John Baldessari Quotes

I was aware that the teaching of drawing was being stopped almost 30 years ago. And I always said, 'The teaching of drawing is the teaching of looking.' A lot of people don't look very hard.

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.

Teaching is, after all, a form of show business.

The amount of psychology which is necessary to all teachers need not be very great.

Teaching is performance art.

Teaching may be compared to selling commodities. No one can sell unless somebody buys.

I think a lot of teachers want to talk about how to continually improve performance.

Teaching is only interesting because you struggle with trying to talk about photographs, photographs that work, you see.

I was actually qualified to be an art teacher, but I didn't want to teach.

I have never really done any teaching and maybe I should have done. I am not power-mad enough.

I've always wanted to play a teacher.

Psychology ought certainly to give the teacher radical help.

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

You want to know how I think art should be taught to children? Take them to a museum and say, 'This is art, and you can't do it.

I enjoyed teaching. I liked the students. Having to formulate my ideas about literature made them clearer. I did not particularly enjoy the more bureaucratic aspects of the job. However, if you are teaching fervently, your energy and time are used up at a great rate.

The best method for a given teacher is the one which is most familiar to the teacher.

You've got to accept the fact that you are basically not teaching a subject, you are teaching children

I was the same way after graduating with a degree in education. I started to teach and I was wondering: do I really know how to teach?

Nothing is better for my playing than teaching because when you teach, you have to think and you have to listen what other people do. And then all of a sudden, you play yourself and then you say, my goodness, I don't need a teacher. I'm my own teacher. Then I can react to what I'm doing immediately. It really improves.

Today, in the age of standardized testing, thinking and acting, reason and judgment have been thrown out the window just as teachers are increasingly being deskilled and forced to act as semi-robotic technicians good for little more than teaching for the test.

Teaching literature is impossible; that is why it is difficult.

You don't have to be Michelangelo to teach basic art, just as you don't have to be Shakespeare to be able to teach the correct use of language.

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

What a teacher needs to know about psychology "might almost be written on the palm of one's hand."

What is drawing? Not once in describing the shape of the mass did I shift my eyes from the model. Why? Because I wanted to be sure that nothing evaded my grasp of it... My objective is to test to what extent my hands already feel what my eyes see.