Lydia Davis Quotes

We can teach a lot of things, but if the teacher can't relate by talking to a group of friendly students, he'll never be a competent teacher.

If you have a class of 35 children, and they're all smiling, and there's one little bastard, and he's just staring at you as if to say 'Show me', then he's the one you think about going home on the train.

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.

Prior to being allowed to enter the profession, prospective teachers should be asked to talk with a group of friendly students for at least half an hour and be able to engage them in an interesting conversation about any subject the prospective teacher wants to talk about.

I was terrified of being a teacher. To stand in front of a classroom, the responsibility is boggling. Imagine! Standing in front of people!

Sometimes I loved the disruptive student in class who livened up lectures with wisecracks - it put a spin on things, added flavor, made me laugh. Other times, I wished the heckler would just shut up so I could learn something.

Any good teacher knows how important it is to connect with students and understand our culture.

I don't teach anymore, but I can still clearly see fifth period after lunch - that's a real tough time to teach. And I tried to imagine writing a story that would appeal to those kids - even when they're tired, even when they're bouncing off the walls.

Teachers are performers, just like I am.

I was not a good teacher; I didn't have the sort of edge one should have on the students, so I decided to do something else.

It's hard to get an education when teachers spend 70 percent of their time trying to discipline students.

A classroom setting for me was an audience.

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

Teaching was my first job after leaving university. It was a challenge, but I enjoyed it. Some of the kids were disruptive, but I could deal with it because I was only 24 at the time, and my own school memories were still fresh.

It takes a lot of energy to teach.

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.

Professors gravitate to the bright, well-prepared students. They are easier to teach, and they appear to profit most from instruction, which may simply mean they are most like the professors. But in the increasing pluralism and decreasing professionalism of colleges and universities in the next decades, the master teacher is likely to be the one who can provide context for many kinds of students.

I would not, by any means, turn the school room into a motion picture theater, I would use the picture as a means to enlist the pupil’s interest.

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.

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.

Before Juilliard, I was a schoolteacher for a little bit. I taught in a charter school. I was a substitute teacher for kids ages 3 to 6.

Teaching's hard! You need different skills: positive reinforcement, keeping students from getting bored, commanding their attention in a certain way.

If you are giving a graduate course you don't try to impress the students with oratory, you try to challenge them, get them to question you.

I love working with kids and helping others, so I feel like a career in teaching would be perfect.

I had a speech class in elementary school. And you know how teachers, when a kid is struggling to pronounce a word, used to lead him and say, 'Johnny, sounds like... ? Johnny, sounds like... ?' I said out loud, 'Sounds like Johnny can't read.' Teacher told me to leave the room.