Educational Pressure Quotes

When I was teaching, I gave a lot of my mind and anxiety to it. There was always something clenched and anxious in me until the classes were over.

We're so used to the tests telling me if I'm smart or not. It's telling me if I know the material or not.

You know when I was a kid, I hated every day I was in school, from the kindergarten right through to my last day of high school.

A lot of times, kids go to college and take a major because they do what they think they're supposed to do. I told them I believe 90 percent of America gets up in the morning and drives to a job they hate. That could have happened to me in the hotel industry.

It's been a horrifying academic secret for decades that the children who walk away with the highest formal honors, the valedictorians and National Merit Scholars, have a horrendous performance record in later life.

It was a competitive examination [in Boston Latin School]. Poor kids, Brahmans, middle-class kids. The masters, as the teachers were called, didn't give a damn about - how we felt, what was - things like at home. I mean, this goes against the current grain. All they thought about was: 'You're here. You made the exam. You can do the work. And if you can't, we'll throw you out.'

School used to be an escape. Now it's just another place with too much pressure, too much confrontation, & so not enough joy.

I chose to be a maths teacher because I thought the marking would be easy. You'd just tick and cross, whereas if you're an English teacher, you've got to read essays. Then they said I had to analyse the methodology. It takes an eternity, it's insane!

Showing up at school already able to read is like showing up at the undertaker's already embalmed: people start worrying about being put out of their jobs.

We put so much pressure on kids to excel in school at such a young age.

It was just expected that I would go to college. Both my parents are teachers and they tolerated acting, but I was going to go to a school of quality or bust. Which made my downshifting back to acting afterward a little difficult.

It worries me that undergrads and high school students are forced into books they aren't ready for, like Faulkner's, and then they are afraid of putting their toes in the water again.

I should have liked to be asked to say what I knew. They always tried to ask what I did not know. When I would have willingly displayed my knowledge, they sought to expose my ignorance. This sort of treatment had only one result: I did not do well in examinations