Quotes

    "I've come to the frightening conclusion that I am the decisive element in the classroom. My personal approach creates the climate. My daily mood make the weather. As a teacher, I possess the tremendous power to make a child's life miserable or joyous. I can be a tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration. I can humiliate or humor, hurt or heal. In all situations, it is my response that decided whether a crisis will be escalated or de-escalated and a child humanized or dehumanized."

-Haim Ginott          

    "...the child is an ever-attentive witness of grown-up morality - or lack thereof; the child looks and looks for cues as to how one ought to behave, and finds them galore as we parents and teachers go about our lives, making choices, addressing people, showing in action our rock-bottom assumptions, desires, and values, and thereby telling those young observers much more than we realize."

 

        -Robert Coles   

(The Moral Intelligence of Children, 1998)

 

 

 

 

    "How was I to know that for 15 years I'd be the creative writing teacher at Stuyvesant High School, that the classes would go from three to five, that I'd read millions of words of adolescent angst, romance, ecstasy, that often I'd envy my own students their talent, that I probably learned more from them than they from me. What I learned, most of all, was that if you're teaching and not learning then you're not teaching, and if you don't enjoy yourself in the classroom, you might as well be driving a taxi."

 

            -Frank McCourt

(New York Times, April 14, 2002)