Frank McCourt 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.

In schools with a history of chaos, the teacher who can keep the classroom calm becomes virtually indispensable.

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

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

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

I did end up doing substitute teaching, but there's not a lot of teaching involved in that.

I started out as a high school teacher in inner-city Chicago and realized quite quickly that my students weren't that motivated.

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

It is easier for a tutor to command than to teach.

I had a public school education - 3,000 kids when I was there. And there were a lot of teachers who would just sit there. You'd come in and sign your name and the teacher would just sit there at the head of the class and you would literally just have to stay in your seat for 40 minutes and that was the only thing you'd have to do in class.

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.

Teachers are performers, just like I am.

Teachers themselves know if there's a colleague who can't keep control or keep the interest of their class, it affects the whole school.

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.

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.

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

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.

I just think it would be interesting. I already applied to be a substitute teacher.

When I was 27 years old, I left a very demanding job in management consulting for a job that was even more demanding: teaching. I went to teach seventh graders math in the New York City public schools.

I feel like I'd be a really good teacher. I would go for middle school... those high schoolers would be difficult to deal with.

Both of my sisters have been teachers and they used to say you get asked between 300 and 600 questions every day which you have to answer. That's exactly what directing is. And the vast majority of those questions are not very interesting really, but they need somebody to make a decision - a good one or a bad one - and they follow it.

My time at the Denver Public Schools taught me there is no harder, or more important, job than being a teacher.

I tell young teachers who are determined to dissent from some of the Draconian aspects of the current orthodoxy that the best form of protection is to be incredibly good at what you do and keep good discipline in class.

I'd love to go back and teach primary school. I used to teach fourth grade and fifth grade. I'd love to spend several years teaching kindergarten or maybe third grade.

I wrote my first 30 books as a teacher. I would read to my classes, and they'd give me feedback. I was trying to role model.