Teachers Quotes

“The educator has the duty of not being neutral.”
― Paulo Freire, We Make the Road by Walking: Conversations on Education and Social Change

“Regard mistakes as teachers, not judges!”
― Tae Yun Kim, The Silent Master: Awakening the Power Within

“Those who can do, those who can't teach.”
― George Bernard Shaw

“Great teachers will never be able to make up for bad parents, nor should they be expected to.”
― Taylor Mali

“A kid shouldn't need a diagnosis to access help.”
― Ross W. Greene, Lost at School: Why Our Kids with Behavioral Challenges are Falling Through the Cracks and How We Can Help Them

“Teachers shouldn't make the mistake of always thinking they're the smartest person in the room”
― Taylor Mali

“Showing up at school already able to read is like showing up at the undertaker's already embalmed: people start worrying about being put out of their jobs.”
― Florence King, Reflections in a Jaundiced Eye

“The only thing that surprises me is the characterization of teachers as lazy and greedy. Only someone with very little understanding of what teaching requires would say such a thing.”
― Taylor Mali

“Without books we should very likely be a still-primitive people living in the shadow of traditions that faded with years until only a blur remained, and different memories would remember the past in different ways. A parent or a teacher has only his lifetime; a good book can teach forever.”
― Louis L'Amour, Education of a Wandering Man: A Memoir

“Certainly teachers themselves can do a better job of letting the world know how hard their profession is, but frankly, they have real work to do and a lot of it, so they don't have a whole lot of free time on their hands.”
― Taylor Mali

“We are more than role models for our students; we are leaders and teachers of both an academic curriculum and a social curriculum.”
― Patricia Sequeira Belvel, Rethinking Classroom Management: Strategies for Prevention, Intervention, and Problem Solving

“Simply put, the best teachers are the ones you work your tail off for because in the end you just don't want them to think any less of you. You want and need their approval.”
― Taylor Mali

“That's what teaching is, the art of explanation: presenting the right information in the right order in a memorable way.”
― Taylor Mali

“Here, let me break it down for you,
so you know what I say is true:
Teachers? Teachers make a difference!
Now what about you?”
― Taylor Mali

“By the time these students enter the workforce, many of the jobs they will apply for ill be in industries that don't even exist yet. That's a hard future to prepare someone for. Teachers have their sights set on the real goal: not to produce Ivy League graduates, but to encourage the development of naturally curious, confident, flexible, and happy learners who are ready for whatever the future has in store.”
― Taylor Mali

“It is said, in a fire, everyone runs away from it save for the fireman who run towards it. When dealing with students, be the fireman.”
― Patricia Sequeira Belvel, Rethinking Classroom Management: Strategies for Prevention, Intervention, and Problem Solving

“But by the end of two years, most have either changed careers or moved to suburban schools - a consequence of low pay, a lack of support from the educational bureaucracy, and a pervasive feeling of isolation.”
― Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream

“To teach, learn. To learn, teach.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“There is nothing more valuable then God's widsom. HIS teachers are sometimes the most unlikely people.”
― Shannon Alder

“We need teachers. We need to be teachers. Knowing when for each, is wisdom”
― Rick Beneteau

“Some teachers, the less effective ones, thought that fair meant distributing instruction equally to all students regardless of their needs. The exemplary teachers we studied, however thought fair meant working in ways that evened out differences between students”
― Richard Allington

“What the teachers understand, students never understand and in the paper what we want them to understand they never understand so, apparently, students and teachers are like withstanding married couples with misunderstanding.”
― Himmilicious

“I had authority issues. In my defense, my math teacher had it coming. She’d made me write one hundred on the black board, so I wrote one, zero, zero in words since one hundred consisted of those numbers. Because she hadn't been specific in her instructions,she’d berated me for being a smart aleck. The whole class had laughed at me. The next morning, they had to cut her out of her chair.”
― Kate Evangelista, Taste

“Today, girls,' said Miss Renshaw, 'we shall go out into the beautiful Gardens and think about death.”
― Ursula Dubosarsky, The Golden Day

“Service members will only stay on active duty if they can provide for their families—and DOD schools provide a world-class education that has proven time and again to be an incentive for sailors, soldiers, airmen and marines to reenlist. Military dependents that attend DoDDS schools are highly regarded by prestigious universities the world over for a number of reasons, but there’s one that you’d have a hard time replicating in a stateside school system: they’ve lived overseas, traveled the world, seen and experienced other cultures, learned foreign languages through immersion, and they’ve gained an understanding of the world that you can’t get in a traditional classroom. Add a rigorous curriculum and a long track record of high test scores throughout DoDDS, and it’s pretty easy to see why military kids are in such high demand.”
― Tucker Elliot, You Look Like A Teacher

“The argument could be made that the word 'hero' is overused. I do not think, however, that this is the case when referring to teachers.”
― Steve Maraboli

“Roger Collins wasn’t the most popular teacher at school only because he was interesting in class. In fact, most of the girls would have loved a little after-class attention from this teacher.”
― Francine Pascal, Dear Sister

“Half of teachers leave the profession within their first four years, and kids with behaviour challenges and their parents are cited as one of the major reasons.”
― Ross W. Greene, Lost at School: Why Our Kids with Behavioral Challenges are Falling Through the Cracks and How We Can Help Them

“As calls rang out the world over for new treaties and organizations to be established with the intent of preventing future wars, America and her allies took a more realistic approach to the problem—we maintained allied military bases across Europe and Asia and we stationed troops in these foreign territories on a permanent basis. We weren’t invaders or conquerors and for sure we had no intention of being an empire. We were liberators. That’s all. But having fought and sacrificed so much and for so long, the pragmatic thing to do was to follow this simple philosophy: it’s great to have dialogue, it just works a lot better when you have a strong military strategically placed and ready to act around the globe.”
― Tucker Elliot, You Look Like A Teacher

“They were worried about keeping military families strong. They were worried about the stress and strain of prolonged military service and how it would affect our military readiness the next time a Hitler-wannabe reared his ugly head. As they made a list of pros and cons for sending families overseas, they never imagined that DOD schools would be the best possible solution to nearly every problem they could envision. The most unpredictable phenomena occurred. The DOD literally created a culture of kids whose life experiences were so rich, yet so different from where they’d come from, that as they grew in years the people they most related to, the people they most wanted to be around, were other military kids who had the same shared experience. Military kids became military members—and they’ve kept us strong, our families, armed forces, our country, all of us.”
― Tucker Elliot, You Look Like A Teacher