Educational Challenges Quotes

I was a very earnest, hard working boy at school, but my parents were distressed because I was always bottom of the class. But I wasn't dilatory, I worked like crazy.

We are a nation of children letting horrible things happen, and flunking Calc.

For me, school was a nightmare. I struggled.

I was an appalling person to teach. At 14, I was pretty advanced. I would read all the books in a few minutes, and I was bored. It must have been awful for a teacher to have a bright boy who's giving them his undivided indifference.

I was dyslexic and didn't know it until I was 31. Couldn't do math, spell, or tell left from right - left was the elbow that stuck out the window while I drove.

When I was a kid they didn't call it dyslexia. They called it you know, you were slow, or you were retarded, or whatever. What you can never change is the effect that the words 'dumb' and 'stupid' have on young people. I knew I wasn't stupid, and I knew I wasn't dumb. My mother told me that. If you read to me, I could tell you everything that you read. They didn't know what it was. They knew I wasn't lazy, but what was it?

I had a lot of trouble in school to begin with. I got left back in kindergarten, and I was in special education. My teachers didn't have very much faith in me.

You can't separate me from my upbringing as a child overcoming learning disabilities and having to make my way through that.

When I first came to Los Angeles, I was a teacher in Compton. I know how in need schools are around the country.

Learning is not child's play; we cannot learn without pain.

People don't realise how dyslexia affects your confidence and how brutal it can be. People think you're dumb, and you know you're not. it's just how your brain works.

It is easy to carp at colleges, and the college, if he will wait for it, will have its own turn. Genius exists there also, but will not answer a call of a committee of the House of Commons. It is rare, precious, eccentric, and darkling.

It is a nuisance that knowledge can only be acquired by hard work.

I wasn't a troublemaker. I wasn't impertinent. The teachers liked me. But year after year, the comments on my report cards basically came down to a single point, and it was 100% accurate: I seemed to get nothing whatsoever out of all those long hours spent in the classroom.

I went to seven colleges. I was a professional transfer student. I had to drop out 'cause I couldn't see out the back window.

There's a certain point in chemistry and in calculus where I reached the end of my abilities, and I realized, 'This is where I'm stupid.'

Yo, I failed ninth grade three times, but I don't think it was necessarily 'cause I'm stupid.

Emile Zola was a poor student at his school at Aix. We are all so different largely because we all have different combinations of intelligences. If we recognize this, I think we will have at least a better chance of dealing appropriately with many problems that we face in the world.

Plasticene and self-expression will not solve the problems of education. Nor will technology and vocational guidance; nor the classics and the Hundred Best Books.

Everyone's brain works in a different way. I didn't feel smart in school; I just didn't get it. I thought I was an idiot. Until I got out.

For those of us who got into good colleges or the professions, did we stand up to that high school history teacher who told us some ridiculous lie about American history and say, "That's a ridiculous lie. You're an idiot"? No. We said, "All right, I'll keep quiet, and I'll write it in the exam and I'll think, yes, he's an idiot." And it's easy to say and believe things that improve your self-image and your career and that are in other ways beneficial to yourselves.

I'm from East Sheen, I went to public school where I learned Latin at the age of nine, and certain expectations were made of me to go to St Paul's, Oxbridge maybe, and all that kind of thing. And I failed systematically to meet the mark - who I am and what I should have been are two very different things.

In order to be Miss Anybody you had to have excellent grades, and I had terrible grades because of my dyslexia.

I have discovered few learning disabled students in my three decades of teaching. I have, however, discovered many, many victims of teaching inabilities.

I grew up thinking that because I couldn't read, I was stupid and would never amount to anything. I worked my way through college as a waitress and thought I wasn't capable of doing anything else. My grades in English were horrible, and I barely got through.