Freeman Dyson Quotes

I think the biggest misconception about mathematics is that everybody has to learn it. That seems to be a complete mistake. All the time worrying about pushing the children and getting them to be mathematically literate and all that stuff. It's terribly hard on the kids. It's also hard on the teachers. And I think it's totally useless. To me, mathematics is like playing the violin. Some people can do it - others can't. If you don't have it, then there's no point in pretending.

I'm from a family of teachers. My father would drown me in the bathtub if my daughter didn't graduate from college. I don't care who she is or what she does. Just get the diploma.

If parents are aiming at choosing children who will be good athletes, or great musicians, or who will get into Ivy League schools, or who will be tall enough to make the basketball team, then there is a danger that the life of the child will bear the burden of that expectation; and the risk of disappointment and the cost of disappointment will be even higher than they are now, and even now they can be considerable.

All over China, parents tell their children to stop complaining and to finish their quadratic equations and trigonometric functions because there are sixty-five million American kids going to bed with no math at all.

I had to get good grades and do well in school - my mother was an assistant principal and my father was a teacher - and they took this very seriously.

It's a form of bullying, in my opinion, to make sure that your kid gets the best grades, the best jobs and all that sort of stuff. I just want my child to be happy. I want him to do his best and trust God in the rest, but I'm not going to bully him.

In my son's kindergarten, they're telling us how to get him into Stanford. By their advice, I'm doing everything wrong, because I'm trying to make him happy rather than putting him through as many piano lessons as possible.

As the daughter of two teachers with first-class degrees, I'd always seen myself as a duffer by comparison.

Of course, MIT was notable not just for its faculty but also for its students. And, facing such extremely bright kids as a rookie teacher was something like being thrown to the wolves.

I think in the case of my father, in terms of the things that influenced me, he never pressed me to go into academics or pressed me to go to a field, and indeed, my behavior was largely to move as far the other direction. I don't think that's uncommon with people with very successful parents.

I majored in elementary education, and I have a passion for kids.

Most teachers prefer to teach highly motivated kids who live in safe communities.

We have a culture where it’s OK to not know anything about mathematics whereas in Asia, they don’t

I quickly learned that teaching students was far more complicated than managing adults. Why, you may ask? Here are three simple reasons: Your employees are paid to listen to you, students are not. In business, employees are selected based upon a search and interview process. Teachers do not select their students. In business, an insubordinate employee is fired. An insubordinate student is merely one more challenge for a classroom teacher.

My sister and I had resolved never to become teachers because the job seemed to demand so much. My mother always seemed to be working. Our dining room table was cluttered with papers waiting to be read and graded.

When I was in first grade, some psychologist told my mom if I didn't go to graduate school, she basically failed as a parent, because I had the aptitude to do it. Which is so dumb. Huge pressure!

I chose to be a maths teacher because I thought the marking would be easy. You'd just tick and cross, whereas if you're an English teacher, you've got to read essays. Then they said I had to analyse the methodology. It takes an eternity, it's insane!

In my head, I'm still a teacher. I miss the kids.

Of course, the damaging pressure of competition and high-stakes testing isn't limited to the impact on children themselves. It filters down to pupils because of the pressure on school leadership and teachers in turn, to perform well in Ofsted inspections and league tables.

My greatest fear is that I'll fail my kids.

I kept on telling my parents school wasn't for me. And they were like, 'No you need to go university.'

These days, teachers have it rough. Kids can be hyperactive, disobedient, and obnoxious. It must feel like being locked in a room of drunk midgets.

It's been a horrifying academic secret for decades that the children who walk away with the highest formal honors, the valedictorians and National Merit Scholars, have a horrendous performance record in later life.

[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.

I get scared when I approach teachers and tell them that I'll probably be able to attend only half the classes, .. I'm scared that they're going to drop me. In the fall of 2002 I signed up for five classes and had to drop three of them.