Frank McCourt Quotes

I mean, I deal with so many problems on a personal basis with my students and I think to myself, 'Nobody ever trained me to do this.'

I think maintaining relationships with my friends, my mother, my manager, they're all important.

We're good at taking care of little kids, and spend a lot of energy teaching them things like how to read. But when kids get as tall as their parents and can look them in the eyes, we tend to drop the ball - at a time they most need a loving consistent community of adults, be it parents, aunts, uncles, or others.

My mother was a listener. I'm a talker. I'm very comfortable talking.

You can choose your family sometimes. You can choose people, it could be a teacher, it could be a professor, it could be someone you work with that actually genuinely cares about you and wants you to succeed.

I grew up in a family with two very strong women, my mother and my older sister, and they were big influences on my life.

Many of our students say, 'We wish we had a mentor in high school. We wish we had someone we could spend more time with, who paid more attention to us, who I could sit down with and talk to when I had a problem.' So relationships are critical.

Emotional 'literacy' implies an expanded responsibility for schools in helping to socialize children. This daunting task requires two major changes: that teachers go beyond their traditional mission and that people in the community become more involved with schools as both active participants in children's learning and as individual mentors.

Teachers need to be comfortable talking about feelings.

MC Lyte definitely embraces me. Jada Pinkett Smith embraces me. Those are two people that I can call and get advice. Those are two people that will call me to see what I'm doing.

At the beginning of every semester, I ask my graduate students whether there is something I should read that will help me understand their work.

Kids need activities and role models to stay out of trouble.

Like most of the other teachers, I'd done a bit of teaching and we all think we're great at what we do, but you realize that normally you have an audience who are all onside, who all want to listen.

What kind of influence did my parents have on my life? Well, they had the most influence. These are the people who are closest to me. My parents are very positive people. They've been supportive. They're always there.

Teaching is like flying a plane. You leave school one day feeling like you're spiraling down toward the trees, expecting that the next day the crash will come. You brace yourself for the impact, only to find that things have leveled out at treetop height, and you climb and enjoy the remainder of the flight.

I think the real heroic teachers are the ones who work with kids, like my mom and my sister do.

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.

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

I'm not a role model to my kids. They're a role model to me.

He is like a daddy to me.

It's an honor to be presented with an opportunity to follow in the footsteps of my mentor, Mike Mansfield, who worked to strengthen and improve America's important relationships throughout Asia.

High-quality alternative educational settings should be available when students violate codes of conduct and need to be removed from the classroom while still maintaining access to instruction. And there must be social, health and psychological services to address students' needs.

I became a teacher all right. I wanted to become a teacher because I had a misconception about it. I didn't know that I'd be going into - when I first became a high school teacher in New York, that I'd be going into a battle zone, and no one prepared me for that.

A state school class can only learn as fast as its thickest child. Your kid misses stuff, mine has to wait while yours catches up.

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.