The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires.
At the end of the day, I'm a very boring academic, bogged down with academia and structure and delivering an education.
It's an extension of what I do also as part of making my living - I go into schools and work with kids on writing, and I do assembly programs often. Each one is different because each school has different requirements.
I'm not interested in on-the-job learning or on-the-job training.
There is nothing more valuable than great classroom instruction. But let's stop putting the whole burden on teachers. We also need better parents. Better parents can make every teacher more effective.
You [the teacher] do not merely insert a lot of facts, if you teach them [the students] properly. It is not like injecting 500 cc. of serum, or administering a year's dose of vitamins.
I was a per diem floater in the same junior high school I went to. I sat in the office and made $42.50 a day, and whenever a teacher was absent, I'd substitute. I taught everything from English to auto shop.
Research shows that there is only half as much variation in student achievement between schools as there is among classrooms in the same school. If you want your child to get the best education possible, it is actually more important to get him assigned to a great teacher than to a great school.
I had, out of my sixty teachers, a scant half dozen who couldn't have been supplanted by phonographs.
My seventeen years of teaching inform my sense of audience in every line I write.
Nothing replaces real-life experience. Of course, I say this as someone who went to law school.
While technology and assessment can help complement the important work of our teachers, I worry that we are spending too much of our time testing.
My obligation is to focus on the priorities of classroom instruction, parental involvement and student safety, targeting student performance and eliminating unnecessary administrative costs.
Never mind the cream; it will always rise to the top. It's the skim milk that needs good teachers.
To the teacher weighed down with paperwork, I say: you've been messed around too often. You came into teaching to spend your time teaching children not filling in forms.
In my classroom, I would start my lessons with a quick review of an old topic. Then, I would introduce a new topic. Finally, I would give my students a problem to solve on their own, one that would reinforce what I'd just taught.
It's definitely important for kids to learn in many different settings.
We're not in love with Literature all the time - especially when you have to teach it every day.
Standing up and teaching is grueling, but grueling fun.
I am a teacher, and I am proud of it. At Cornell University I have taught primarily undergraduates, and indeed almost every year since 1966 have taught first-year general chemistry.
Our approach to education has remained largely unchanged since the Renaissance: From middle school through college, most teaching is done by an instructor lecturing to a room full of students, only some of them paying attention.
While it was a very interesting period in my life, I was happy to get back to more direct contact with students in the classroom and in my research projects.
Lectures should go from being like the family singing around the piano to high-quality concerts.
That is a secondary teacher conception - the writer as an observer.
A good teacher offers practice, a bad one offers theories.
