Classroom Discipline Quotes

Teaching's hard! You need different skills: positive reinforcement, keeping students from getting bored, commanding their attention in a certain way.

That's a big deal for kids, when they come into the kitchen and the teacher is drinking coffee with mom. They react differently on the next day when you say: 'Sit down and shut-up!'

What we tell students in formal schooling: “Sit down, stay quiet, and absorb. Do this for 12 to 16 years and all will be well.

The most essential thing in dance discipline is devotion, the steadfast and willing devotion to the labor that makes the classwork not a gymnastic hour and a half, or at the lowest level, a daily drudgery, but a devotion that allows the classroom discipline to become moments of dancing too.

When I look back now I realize I was such an obnoxious kid but, you know, I went to schools like you, like a public school in New York so compared to the anarchy that was going on there, they really wouldn't - I wasn't like a bad kid. I saw people come in and punch the teachers.

I went to a Catholic high school and it seemed like every time I drew something for a class project, it either got thrown away by the teacher or something.

Students follow rules. Students complete assignments. The job of students - in part, at least - is to please their teachers. Now, I realize I may be exaggerating a little here, but basically I think I'm right: students do what they're told.

Fifty years ago, teachers said their top discipline problems were talking, chewing gum, making noise, and running in the halls. The current list, by contrast, sounds like a cross between a rap sheet and the seven deadly sins.

At the moment, I'm afraid that the discipline system doesn't give teachers the support that they need. One thing that I've been struck by is that the number of violent assaults on teachers increased last year. We need to be clear that teachers have the power they need in order to impose discipline.

School is established, not in order that it should be convenient for the children to study, but that teachers should be able to teach in comfort. The children's conversations, motion, merriment are not convenient for the teacher, and so in the schools, which are built on the plan of prisons, are prohibited.

I quickly learned that teaching students was far more complicated than managing adults. Why, you may ask? Here are three simple reasons: Your employees are paid to listen to you, students are not. In business, employees are selected based upon a search and interview process. Teachers do not select their students. In business, an insubordinate employee is fired. An insubordinate student is merely one more challenge for a classroom teacher.

I think we have to get back the value of behavior that is consistent with being taught: that's to say, respecting teachers, listening, and not always expecting your opinion to take precedence.

As a former teacher, I know how frustrating it must be to watch students walk out of class, particularly if they have important exams on the horizon.

I was not a good teacher; I didn't have the sort of edge one should have on the students, so I decided to do something else.

A teacher should be sparing of his smile.

For me, the dumbest rule is that you can't chew gum in school.

It's hard to get an education when teachers spend 70 percent of their time trying to discipline students.

There's nothing in the world like getting up in front of a high-school classroom in New York City. They won't give you a break if you don't hold them. There's no escape.

I had a public school education - 3,000 kids when I was there. And there were a lot of teachers who would just sit there. You'd come in and sign your name and the teacher would just sit there at the head of the class and you would literally just have to stay in your seat for 40 minutes and that was the only thing you'd have to do in class.

Teachers themselves know if there's a colleague who can't keep control or keep the interest of their class, it affects the whole school.

If you have a class of 35 children, and they're all smiling, and there's one little bastard, and he's just staring at you as if to say 'Show me', then he's the one you think about going home on the train.

The status quo was rote memorization and recitation in classrooms thronged with passive children who were sternly disciplined when they expressed individual needs.

I find teaching - I like it, but I find just walking into the classroom and facing the students very difficult.

It makes sense that we came up with our public school system during the Industrial Revolution because it's like everybody is a factory worker, eating their terrible food and going back to the room where you're silent and listening to an idiot. That's an epitomizing idea, getting called 'Nothing' for your whole high school experience.

It was also, however, a favorite place for novices to stand and wait for innocent students to slip up by talking too loudly between classes. No novice has ever been created that could keep Gina quiet, however.