Helen Herron Taft Quotes

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.

It is useless to deny that, unless one has a genius for imparting knowledge, teaching is a drudgery.

A teacher should have maximal authority, and minimal power.

In America the schools have become too permissive, the kids now are controlling the schools, the tail is wagging the dog. We've got to make a change there and get it back to where the teachers have control of the classrooms.

I studied secondary education.

I was an elementary school teacher.

I taught high school for one year in Deerfield Beach, Fla., and in the end, it was such an enjoyable experience breaking up fights daily, that I decided to return to the combat zone of Afghanistan.

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.

To teach one who has no curiosity to learn, is to sow a field without plowing it.

I was a schoolteacher; I taught seventh and eighth grade, and I tried to write fiction on the side.

A music teacher. It was in the inner city at a school called Horace Mann. I think I was most effective when the kids pissed me off.

There's nothing in the world like getting up in front of a high-school classroom in New York City. They won't give you a break if you don't hold them. There's no escape.

There's lots of bad things about teaching, but the really good thing is that you get to be around young people - irritating as they are.

I was a social studies teacher at a high school in the Bronx for five years.

I love working with teachers and principals; they are my heroes. They are very dedicated to children, and it's very impactful.

If you want to be able to teach, then you need to listen - a lot.

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.

Early in my school career, I turned out to be an incorrigible disciplinary problem. I could understand what the teacher was saying as fast as she could say it, I found time hanging heavy, so I would occasionally talk to my neighbor. That was my great crime, I talked in school.

I believe that teachers - whether in elementary schools, at the secondary level, or at colleges and universities - every teacher deserves the Nobel Peace Prize just for maintaining order in our schools!

I'm a high school teacher. I'm someone who stumbles my way through, leads with my chin in some cases, leads with my heart in all cases.

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

God help the teacher, if a man of sensibility and genius, when a booby father presents him with his booby son, and insists on lighting up the rays of science in a fellow's head whose skull is impervious and inaccessible by any other way than a positive fracture with a cudgel.

Teaching is the rare profession where the customer isn't always right and needs to be told so appropriately.

I can only think that the book is read because it deals with the difficulties of schooling, which do not change. Please note: the difficulties, not the problems. Problems are solved or disappear with the revolving times. Difficulities remain. It will always be difficult to teach well, to learn accurately; to read, write, and count readily and competently; to acquire a sense of history and start one's education or anothers.

Back in the class room, open your books, keep up, the teacher don't know how mean she looks.