Best marks go to cheaters and memorizers. Marks depend on memorizing and not on real knowledge. When you cram into your head for a test you may get a high mark but forget it the next day. That’s not an education.
BEL KAUFMANThe preciousness of every moment is emphasized with every tick of the clock. Isn’t it a magnificent day today?
More Bel Kaufman Quotes
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… good teachers, like Tolstoy’s happy families, are alike everywhere.
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“Let it be a challenge to you” means you’re stuck with it; “interpersonal relationships” is a fight between kids; “ancillary civic agencies for supportive discipline” means call the cops.
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The clerical work is par for the course. “Keep on file in numerical order” means throw in wastebasket. You’ll soon learn the language.
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I so enjoy being old because for the first time I don’t have to do anything-work, teach, study. I feel very good about myself-and at my age I can say no to anything now if I don’t want to do it. What a liberating word.
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Time collapses and expands like an erratic accordion.
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If a teacher wants to know something why doesn’t she look it up herself instead of making we students do it? We benefit ourselves more by listening to her, after all she’s the teacher!
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I had used my sense of humor; I had called it proportion, perspective. But perspective is distance.
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To the outside world, of course, this job is a cinch: 9 to 3, five days a week, two months’ summer vacation with pay, all legal holidays, prestige and respect.
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One of my students had written wistfully of a dream-school that would have “windows with trees in them.
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Teachers try to make us feel lower than themselves, maybe because this is because they feel lower than outside people. One teacher told me to get out of the room and never come back, which I did.
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I suggest just Good and Bad at the end of the term on report cards. Or maybe nothing. Frank Allen
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And that’s it; that’s why I want to teach; that’s the one and only compensation: to make a permanent difference in the life of a child.
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My mother, for example, has the pleasant notion that my day consists of nodding graciously to the rustle of starched curtsies and a chorus of respectful voices bidding me good morning.
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The preciousness of every moment is emphasized with every tick of the clock. Isn’t it a magnificent day today?
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I am writing this during my lunch period, because I need to reach towards the outside world of sanity, because I am overwhelmed by the sheer weight of the clerical work still to be done, and because at this hour of the morning normal ladies are still sleeping.
BEL KAUFMAN