The main thing I am interested in is my experience as a teacher.
The class has become over the years fairly large, running to three hundred or more, but I always insist upon reading all the student folklore collections myself. Although this is a tall order, I look forward to it because I learn so much from it.
There are many things which no teacher can convey to a child of three, but a child of five can do it with ease.
You cannot be an educator or a teacher without relating to children with full insight. Their urge to imitate has been transformed into a receptivity based on a natural and uncontested relationship of authority, and you must take this into account in the broadest possible sense.
I used to know kids better because I was teaching in a classroom, but I still have a sense of comfort with them. I don't believe that kids have essentially changed.
Writing for children hadn't occurred to me when I was younger, but nine years of teaching in the upper elementary grades had given me a deep appreciation of the gifts and graces that are specific to individuals with 10 or 11 years of experience as human beings.
there is plenty to be learned even from a bad teacher: what not to do, how not to be
One may receive the information but miss the teaching.
A good teacher is like a good artist. They go right to the most difficult part of whatever's going on.
History class was a forty-minute squirm from which I would emerge unscathed by insight. Down the hall in English Lit, though, there were stories to be had, and it was stories I craved.
I've learned a lot about writing from listening to my students talk.
I loved teaching and I did a lot of work as a teacher's assistant in college, and my favorite experience was basically getting a laugh from a bunch of people because they had just understood something. Because I had shown them something they hadn't seen before, and it amused them. That's the combo platter. That's a perfect moment.
The Dewey decimal system really works. So that's all I needed to know. Elementary school taught me that.
I had an issue with dyslexia before they understood what dyslexia was. One of my teachers, Mrs. Anderson, taught me to look at it like a curveball. The ball breaks the same way every time. Once you get used to it, you can handle it pretty well.
Data adds concrete information to a teacher's observations and intuition, but it will never replace experience, personal relationships, and cultural understanding.
Faulkner turned out to be a great teacher. When a student asked a question ineptly, he answered the question with what the student had really wanted to know.
