Freeman Dyson Quotes

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.

I am not somebody who believes everyone is equally talented; talent remains unequally distributed.

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

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.

I didn't set out to write. It was just something I always could do. Teachers would say, 'you really have this gift,' but I just didn't care.

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!

[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.

It is a monstrous thing to force a child to learn Latin or Greek or mathematics on the ground that they are an indispensable gymnastic for the mental powers. It would be monstrous even if it were true.

If we can keep ourselves from interfering with the natural laws of life, mistakes can be our child's finest teachers.

[Not enough is known about solid geometry] and for two reasons: in the first place, no government places value on it; this leads to a lack of energy in the pursuit of it, and it is difficult. In the second place, students cannot learn it unless they have a teacher. But then a teacher can hardly be found.

Teachers today can't take to a child.

The teacher's task is not a small easy one! She has to prepare a huge amount of knowledge to satisfy the child's mental hunger. She is not like the ordinary teacher, limited by a syllabus. The needs of the child are clearly more difficult to answer.

Parents - and teachers too - are woefully short-sighted when they try to protect the child from his mistakes, when they make the "right answer" more important than the quest for knowledge and good judgment. For what is not learned within one's self cannot be learned from another.

The only thing that surprises me is the characterization of teachers as lazy and greedy. Only someone with very little understanding of what teaching requires would say such a thing.

There are many things which no teacher can convey to a child of three, but a child of five can do it with ease.

We must establish all over the country schools of our own to train our own children to become scientists, to become mathematicians. We must realize the need for adult education and for job retraining programs that will emphasize a changing society in which automation plays the key role. We intend to use the tools of education to help raise our people to an unprecedented level of excellence and self respect through their own efforts.

The instruction of children should aim gradually to combine knowing and doing. Among all sciences mathematics seems to be the only one of a kind to satisfy this aim most completely.

Positive energy brings good feelings, and dark energy often means harm. But the destruction in dark energy is also a subtle aspect of construction, like how even forest fires have their benefits. Sometimes enemies are our best teachers, people can learn from their mistakes, destruction sometimes means rebirth.

I believe government should be loyal to parents, teachers and children.

I've got three sons, and two of them would absolutely hate being on the stage and never liked appearing in their school plays or musicals, but the middle one absolutely loves it and never shows any sign of nerves or pressure and really gets a kick out of performing. I think it depends entirely on the child. And that applies to anything whether it's sport or entertainment or music or film.

My Sunday school teachers had turned Bible narrative into children's fables. They talked about Noah and the ark because the story had animals in it. They failed to mention that this was when God massacred all of humanity.

Little children can learn anything, just as they can learn a foreign language. The mind is so absorbent then. There ought to be a real program to educate teachers who want to teach grade school children about history.

My family tried to educate me in the way they thought a young woman should be. But I wanted to learn about mathmatics. I must have gotten that from my father, he was a master of math and science, and I always liked that sort of thing, too. Of course my mother and father did not agree with me on becoming more educated in mathmatics, but I was persistent and eventualy they gave in and I was taught by a wonderful teacher.

Mathematics is a language. We want scientists to be able to read it, speak it, and write it. But we are are not training them to be grammarians.

I thought ["Summer Sisters" ] would be a children's book - two girls who summer together from very different backgrounds. And then when it just kept going and going and going. They kept getting older.