No matter what our job is, we view it not as our purpose in life but rather as where God has sovereignly placed us for the purpose of making Christ known and his name great. If you are a teacher, if you are a politician, if you are a businessman, if you are in agriculture, if you are in construction, if you are in technology, if you are in the arts, then you should not be saying, ‘I need to find my life’s purpose in this work,’ but rather, ‘I need to bring God’s purpose to this work. ’
We feasted on love; every mode of it, solemn and merry, romantic and realistic, sometimes as dramatic as a thunderstorm, sometimes comfortable and unemphatic as putting on your soft slippers. She was my pupil and my teacher, my subject and my sovereign, my trusty comrade, friends, shipmate, fellow-soldier. My mistress, but at the same time all that any man friend has ever been to me.
People (or students) do not have shortcomings, only uniquenesses. The goal of a good teacher is to turn these uniquenesses into advantages.
Meditate on enlightenment. Read the exploits of the great teachers, the great saints. They'll inspire you. Their power is there.
There's very little I can sing now. When I asked my first voice teacher, who was the best one, "When will I know when to stop singing?" he said, "Your voice will tell you. " And it is very, very difficult to sing now.
There is no teacher more discriminating or transforming than loss.
Knowing something for oneself or for communication to an expert colleague is not the same as knowing it for explanation to a student.
My son's an idiot. His teacher asked him to spell Mississippi. He asked which one? The river or the state?
One of the main truths of all education is that if the young are not always right, the old are always wrong.
Schools often get the teachers they deserve!
In homes where high ideals and gospel values are maintained, it is parents, not teachers, who lay the foundation of character and faith in the hearts of their children.
In the United States, if you ask teachers, "Are there children whom we should call 'gifted?'", many if not most will say 'No. ' That's the politically correct answer. But if you then ask the teacher to rank order students in terms of how well they paint or write or dance, they'll have little difficulty in doing so.
Broke people giving financial advice is like a shop teacher with missing fingers.
We are all in the business of sales. Teachers sell students on learning, parents sell their children on making good grades and behaving, and traditional salesmen sell their products.
But more classrooms and more teachers are not enough. We must seek an educational system which grows in excellence as it grows in size. This means better training for our teachers. It means preparing youth to enjoy their hours of leisure as well as their hours of labor. It means exploring new techniques of teaching, to find new ways to stimulate the love of learning and the capacity for creation.
Feast of Gregory, Bishop of Nyssa, & his sister Macrina, Teachers, c. 394 & c. 379 Humility is the root, mother, nurse, foundation, and bond of all virtue.
The last thing we need to do, relating to teachers, is the key to a good education in this country is a strong teacher. I would have a minimum wage for all our teachers, $40,000 per year.
It is important that students bring a certain ragamuffin, barefoot irreverence to their studies; they are not here to worship what is known, but to question it.
Excellent instruction is less about what a teacher does and more about what students can do and know as a result of the lesson.
The better teachers recognize that by freeing yourself of the rigid ego identity habit, you actually strengthen the resilient, flexible, creative ego, and you then can be more effective in helping others, and creative in whatever work you do.