Quotes About Teaching

We spend a lot of time teaching leaders what to do. We don't spend enough time teaching leaders what to stop. Half the leaders I have met don't need to learn what to do. They need to learn what to stop

While a significant part of learning certain comes from teaching - but good teaching and by good teachers - a major measure comes from exploration, from reinventing the wheel and finding out for oneself.

It needs more than ever to be stressed that the best and truest educators are parents under God. The greatest school is the family. In learning, no act of teaching in any school or university compares to the routine task of mothers in teaching a babe who speaks no language the mother tongue in so short a time. No other task in education is equal to this. The moral training of the children, the discipline of good habits, is an inheritance from the parents to the children which surpasses all other. The family is the first and basic school of man.

I was a student in the Department of Anthropology. At that time, they were teaching that there was absolutely no difference between anybody. They may be teaching that still.

The key to teaching anything is to remember what it was like not to understand that thing. That's a very hard thing to do. Every time you come to understand something you didn't understand before, you are transformed. You become a different person from who you were before. The key to teaching someone else to understand that same thing is to remember your former, untransformed self. If you can do that, I think you can teach anything, even physics.

Teaching is the only major occupation of man for which we have not yet developed tools that make an average person capable of competence and performance. In teaching we rely on the 'naturals,' the ones who somehow know how to teach.

The Church is a system, - but whether it is as much founded on the teaching of our Lord, who was divine, as on the teaching of St. Paul, who was not divine, is a question to me of much perplexity.

Teaching a practice can also be a hindrance if it becomes one's identity. To be a spiritual teacher is a temporary function. I'm a spiritual teacher when somebody comes to me and some teaching happens, but the moment they leave I'm no longer a spiritual teacher. If I carry the identity of spiritual teacher, it will cause suffering.

. . . the fools of this world prefer to look for sages far away. They don't believe that the wisdom of their own mind is the sage . . . the sutras say, "Mind is the teaching." But people of no understanding don't believe in their own mind or that by understanding this teaching they can become a sage. They prefer to look for distant knowledge and long for things in space, buddha-images, light, incense, and colors. They fall prey to falsehood and lose their minds to insanity.

If I had a kid, and I had a choice between teaching somebody how to avoid trouble, or teaching them how to get out of it, I'd teach them how to get out of it.

To live a single day and hear a good teaching is better than to live a hundred years without knowing such teaching.

Teaching can be compared to selling commodities. No one can sell unless someone buys ... yet there are teachers who think they have done a good day's teaching irrespective of what the pupils have learned.

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

If I ever write an autobiography about teaching meditation in the West, I'll call it "Pissing In the Wind - Teaching Buddhism in America".

Traditional education focuses on teaching, not learning. It incorrectly assumes that for every ounce of teaching there is an ounce of learning by those who are taught. However, most of what we learn before, during, and after attending schools is learned without its being taught to us. A child learns such fundamental things as how to walk, talk, eat, dress, and so on without being taught these things. Adults learn most of what they use at work or at leisure while at work or leisure. Most of what is taught in classroom settings is forgotten, and much or what is remembered is irrelevant.

And what is true education? It is awakening a love for truth; giving a just sense of duty; opening the eyes of the soul to the great purpose and end of life. It is not so much giving words, as thoughts; or mere maxims, as living principles. It is not teaching to be honest, because 'honesty is the best policy'; but because it is right. It is teaching the individual to love the good, for the sake of the good; to be virtuous in action because one is so in heart; to love and serve God supremely, not from fear, but from delight in his perfect character.

Mechanical Notation ... I look upon it as one of the most important additions I have made to human knowledge. It has placed the construction of machinery in the rank of a demonstrative science. The day will arrive when no school of mechanical drawing will be thought complete without teaching it.

One good thing the teaching has given me is the ability to read and revise my own work.

"Spiritual teacher" of course is not an identity. "Spiritual teacher" is a function. Somebody comes, the teaching happens. Somebody leaves, there's no spiritual teacher left.

If the question were, "What ought to be the next objective in science?" my answer would be the teaching of science to the young, so that when the whole population grew up there would be a far more general background of common sense, based on a knowledge of the real meaning of the scientific method of discovering truth.

I'm honestly not sure that I've ever tried to talk as a theologian about "homosexual acts," per se. My disagreement with the current teaching of the Roman Congregations is about what I consider to be their fundamentally flawed premise of the objectively disordered nature of the inclination.

