Carl Friedrich Gauss Quotes

I grew up in a school system . . . where nobody understood the meaning of learning disorder. In the West Indies, I was constantly being physically abused because the whipping of students was permitted.

Who does not recall school at least in part as endless dreary hours of boredom punctuated by moments of high anxiety?

From the time I started school, it was clear to everyone that I wasn't learning at the same pace as other kids.

When I enrolled in college at age 19, I had a total of eight years of formal classroom education. As a result, I was not comfortable with formal lectures and receiving regular homework assignments.

The authority of those who teach is often an obstacle to those who want to learn.

Since 'The Overachievers' came out, I've been doing a lot of lectures and talking to kids across the country.

I know what it feels like to struggle to get the education that you need.

In order to be Miss Anybody you had to have excellent grades, and I had terrible grades because of my dyslexia.

We should not have 8th grade graduations. Instead we should tell the students, “You have a long way to go. Get your butt down and study.”

Teachers and parents who incline toward the authoritarian attitude are scornful of “frills.” They consider lecturing, memorization, recitation, and grading to be the basics, as they remember them from their own school days. They believe in withholding promotion form children who have not satisfactorily completed the year’s work in all subjects, despite the evidence that when children are made to repeat a grade, they do not do as well in the following years as similar children who were promoted. To authoritarians, education is not a means to help each child to mature but a series of hurdles over which everyone, of no matter what capability, must jump. A policy of withholding promotion means ignoring the fundamental and complex question of why the children failed and what needs to be done to correct that problem.

Students Are Not Widgets. Schools Are Not Factories.

In the end, I did end up repeating seventh grade.

A one-size-fits-all lecture is not the way to go about education.

We've never tried to educate children. We've never tried to preach to them, just entertain.

My dad took me to a high school basketball game and this very, very famous coach in Michigan, by the name of Lofton Greene - he was a guy that my dad was familiar with. He was from our hometown. And I watched the game and I said I didn't see this guy doing a lot of coaching. And my dad told me, well, it's just like a teacher - which he was - he said if you do a good job teaching during the week, when they take the test on Friday, that's not the time you have to do a lot of demonstrative things.

I had a major in business, and I graduated with a business degree, but I was perhaps the worst student to graduate from that program.

Experience takes dreadfully high school-wages, but he teaches like no other.

When you teach, you learn.

Is it life, I ask, is it even prudence, To bore thyself and bore the students?

Teaching is like trying to hold 35 corks underwater at once.

I have always felt that the true text-book for the pupil is his teacher

The greatest educational dogma is also its greatest fallacy: the belief that what must be learned can necessarily be taught.

But teaching is like climbing a mountain.

Education is the sum of what students teach each other between lectures and seminars.

Fun for me is to take what I learn and teach others in a way that is accessible and applicable in their own lives.