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Quotations about teaching | |
It is not what you do for your children, but what you have taught them to do for themselves, that will make them successful human beings. If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough. You can get help from teachers, but you are going to have to learn a lot by yourself, sitting alone in a room. There are two kinds of teachers: the kind that fill you with so much quail shot that you can't move, and the kind that just gives you a little prod behind and you jump to the skies. I'm no teacher. Never wanted to teach and don't believe in teaching an art. Science yes, business of course..but an art cannot be taught. You can only inculcate it, you can be an exemplar, you can create an atmosphere in which it can grow. Well I suppose I, being an exemplar, could be called a teacher, in spite of myself. So go ahead, call me a teacher. The authority of those who teach is often an obstacle to those who want to learn. The best educators are the ones that inspire their students. That inspiration comes from a passion that teachers have for the subject they're teaching. Most commonly, that person spent their lives studying that subject, and they bring an infectious enthusiasm to the audience. I think many people have that enthusiasm, but they are prevented from being teachers because they didn't go through the teacher mill. Now you have teachers who have been through the teacher mill, yet they have no capacity to inspire anyone at all. It's the inspired student that continues to learn on their own. That's what separates the real achievers in the world from those who pedal along, finishing assignments. The object of teaching a child is to enable him to get along without a teacher. An understanding heart is everything in a teacher, and cannot be esteemed highly enough. One looks back with appreciation to the brilliant teachers, but with gratitude to those who touched our human feeling. 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. The mere mechanical technique of acting can be taught, but the spirit that is to give life to lifeless forms must be born in a man. No dramatic college can teach its pupils to think or to feel, it is Nature who makes our artists for us, though it may be Art who taught them their right mode of expression. A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops. Technology is just a tool. In terms of getting the kids working together and motivating them, the teacher is the most important. A tutor should not be continually thundering instruction into the ears of his pupil, as if he were pouring it through a funnel, but, after having put the lad, like a young horse, on a trot, before him, to observe his paces, and see what he is able to perform, should, according to the extent of his capacity, induce him to taste, to distinguish, and to find out things for himself; sometimes opening the way, at other times leaving it for him to open; and by abating or increasing his own pace, accommodate his precepts to the capacity of his pupil. Teaching should be such that what is offered is perceived as a valuable gift and not as a hard duty. So Alice is a project that we worked on for a long, long time. It's a novel way to teach computer programming. Kids make movies and games. The head fake -- again, we're back to the head fakes. The best way to teach somebody something is to have them think they're learning something else. I've done it my whole career. And the head fake here is that they're learning to program but they just think they're making movies and video games. Is the reason black kids often think of school as white, that white people today don't like them, or that the system is somehow set against black kids learning? No: That analysis makes no sense, period. Only a heedless, numb kind of fealty, a quiet refusal to engage the actual individuals we are talking about, would insist that "racism" is why a black kid, decades after 1966, gives a black nerd trouble for studying hard. Racism sparked this problem originally, to be sure, but the solution today cannot be to wave a magic wand and "eliminate racism," because the teachers who exerted racism upon black kids three generations ago are now mostly dead. |
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