Susan Barker Quotes

When you become a parent, or a teacher, you turn into a manager of this whole system. You become the person controlling the bubble of innocence around a child, regulating it.

My mother tells this story that when I first went to school, I thought I was going to help the teachers. I didn't realise I was going to get educated.

I always wanted to be a teacher. A bit of me still wants to be a teacher.

I can remember exactly where I sat when my teacher first read Roald Dahl's 'James and the Giant Peach'.

When I went to college, my goal was to be a college history teacher. I majored in history.

I thought I'd grow up to be a teacher, or maybe run for political office.

I never had to learn English, French and German because I was brought up as all three languages. I had a private French teacher before I even went to school. That helped a lot.

I remember when I was in school I had this teacher give me this E.L. Doctorow quote: They asked him how much historical research he does for his books and he said, 'As little as possible.' So I try and adhere to that.

Just like my father, I've always loved education. In school I was a member of the honor society.

My parents always knew that I loved music. They just didn't think I'd try to make it a career. They thought I'd be a painter or an art teacher or something like that.

I studied with a blind teacher from about 5 until I was 16, at two different schools. From the age of 12 until 16, I was in a boarding school-which, I believe, at that time was compulsory for blind children.

My mother wanted to be a teacher when she was young, and my father didn't approve of it, so she fought very hard to become one. And she did it. So when I said I wanted to become an actress, my mother was very supportive. She always said to me, 'There's no such thing as 'can't.'

I read 'the Hobbit' at the age when you're supposed to read it. I didn't read 'The Lord Of The Rings.' My father, who was an English teacher, advised me that once I had read 'the Hobbit,' that would be enough. I could then move on to Dostoyevsky.

When I ask teachers why they teach, they almost always say that it is because they want to make a difference in the lives of children.

I'm constantly snatching my books out of the hands of precocious ten-year-olds who are simply too young to read them, despite parents insisting that dear Octavia has a reading age of 28. I remember trying to read 'In Cold Blood' at the age of twelve, and realising that just because you can read book doesn't mean you should.

I don't think in terms of that bizarre tautology 'value for money' in my literary and journalistic work - and nor will I in my academic role. However, if I don't believe I'm helping my students towards a fuller and more empowering relationship with the world, then I'll resign.

We spend the first twelve months of our children's lives teaching them to walk and talk and the next twelve telling them to sit down and shut up.

When I was 8, I was reading 'Gone with the Wind' and 'Pride and Prejudice' and all that, not knowing it wasn't my reading level.

I wanted to become a kindergarten teacher like my mother.

My mother had been an English teacher in India before she came to the U.K., and she taught me to read early on - not only in English, but in Hindi, too. My teachers didn't like the fact that I was reading more quickly than they were teaching, and as a consequence, I would sometimes get bored in class.

Knowing what to expect from a teacher is a really good thing, of course: It lets you get the right answers more quickly than you would otherwise.

I scored a 910 on my SAT. I didn't care about education. I don't know what I cared about.

You want schools to teach reading and writing. But you also want schools to reflect who you are and your values.

Ethelwerd the youngest … was consigned to the schools of learning, where, with the children of almost all the nobility of the country, and many also who were not noble, he prospered under the diligent care of his teachers. Books in both languages, namely, Latin and Saxon, were both read in the school. They also learned to write; so that before they were of an age to practice manly arts, namely, hunting and such pursuits as befit noblemen, they became studious and clever in the liberal arts.

Many instructional arrangements seem "contrived," but there is nothing wrong with that. It is the teacher's function to contrive conditions under which students learn. Their relevance to a future usefulness need not be obvious. It is a difficult assignment. The conditions the teacher arranges must be powerful enough to compete with those under which the student tends to behave in distracting ways.