Robert T. Bakker Quotes

Of all the hard jobs around, one of the hardest is being a good teacher.

I never intended to be a teacher, but once I started teaching, I found that junior high kids are easy to get hooked on, and I stayed for nearly twenty years.

The only thing that I was equipped for with my very mediocre college Arts degree was to get a job in teaching.

My daughter became a teacher right out of college.

I used to work at a school as a teacher's assistant, and my mom is a principal at an elementary school. I don't know, I think that's a pretty good life, teaching kids.

I could write and help a lot of kids, or teach and help a few and go nuts.

Teaching is in my blood.

Teachers are performers, just like I am.

Teaching, real teaching, is - or ought to be - a messy business.

While it was a very interesting period in my life, I was happy to get back to more direct contact with students in the classroom and in my research projects.

I had a great education. From kindergarten to John Dewey High School in Coney Island, I am public-school educated.

Knowing what to expect from a teacher is a really good thing, of course: It lets you get the right answers more quickly than you would otherwise.

Anyone who teaches knows that you don't really experience a text until you've taught it, in loving detail, with an intelligent and responsive class.

The single most important thing in a child's performance is the quality of the teacher. Making sure a child spends the maximum amount of time with inspirational teachers is the most important thing.

The mere imparting of information is not education.

Colleges and classrooms should be havens of tranquility, places where thoughtful discussions occur, where students work together with their teachers to acquire knowledge of the arts and sciences.

I loved teaching and I did a lot of work as a teacher's assistant in college, and my favorite experience was basically getting a laugh from a bunch of people because they had just understood something.

Everybody who is incapable of learning has taken to teaching.

Teaching is not the work in which a man can live and grow.

I don’t believe curriculums are the key to education, I believe teachers are.

The more efficient causes of progress seem to consist of a good education during youth whilst the brain is impressible, and of a high standard of excellence, inculcated by the ablest and best men, embodied in the laws, customs and traditions of the nation, and enforced by public opinion.

Many instructional arrangements seem "contrived," but there is nothing wrong with that. It is the teacher's function to contrive conditions under which students learn. Their relevance to a future usefulness need not be obvious. It is a difficult assignment. The conditions the teacher arranges must be powerful enough to compete with those under which the student tends to behave in distracting ways.

We need a serious intellectual culture in schools.

As one who has taught mathematics at all levels of university instruction, I am well aware of the negative attitude of so many students toward the subject. There are many reasons for this, one of them no doubt being the esoteric, dry way in which we teach the subject. We tend to overwhelm our students with formulas, definitions, theorems, and proofs, but we seldom mention the historical evolution of these facts, leaving the impression that these facts were handed to us, like the Ten Commandments, by some divine authority.

My mom actually taught fifth grade, so... I'm good with fifth graders. That's, like, my specialty.