Everyone had always told me I had to see alpine flowers, since I was writing about flowers, and I had never seen these. So I happened to be teaching a class at the University of Colorado, and I got to go for hikes that took me there. But my perspective was most often down at ground level, trying to see quite tiny exquisite flowers.

Quite a while ago, I made a conscious choice to place my teaching first, so it was very ego-invested. That decision wasn't a good thing in some ways.

Life is good for only two things, discovering mathematics and teaching mathematics.

In general I like a guy who is athletic, somebody who can teach me something. Whether it's teaching me a new way to cut on a wave or teach me a three-point conversion or teach me how to dribble a soccer ball. There's something really cool about that.

In truth, to attain to interior peace, one must be willing to pass through the contrary to peace. Such is the teaching of the Sages.

If you just do something, then you're a five-year wonder and, goodbye, you're gone. But if people feel it's worthwhile, not only do they copy but they want to learn how to do it To me, that's what it's all about. If someone were to ask me, 'What's the number one thing, in essence, that you left behind?' It was the teaching of others so that they could take my work and take it further.

Student teaching is the hardest job there is.

When I went home, my family became a little lonely family because it was just me and my mom. Part of my longing to go back to work was wanting to be surrounded by these people who were teaching me things and drinking bad coffee at three in the morning while we were lying around in a bikini in the winter. Somehow it just felt like real life. It felt more like real life than my life.

It's actually a tribute to the quality of economics teaching that they have persuaded so many generations of students to believe in so much that seems so counter to what the world is like. Many of the things that I'm going to describe make so much more common sense than these notions that seem counter to what one's eyes see every day.

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.

My recent retirement from full-time teaching to the status of research professor at University of California-Santa Barbara (UCSB) encouraged me to come out, so to speak.

In all teaching there must be a fusion of authority as an adult providing a stable framework for the children in one's care, and humility as another human being ready to educate an equal who may turn out to be a superior.

When media "narratives" about [Pope] Francis get set in concrete, and act as filters bending or distorting (or ignoring) aspects of his vision and his teaching that don't fit the established story line, the Church has a problem.

It is I, the ungodly Zarathustra, who says:Who is more ungodly than I, that I may rejoice in his teaching?

Any teacher can study books, but books do not necessarily bring wisdom, nor that human insight essential to consummate teaching skills.

Much education today is monumentally ineffective. All too often we are giving young people cut flowers when we should be teaching them to grow their own plants.

[The error in the teaching of mathematics is that] mathematics is expected either to be immediately attractive to students on its own merits or to be accepted by students solely on the basis of the teacher's assurance that it will be helpful in later life. [And yet,] mathematlcs is the key to understanding and mastering our physical, social and biological worlds.

Most remarks made by children consist of correct ideas very badly expressed. A good teacher will be very wary of saying 'No, that's wrong.' Rather, he will try to discover the correct idea behind the inadequate expression. This is one of the most important principles in the whole of the art of teaching.

When I was 19 I went to art school. I had six months of teaching myself to play baritone ukulele under my belt so I was sort of a novice folkie... I was singing folk songs at that time.

The schoolmaster is the person who takes the children off the parents' hands for a consideration. That is to say, he establishes a child prison, engages a number of employee schoolmasters as turnkeys, and covers up the essential cruelty and unnaturalness of the situation by torturing the children if they do not learn, and calling this process, which is within the capacity of any fool or blackguard, by the sacred name of Teaching.

In 1847 I gave an address at Newton, Mass., before a Teachers' Institute conducted by Horace Mann. My subject was grasshoppers. I passed around a large jar of these insects, and made every teacher take one and hold it while I was speaking. If any one dropped the insect, I stopped till he picked it up. This was at that time a great innovation, and excited much laughter and derision. There can be no true progress in the teaching of natural science until such methods become general.

What you create when you're teaching fiction writing is a kind of literary salon, not a social club or a mutual admiration society, not a debating society, not a repair shop, not a fight club or a soap box. It's a place to have a conversation about a story.

I know I have this kind of teaching element in me, but I don't want to become a 'teacher of theater' because that would formalize something that I'd much rather keep casual.

When we were in the seminary we got a stipend direct from the government and for that stipend we had an obligation to stick to our teaching job for five years.

I want to thank my mother and my father for teaching me to have a dream. You are seeing my dream come true.

I look forward to teaching the occasional class, 'cause I was a professor. And I had fun doing it.

What we need is a gigantic, messy community conversation about what is teaching and learning for the 21st century. We need to engage communities.