“To the teacher weighed down with paperwork, I say: you've been messed around too often. You came into teaching to spend your time teaching children not filling in forms.”
A good teacher changes lives, often without realizing it until years later. These quotes honor educators — their patience, dedication, creativity, and the underappreciated truth that teaching is one of the most demanding and important professions there is.
“Please stop teaching my children that everyone gets a trophy just for participating. What is this, the Nobel Prize? Not everybody gets a trophy.”
“To the teacher weighed down with paperwork, I say: you've been messed around too often. You came into teaching to spend your time teaching children not filling in forms.”
“Advice is sometimes transmitted more successfully through a joke than grave teaching.”
“You have to grow from the inside out. None can teach you, none can make you spiritual. There is no other teacher but your own soul.”
“In a Glasser Quality School there is no such thing as a closed book test. Students are told to get out their notes and open their books. There is no such thing as being forbidden to ask the teacher or another student for help.”
“For the longest time, you just sound like a broken record, but you have to be consistent when teaching kids.”
“I think teaching should be an exalted profession, not a picked-on profession.”
“One looks back with appreciation to the brilliant teachers, but with gratitude to those who touched our human feelings. The curriculum is so much necessary raw material, but warmth is the vital element for the growing plant and for the soul of the child.”
“I was attending the University of Alberta. I was going to be a high school teacher, like my parents. I failed - no, I didn't fail a class, I just barely passed. I really didn't try. It was Canadian history, through the plays of the time. My God, those were boring plays.”
“It is by teaching that we teach ourselves, by relating that we observe, by affirming that we examine, by showing that we look, by writing that we think, by pumping that we draw water into the well.”
“Take away paradox from the thinker and you have a professor.”
“If you think your teacher is tough, wait until you get a boss. He doesn't have tenure.”
“I wanted to be a teacher.”
“I do not believe there is a problem in this country or the world today which could not be settled if approached through the teaching of the Sermon on the Mount.”
“What a blind person needs is not a teacher but another self.”
“I thought, well of course, Kinsey absolutely adored teaching. He was a wonderful teacher. So these kids really inspired me. So that was a clue I hung onto. He loved young people, he absolutely loved them. And he loved teaching them and trying to help them.”