Top 490 Teaching Quotes

I went to Africa without the perspective of a balance between teaching people the truth, which has been my calling, and helping people who have physical problems, like AIDS and orphans and hunger.

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.’

I saw an advertisement to work for a Swedish institute in Karachi in Pakistan. I had just been offered a permanent assignment, teaching in Oulu. But I felt, ‘My God, I am not going to stay here forever.’ You know why? Because I was following international events.

I had never picked up a basketball before. I went through a grueling audition process. It was almost as if I was learning to walk. It would be like teaching somebody to dance ballet for a role.

I had a friend who had been teaching music for a long time, and he knew a bunch of teachers, so I just put up the money and started a school.

I walked into an international economics tutorial, and the professor said, ‘I don’t know how to teach a woman.’ I said, ‘It’s the same as teaching a man.’ I just sat down, and he had no choice but to start teaching. When I handed in my first paper, I think that shut him up.

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.

Everybody who is incapable of learning has taken to teaching.

I believe in teaching as a real job. I don’t think it’s a substitute for anything else. It’s been shown to me that teachers can help, and the writing today is just as good as it was when I started out. Technology hasn’t changed that.

My mother played the piano and my father the violin, I can remember my dad teaching me how to waltz; I had my feet on his, my mother playing the piano, and my husband will tell you the lessons weren’t very successful.

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.

Forget about teaching the children about numbers and colors and the like, and just play with them.

I used to teach kids when I was younger. When I was about 14 or 15 I started teaching children drama and something that I used to say to them was, ‘Don’t be afraid.’ People would be afraid of forgetting their lines or something.

It took me about three years to write About Grace. I wasn’t teaching two of those years, so I was working eight-hour days, five days a week. And it would include research and reading – it wasn’t just a blank page, laying down words.

Christian teaching about sex is not a set of isolated prohibitions; it is an integral part of what the Bible has to say about living in such a way that our lives communicate the character of God.

I worked in a number of high schools in New York, and I wound up at Stuyvesant High School, which is known nationally for producing brilliant scientists and mathematicians, but I had writing classes. I thought I was teaching. They thought I was teaching, but I was learning.

I was going to be a teacher. I was applying to graduate school when I got the call to do ‘Same Love,’ actually. I was gonna go to Boston University for my masters in teaching.

Those 25 dancers we worked with for a day, in as highly productive a way as possible – a long class, a period of teaching bits of the repertory – in fact I didn’t teach Bank, I’ve used parts of Oil and Water.

The total loss of hearing was a process that lasted more than a decade, but it was sufficiently gradual for me to attend Sydney Boys’ High School and to profit from the teaching there.

You’ve never seen me debate anybody. On anything. Ever. My investment of time, as an educator, in my judgment, is best served teaching people how to think about the world around them. Teach them how to pose a question. How to judge whether one thing is true versus another. What the laws of physics say.

I find teaching – I like it, but I find just walking into the classroom and facing the students very difficult.

We’ve become so accustomed to teaching to the tests that we’ve forgotten about a child’s joy of discovery.

My daddy wanted me to be a farmer; feel the smoothness of Alabama clay and become one of the first blacks in my town to own land. But, I was worried about my history being caked with that southern clay, and I subscribed to a different kind of teaching and learning in my bones and in my spirit.

I think the teaching profession contributes more to the future of our society than any other single profession.

I was in the classroom four days after the inauguration, because I said to Joe when we got elected, ‘Joe, I really want to continue to teach.’ And he said, ‘Absolutely. You should be doing what you love.’ Politics – that’s Joe’s life, really, his love. But teaching is mine.

There is no teaching to compare with example.

We are supposed to enjoy the good stuff now, while we can, with the people we love. Life has a funny way of teaching us that lesson over and over again.

I had no intention of getting back into politics. I was teaching at Bowdoin and happily retired from politics.

If God treats you well by teaching you a disastrous lesson, you never forget it.

Teaching and writing, to me, is really just seduction; you go to where people are and you find something that they’re interested in and you try and use that to convince them that they should be interested in what you have to say.

In a way, education by its nature favours the extrovert because you are taking kids and putting them into a big classroom, which is automatically going to be a high-stimulation environment. Probably the best way of teaching in general is one on one, but that’s not something everyone can afford.

I enjoy teaching football.

There was an email forwarded to me from a first-grade teacher, and she said she was teaching them civil rights for MLK weekend, and a little first-grader stood up, and he said, ‘I can explain segregation,’ and proceeded to explain all the scenes from ‘Hidden Figures.’ And I died because that’s everything.

Teaching players during practices was what coaching was all about to me.

The biggest thing we get out of it is seeing the kids smile. And hopefully we will also see that the lessons we’re teaching – not only the fundamentals of hockey, but also the life values – are sinking in.

I think what I do differently from a lot of TV chefs is that I break down barriers and make fine food more accessible to the regular person, who might be intimidated. I try hard, particularly with wine, to make it not intimidating. It’s sort of a teaching job.

In 1979, I received a phone call from Ansel Adams asking me if I would be willing to consider coming to work for him. I was teaching photography in Southern California at that point.

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.

The greatest difference between now and 1964, when I began teaching, is that public policy has pretty much eradicated the dream of Martin Luther King.

Through teaching myself how to be happy and get through things, I hope I can also do that for other people.

I’m not very good at science or math, even though I pretend. And I’m not very good at teaching. I’m not very patient.

I think teaching should be a vocation, and they should be paid more for it.

I have devoted my energies to the study of the scriptures, observing monastic discipline, and singing the daily services in church; study, teaching, and writing have always been my delight.

My students often say, ‘My roommate read this story and really liked it,’ and it’s hard to convince them that there are things wrong with it. I say, ‘Well, people who love you want you to be happy. But I’m your professor and I’m supposed to be teaching you something.’

Jagdish Singh was my basic coach, and he trained me from my very early days in boxing, teaching me the fundamentals of the sport. He was the one who shaped me into a boxer, disciplined me when I required disciplining.

When I went to Egypt right after 9/11 I was very upset. I used to live in Egypt. I had a lot of friends there. I spent two years teaching there. I had very fond feelings for that part of the world, and the fact that a culture I liked so much had attacked my own culture was really very upsetting to me.

For me, teaching helps to reaffirm the right principles and values of acting. It helps me focus on the good stuff that can be easy to lose sight of because the business is so result-oriented.

I had to be reminded that the guitar is infinite. It never stops teaching you, it never stops being difficult; there’s an unlimited amount of things to learn, and you’ll never master it.

Teaching has always been a very important part of my life. It is one of the ways I contribute to society. It is also a source of energy and insight.

When my mother was young, only two professions were open to women ; teaching and nursing. She chose nursing, but the teaching profession was full of talented women like her, confined there in part because they had few career options.