Neil deGrasse Tyson Quotes

I don't know why people question the academic training of an athlete. Fifty percent of the doctors in this country graduated in the bottom half of their classes.

It's unfortunate that sometimes in schools, there's this need to have things quantified and graded.

I was told that I had to give grades to the students, which I wasn't particularly interested in doing.

I was in that part of the class that made the top half possible.

I always have to bring back an all-A report card.

Whatever the course, whether the course was boring or interesting to me, whether I was talented in mathematics or not talented in languages, my parents expected A's.

I passed the 11-plus and went up to the senior school, where my two older sisters had already gone. I was in the 'A' stream, but in the third year, they asked me to give up Latin; no one had ever got 7 per cent before.

C is a passing grade. You don't need straight A's to be a scientist, despite what you may have heard.

I was, like, the guy who sat at the front of the class and did his homework and did everyone else's homework and got A grades.

People are still programmed to think that if your child doesn't get straight As, get A-levels and go to a Russell Group university, that somehow they are not going to achieve in life. I think that's sad.

I was going to college on a full scholarship. I graduated summa cum laude. I was always on the dean's list. I was never a kid that started any kind of trouble.

My grade point average went from a 2.2 to a 4.0 over the summer. I wanted to get straight A's. I decided to get straight A's. I didn't want people to think I was dumb. And when you get straight A's once, its easier.

I was valedictorian. Did I enjoy going to school? I hated it. It wasn't a choice on my part, it was expected.

You can't eat straight A's.

We send our kids off to school to major in labeling and think the ones who do it best deserve the highest grades.

The job of the school is to teach so well that family background is no longer an issue.

Schools teach you to imitate. If you don't imitate what the teacher wants you get a bad grade. Here, in college, it was more sophisticated, of course; you were supposed to imitate the teacher in such a way as to convince the teacher you were not imitating, but taking the essence of the instruction and going ahead with it on your own. That got you A's. Originality on the other hand could get you anything -- from A to F. The whole grading system cautioned against it.

I did a lot of thinking, and used mental activity to relieve whatever feelings I had. I became very left-brained, and I was good in school. That is, I was a smart kid.

When you succeed at keeping almost everyone in school, you must figure out ways to educate everyone you keep in school.

Your grades are not your destiny: they're just letters and numbers which rate how well you performed in one artificial arena, once.

I wanted to get everything right. I was super nerdy and academic. I got so much satisfaction out of getting good grades.

The pressure on kids is high to get good grades. In my time, no one cared about it. My father looked at them but he didn't really make much fuss about them.

Reducing children to a test score is the worst form of identity theft we could commit in schools.

The ladder was there, from the gutter to the university, and for those stalwart enough to ascend it, the schools were a boon and a path out of poverty.

The premium so often put in schools upon external "discipline," and upon marks and rewards, upon promotion and keeping back, are the obverse of the lack of attention given to life situations in which the meaning of facts, ideas, principles, and problems is vitally brought home.