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.
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.
There are many things which no teacher can convey to a child of three, but a child of five can do it with ease.
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.
there is plenty to be learned even from a bad teacher: what not to do, how not to be
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
The Dewey decimal system really works. So that's all I needed to know. Elementary school taught me that.
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.
