliminate or reduce the negative influences of classroom practices that don't align with what wild readers do.”

— Donalyn Miller

“We can not wait until we have enough trained people willing to work at a teacher's salary and under conditions imposed upon teachers in order to improve what happens in the classroom.”

— Major Owens

“I've talked with a lot of teachers, classroom teachers after the Sandy Hook situation, and they say, look, we need to be looking at mental health.”

— Marsha Blackburn

“What we have done with No Child Left Behind is squeeze the creativity out of the classroom because teachers have begun to just teaching to the test.”

— Claire McCaskill

“Our highly qualified teachers not only work hard, but they care about each and every student that enters their classroom. I thank you, Montana teachers, for your sense of duty and compassion to our precious future generation.”

— Conrad Burns

“Any child may go through periods during which they become less outspoken with their parents or teachers. But girls, like boys, live in many different worlds - they have their friends and their classroom and their parents - and within these different domains, they may have different levels of expressiveness.”

— Christina Hoff Sommers

“The education process is moving beyond the traditional classroom/lecture setting. More and more teachers are seeking tools and techniques to engage their classes and enrich their lessons. Video calling is one of these tools, as it removes barriers to communication and lets students move beyond the boundaries of their classrooms.”

— Tony Bates

“When I was a teacher, teachers would come into my classroom and admire my desk on which lay nothing whatever, whereas theirs were heaped with papers and books.”

— Norman MacCaig

“How do we change the way science is taught?
Ask anybody how many teachers truly made a difference in their life, and you never come up with more than the fingers on one hand. You remember their names, you remember what they did, you remember how they moved in front of the classroom. You know why you remember them? Because they were passionate about the subject. You remember them because they lit a flame within you. They got you excited about a subject you didn't previously care about, because they were excited about it themselves. That's what turns people on to careers in science and engineering and mathematics. That's what we need to promote. Put that in every classroom, and it will change the world.”

— Neil DeGrasse Tyson

“As they work hard for our children, America's teachers often reach into their own pockets to make sure they have the best classroom supplies. I feel strongly that the federal government should help make up for their personal financial burden.”

— John Warner

“Since her retirement from teaching Miss Beryl's health had in many respects greatly improved, despite her advancing years. An eighth-grade classroom was an excellent place to snag whatever was in the air in the way of illness. Also depression, which, Miss Beryl believed, in conjunction with guilt, opened the door to illness. Miss Beryl didn't know any teachers who weren't habitually guilty and depressed
guilty they hadn't accomplished more with their students, depressed that very little more was possible.”

— Richard Russo

“The U.S. has spent billions of dollars on educating and supporting teachers or developing curricula but no resources are applied to 'improving the brain' that a student brings to the classroom.”

— Naveen Jain

“Common sense tells us that we should focus our resources to benefit children, teachers and taxpayers by keeping dollars in the classroom.”

— Bob Beauprez

“We passed a bill in 1997, signed by Democratic Gov. Lawton Chiles, which created a pilot program for a novel experiment called Florida Virtual School. The notion of children using a computer for a classroom and reporting to virtual teachers wasn't exactly mainstream thinking in those days.”

— Dan Webster

“I wasn't a troublemaker. I wasn't impertinent. The teachers liked me. But year after year, the comments on my report cards basically came down to a single point, and it was 100% accurate: I seemed to get nothing whatsoever out of all those long hours spent in the classroom.”

— Tim Howard

“This planet is a divine school, and daily life a classroom. Our choice of teachers depends on what we need to learn.”

— Dan Millman

“Schools should look behind classroom doors and determine the factors that contribute to the kinds of interactions between teachers and students that promote student achievement.”

— James Heckman

“What I have learned from the teachers with whom I have worked is that, just as there is no simple solution to the arms race, there is no simple answer to how to work with children in the classroom. It is a matter of being present as a whole person, with your own thoughts and feelings, and of accepting children as whole people, with their own thoughts and feelings. It's a matter of working very hard to find out what those thoughts and feelings are, as a starting point for developing a view of a world in which people are as much concerned about other people security as they are about their own”

— Eleanor Duckworth

“The normal kid can differentiate between various aspects of life, but a kid with dyslexia has to connect all those dots, and they have to link it like a chain. Teachers can't incorporate that. They don't have time; it's not their fault. They don't have the resources to give personal attention to each kid in the classroom.”

— Malik Yusef

“When we seem to have won or lost in terms of certainties, we must, as literature teachers in the classroom, remember such warnings
let literature teach us that there are no certainties, that the process is open, and that it may be altogether salutary that it is so.”

— Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

“You know, students who major in elementary education - they're going to be grade school teachers - they have the highest rates of math anxiety of any college major. And they bring that into the classroom. So you find students being introduced to math concepts by teachers who may have not only a lack of training but also a lack of enthusiasm about math.”

— Anya Kamenetz

“Differentiation is classroom practice that looks eyeball to eyeball with the reality that kids differ, and the most effective teachers do whatever it takes to hook the whole range of kids on learning.”

— Carol Ann Tomlinson

“Instead of being the 'font of all knowledge,' teachers are required to be effective facilitators of student learning both within and outside the classroom at any time.”

— Susan Mann

“Most teachers have little control over school policy or curriculum or choice of texts or special placement of students, but most have a great deal of autonomy inside the classroom. To a degree shared by only a few other occupations, such as police work, public education rests precariously on the skill and virtue of the people at the bottom of the institutional pyramid.”

— Tracy Kidder

“The most successful teachers in low-income communities operate like successful leaders. They establish a vision of where their students will be performing at the end of the year that many believe to be unrealistic. They invest their students in working harder than they ever have to reach that vision, maximise their classroom time in a goal-oriented manner through purposeful planning and effective execution, reflect constantly on their progress to improve their performance over time, and do whatever it takes to overcome the many challenges they face.”

— Wendy Kopp

“The most reliable way to be certain of their classroom impact is through independent studies conducted by third-party organisations which compare the student growth in our corps members' classrooms to that of other teachers in similar situations.”

— Wendy Kopp

“Television didn't transform education. Neither will the internet. But it will be another tool for teachers to use in their effort to reach students in the classroom. It will also be a means by which students learn outside the classroom”

— John Palfrey

“Well, maybe it was just that I wasn't going to like anybody because I had to work and I had to explain to my teachers why I wasn't keeping up. I'd fall asleep and things in class and they'd lecture me about the reality of their classroom. I said, 'You want to see my reality?' I opened up my backpack to where you usually keep your pencils. That's where I kept my bills ... electric bills, rent ... That was my reality.”

— Eddie Vedder

“I'm going to insist that we've got decent funding, enough teachers, and computers in the classroom, but unless you turn off the television set and get over a certain anti-intellectualism that I think pervades some low-income communities, our children are not going to achieve.”

— Barack Obama

“But while they're adding teachers in places like South Korea, we're laying them off in droves. It's unfair to our kids. It undermines their future and ours. And it has to stop. Pass this bill, and put our teachers back in the classroom where they belong.”

— Barack Obama

“Teachers who do not take their own education seriously, who do not study, who make little effort to keep abreast of events have no moral authority to coordinate the activities of the classroom.”

— Paulo Freire

“Now I realize that I have to let everyone take what they have to take from the film. No matter what I think about the film, it becomes a little irrelevant. I think I would say that the film is trying to show us that - and I spoke about that earlier - we have to let the teachers invest in their own classroom. There's no use in trying to control everything. Education is fundamental.”

— Philippe Falardeau

“The Compassionate Classroom is a fabulous book! If teachers will read it, they can transform their classrooms.”

— William Glasser