A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W XYZ
Flannery O’Connor
I was a very ancient twelve; my views at that age would have done credit to a Civil War veteran. I am much younger now than I was at twelve or anyway, less burdened. The weight of the centuries lies on children, I’m sure of it.
Georgia O’Keefe
One day I found myself saying to myself . . . I can’t live where I want to . . . I can’t go where I want to . . . I can’t do what I want to. I can’t even say what I want to. I decided I was a very stupid fool not to at least paint as I wanted to and say what I wanted to when I painted, and that seemed to be the only thing I could do that didn’t concern anybody but myself.
Renee Genbauffe O’Leary teacher
Teaching and life should be lived to the fullest, filled with learning and laughter and brimming with love for the world around you.
Eugene O’Neill 1888 – 1953
Happiness hates the timid! So does science!
Her love and tenderness gave me the faith in love that enabled me to face my dead at last and write this play-write it with deep pity and understanding and forgiveness for all the four haunted Tyrones.
I love every bone in their heads.
Man’s loneliness is but his fear of life.
Obsessed by a fairy tale, we spend our lives searching for a magic door and a lost kingdom of peace.
When you’re 50 you start thinking about things you haven’t thought about before. I used to think getting old was about vanity – but actually it’s about losing people you love. Getting wrinkles is trivial.
P.J O’Rourke
You know your children are growing up when they stop asking you where they came from and refuse to tell you where they are going.
Modern parents believe toilet training should be an easy and casual affair. Just let the child s*%# all over everything. This prepares him or her for a brilliant career as a talk show host. It used to be thought that children should act like “little adults.” Like many things that used to be thought, this is true. In fact, now more than ever. Today’s real adults are self-involved, impulsive, inarticulate, and spend as much time as possible out playing. They can’t sit still, don’t like to get dressed up, and hate every kind of activity that requires self-restraint. Adults are the children of today, and therefore children have to be adults because there’s only so much room in the world for kids.
Susan Ohanian (Teacher and writer)
School administrators intone that “in order for learning to take place, there must be order in the classroom.” That may be true, but I feel the emphasis is in the wrong place. In order for learning to take place, there should be something worth learning.
Teachers consist of equal parts of perspiration, inspiration and resignation.
What a teacher thinks she teaches often has little to do with what students learn.
The disposition for teaching is two percent inborn and ninety-eight percent reinvented every day of one’s career.
Teaching consists of equal parts perspiration, inspiration, and resignation.
A teacher’s day is half bureaucracy, half crisis, half monotony, and one-eightieth epiphany. Never mind the arithmetic.
Teachers need to have the courage of their contradictions.
Please remember these two difficult truths of teaching: 1. No matter how much you do, you’ll feel it’s not enough. 2. Just because you can only do a little is no excuse to do nothing.
Teaching is a rigorous act of faith.
With large industries throwing out the factory model as counterproductive, it is long past time for schools to do the same. I wonder how many adults would do well at dealing with different job requirements and a different boss every 47 minutes.
Remember this great teaching axiom: only dull people are at their best during faculty meetings.
The supply of administrators does seem to exceed the demand. Remember: some administrators are wise. The rest are otherwise. Ninety percent of administrators give the other ten percent a bad name.
While the wheels of all bureaucracies turn slowly, in school bureaucracies many of those wheels have flat tires.
A workbook should be carefully structured, analyzed for appropriate reading level, matched to every student’s individual learning styles, and then thrown out the window.
School is the marketplace of possibility not efficiency.
The first rule of education is that if somebody will fund it, somebody will do it. The second rule of education is that once something is funded, workbooks will follow.
As every teacher knows, it is easier to move a graveyard than to change a district’s existing curriculum.
Robert Orben
Never raise your hand to your children; it leaves your mid-section unprotected.
George Orwell ‘Riding Down from Bangor’, 1946
The books one reads in childhood, and perhaps most of all the bad and good bad books, create in one’s mind a sort of false map of the world, a series of fabulous countries into which one can retreat at odd moments throughout the rest of life, and which some cases can even survive a visit to the real countries which they are supposed to represent.
Part of the reason for the ugliness of adults, in a child’s eyes, is that the child is usually looking upwards, and few faces are at their best when seen from below.
William Osler (1849-1919) Canadian physician
No bubble is so iridescent or floats longer than that blown by the successful teacher.
It is well for young men to remember that no bubble is so iridescent or floats longer than that blown by the successful teacher.
Frank Outlaw
Watch your thoughts; they become words.
Watch your words; they become actions.
Watch your actions; they become habits.
Watch your habits; they become character.
Watch your character; it becomes your destiny.
Ovid
Take a rest; a field that has rested gives a bountiful crop.
Wizard of Oz
“I can’t give you a brain, but I can give you a diploma”