Alan Perlis Quotes

We should not have 8th grade graduations. Instead we should tell the students, “You have a long way to go. Get your butt down and study.”

Any great teacher is a great student.

The teacher gives not of his wisdom, but rather of his faith and lovingness.

To be a teacher in the right sense is to be a learner. I am not a teacher, only a fellow student.

You can do and use the skills that you have. The schools need you. The teachers need you. Students and parents need you. They need your actual person: your physical personhood and your open minds and open ears and boundless compassion, sitting next to them, listening and nodding and asking questions for hours at a time.

I've been humbled by the amount of people who have gone out of their way to reach out, mentor me on an ongoing basis, and devote time to help solve the problems Rent the Runway faces as a company - simply out of their own interest and kindness.

My father was a World War II Marine who became a high school principal. He always had a heart for students who maybe were underprivileged or had difficulty of some sort.

I went to school to be a psychiatrist. That's where I was going until I had a teacher-student conference with one of my teachers and there were film school pamphlets, and he said, "You don't belong here. Get out. Go to film school."

It is commonly said that a teacher fails if he has not been surpassed by his students.

All over China, parents tell their children to stop complaining and to finish their quadratic equations and trigonometric functions because there are sixty-five million American kids going to bed with no math at all.

A true master gives all his knowledge. But only when the student is ready.

The educational system in the US was a highly predictable victim of the neoliberal reaction, guided by the maxim of "private affluence and public squalor." Funding for public education has sharply declined. As higher education is driven to a business model in accord with neoliberal doctrine, administrative bureaucracy has sharply increased at the expense of faculty and students. Cost-cutting leads to hyper-exploitation of the more vulnerable, creating a new precariat of graduate students and adjuncts surviving on a bare pittance, replacing tenured faculty.

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

If I hadn't met those two guys (Billy Martin and Whitey Ford) at the start of my career, I would have lasted another five years.

When we're doing our lessons, the teacher doesn't say, 'Ready, set, work,' They say, 'Ready, set, play,' and I always took that word seriously.

Every serious scientific worker is painfully conscious of this involuntary relegation to an ever-narrowing sphere of knowledge, which threatens to deprive the investigator of his broad horizon and degrades him to the level of a mechanic.

You can imagine what it was like for me to actually be sitting in a room with matching typewriters, working under the tutelage of this guy I so admired, both as a filmmaker and as a man.

The biggest mistake coaches make is taking borderline cases and trying to save them. I'm not talking about grades now, I'm talking about character. I want to know before a boy enrolls about his home life, and what his parents want him to be.

Be an example of what you teach. [As a personal trainer], delve into your student's life, know everything about him. Be interested.

An understanding heart is everything in a teacher, and cannot be esteemed highly enough.

I do not need to establish a deep, lasting, time-consuming personal relationship with every student. What I must do is to be totally and nonselectively present to the student-to each student-as he addresses me. The time interval may be brief but the encounter is total.

Do we say, Oh now I'm going to be nice to the weak and the small? Or do we do as we learned when we were pages?

In a very real way Norman [Lear] godfathered me into my career. He was the best mentor anybody could have ever had.

Duke is in extremely competitive environment. In my high school, I think I got one B my whole four years. I was used to being the smartest kid in every class I was in, and then I went to Duke and suddenly I was the dumbest kid in every class. Everybody there is up to something.

The best students always are flunking. Every good teacher knows that.