Teaching Burden Quotes

I trust the time is coming, when the occupation of an instructer [sic] to children will be deemed the most honorable of human employment. If it is a drudgery to teach these little ones, then it is the duty of men to bear a part of that burthen; if it is a privilege and an honor, then we generously invite them to share that honor and privilege with us.

To the teacher weighed down with paperwork, I say: you've been messed around too often. You came into teaching to spend your time teaching children not filling in forms.

No other job in the world could possibly dispossess one so completely as this job of teaching. You could stand all day in a laundry, for instance, still in possession of your mind. But this teaching utterly obliterates you. It cuts right into your being: essentially, it takes over your spirit. It drags it out from where it would hide.

The actual teaching itself becomes lost in a sea of paperwork and teachers soon realise that the very reason they entered this profession constitutes only a fraction of their working day.

Everybody is now so busy teaching that nobody has any time to learn.

But, because my private lectures and domestic pupils are a great hinderance and intteruption of my studies, I wish to live entirely exempt from the former, and in great measure from the latter. ... in short, I should wish to gain my bread from my writings.

To the distracting occupations belong especially my lecture courses which I am holding this winter for the first time, and which now cost much more of my time than I like. Meanwhile I hope that the second time this expenditure of time will be much less, otherwise I would never be able to reconcile myself to it, even practical (astronomical) work must give far more satisfaction than if one brings up to B a couple more mediocre heads which otherwise would have stopped at A.

My sister and I had resolved never to become teachers because the job seemed to demand so much. My mother always seemed to be working. Our dining room table was cluttered with papers waiting to be read and graded.

The more we try to improve our schools, the heavier the teaching task becomes; and the better our teaching methods the more difficult they are to apply.

As a teacher you are more or less obliged to pay the same amount of attention to everything. That can wear you down.

I feel exhausted if I teach too long.

Teachers should not need to have to buy books for the kids, or pencils and pens. That's absurd.