If we taught music the way we try to teach engineering, in an unbroken four year course, we could end up with all theory and no music. When we study music, we start to practice from the beginning, and we practice for the entire time.
In the beginning of the 19th century, maybe forty percent of women and fifty percent of men could produce a signature, which meant that they'd had at least three years of education because it was in third grade that people started penmanship in the 19th century. And of course black people could get killed if they got caught teaching themselves to read in some parts of the country.
I got used to being a writer. To compare it to teaching - I taught for twenty-five years; for the first two or three years it was heady. I was discovering that I could do something and do it well. Be useful to people. It was exhilarating, sort of like the first two weeks of being in love with somebody, and then it becomes like the third bite of pizza. The first bite is wonderful. The second bite is not disappointing. The third? Meh. You get used to it.
There's no way to put a limit on what one may accomplish individually if the intent is an impeccable intent. Don Juan's teachings are not spiritual. I repeat this because the question has come to the surface over and over. The idea of spirituality doesn't fit with the iron discipline of a warrior. The most important thing for a shaman like don Juan is the idea of pragmatism.
This rock thing got in the way of my teaching career.
If you don't set your writing - teaching - at a level that makes them stretch, they are never going to develop their intellectual muscle.
No man who worships education has got the best out of education. . . Without a gentle contempt for education no man's education is complete.
The result of teaching small parts of a large number of subjects is the passive reception of disconnected ideas, not illumed with any spark of vitality.
We can begin to address the issue of guns by teaching our young people how to deal with situations in nonviolent ways. Someone said to me the other day, "What our adolescents need is not so much health care, but healthy caring," and I agree. Parents and churches need to provide that. Curricula in our schools [need to] provide that.
I was never really cut out to be a student, I prefer to actually work and get a project done and learn that way- but I have a huge respect for good teachers and even enjoy teaching. . . I am a conundrum!
A teacher who cannot explain any abstract subject to a child does not himself thoroughly understand his subject; if he does not attempt to break down his knowledge to fit the child's mind, he does not understand teaching.
The processes of teaching the child that everything cannot be as he wills it are apt to be painful both to him and to his teacher.
Teaching is a calling too. And I've always thought that teachers in their way are holy - angels leading their flocks out of the darkness.
We spend the first twelve months of our children's lives teaching them to walk and talk and the next twelve telling them to sit down and shut up.
. . . There is a great need of more familiarity with the Scriptures and their teaching in order that we may be crushed to our knees with a sense of humility and be made to cry to God that He would visit us again.
I am teaching more. That is what I do best.
Not teaching your kids about money is like not caring whether they eat. If they enter the world without financial knowledge, they will have a much harder go of it.
[The error in the teaching of mathematics is that] mathematics is expected either to be immediately attractive to students on its own merits or to be accepted by students solely on the basis of the teacher's assurance that it will be helpful in later life. [And yet,] mathematlcs is the key to understanding and mastering our physical, social and biological worlds.
A teacher's failure to create an intellectually reflective, engagement for learning is not simply malpractice but it is immoral particularly for students who cannot withdraw.
The teaching which is written on paper is not the true teaching. Written teaching is a kind of food for your brain. Of course it is necessary to take some food for your brain, but it is more important to be yourself by practicing the right way of life.