Henry David Thoreau Quotes

To be a teacher does not mean simply to affirm that such a thing is so, or to deliver a lecture, etc. No, to be a teacher in the right sense is to be a learner. Instruction begins when you, the teacher, learn from the learner, put yourself in his place so that you may understand what he understands and the way he understands it.

It is always the teacher who must learn the most... or else nothing real has happened in the exchange.

[T]eaching has been for me an education (Lord knows what it has been for my students).

A teacher who establishes rapport with the taught, becomes one with them, learns more from them than he teaches them. He who learns nothing from his disciples is, in my opinion, worthless. Whenever I talk with someone I learn from him. I take from him more than I give him.

Education is the sum of what students teach each other between lectures and seminars.

Through dialogue, the teacher-of-the-students and the students-of-the-teacher cease to exist and a new term emerges: teacher-student with students-teachers.

The truth is, when all is said and done, one does not teach a subject, one teaches a student how to learn it.

More important than the curriculum is the question of the methods of teaching and the spirit in which the teaching is given

Active learning is always involved with interaction between teachers and students and Socratic methods and that's gonna continue.

I feel that I learned far more from my students than I could possibly have taught them.

Education must begin with the solution of the student-teacher contradiction, by reconciling the poles of the contradiction so that both are simultaneously teachers and students.

I have learned that, although I am a good teacher, I am a much better student, and I was blessed to learn valuable lessons from my students on a daily basis. They taught me the importance of teaching to a student - and not to a test.

My dad took me to a high school basketball game and this very, very famous coach in Michigan, by the name of Lofton Greene - he was a guy that my dad was familiar with. He was from our hometown. And I watched the game and I said I didn't see this guy doing a lot of coaching. And my dad told me, well, it's just like a teacher - which he was - he said if you do a good job teaching during the week, when they take the test on Friday, that's not the time you have to do a lot of demonstrative things.

Of all the excellent teachers of college English whom I have known I have never discovered one who knew precisely what he was doing. Therein have lain their power and their charm.

We think it's about little techniques and tricks, but techniques only take you so far. We need teachers who care about kids, who care about what they teach, and who can communicate with kids.

We can teach only if we are willing to learn.

Oh, sure. What's this supposed to teach me?" "Is it what the teacher teaches? Or what the students learns?" "What's the difference?" "That is, itself, a question worth considering, yes?" -Jacen & Vergere

Are our ways of teaching students to ask some questions always correlative with our ways of teaching them not to ask - indeed, to be unconscious of - others? Does the educational system exist in order to promulgate knowledge, or is its main function rather to universalize a society’s tacit agreement about what it has decided it does not and cannot know?

The greatest educational dogma is also its greatest fallacy: the belief that what must be learned can necessarily be taught.

Teaching is more difficult than learning because what teaching calls for is this: to let learn. The real teacher, in fact, lets nothing else be learned than learning. His conduct, therefore, often produces the impression that we properly learn nothing from him, if by "learning" we now suddenly understand merely the procurement of useful information.

The teacher is no longer merely the-one-who-teaches, but one who is him/herself taught in dialogue with the students, who in turn while being taught also teach. They become jointly responsible for a process in which all grow.

It's the student who makes the teacher, not the other way around.

To know psychology, therefore, is absolutely no guarantee that we shall be good teacher.

Some teachers teach for others to learn. That's not me. Some teachers teach for others to accomplish. That is me.

A good teacher feels his way, looking for response.