Quotes about teachers

No two journeys are ever alike, because no two pupils are ever alike.

The plants are our oldest teachers.

A teacher comes, they say, when you are ready. And if you ignore its presence, it will speak to you more loudly. But you have to be quiet to hear.

The great thing about dead or remote masters is that they can't refuse you as an apprentice. You can learn whatever you want from them. They left their lesson plans in their work.

The teacher is the designer of the learning process a choreographer of discovery.

I have yet to meet an English teacher who assigned a book to damage a kid.

I have read like a man on fire my whole life because the genius of English teachers touched me with the dazzling beauty of language.

Teaching remains a heroic act to me, and teachers live a necessary and all-important life. We are killing their spirit with unnecessary pressure and expectation that seem forced and destructive to me. Long ago I was one of them. I still regret I was forced to leave them. My entire body of work is because of men and women like them.

The great teachers fill you up with hope and shower you with a thousand reasons to embrace all aspects of life.

Bad teachers do not touch me; the great ones never leave me. They ride with me during all my days, and I pass on to others what they have imparted to me. I exchange their handy gifts with strangers on trains, and I pretend the gifts are mine. I steal from the great teachers. And the truly wonderful thing about them is that they would applaud my theft, laugh at the thought of it, realizing that they had taught me their larcenous skills well.

Teaching is a record of failures. But the glory of teaching is in the attempt.

I developed The Great Teacher theory late in my freshman year. It was a cornerstone of the theory that great teachers had great personalities and that the greatest teachers had outrageous personalities. I did not like decorum or rectitude in a classroom; I preferred a highly oxygenated atmosphere, a climate of intemperance, rhetoric, and feverish melodrama. And I wanted my teachers to make me smart. A great teacher is my adversary, my conqueror, commissioned to chastise me. He leaves me tame and grateful for the new language he has purloined from other kings whose granaries are filled and whose libraries are famous. He tells me that teaching is the art of theft; knowing what to steal and from whom.