“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.
BEL KAUFMANTeachers 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.
More Bel Kaufman Quotes
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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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I had used my sense of humor; I had called it proportion, perspective. But perspective is distance.
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Education is not a product: mark, diploma, job, money-in that order; it is a process, a never-ending one.
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I want to point the way to something that should forever lure them, when the TV set is broken and the movie is over and the school bell has rung for the last time.
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Never mind the cream; it will always rise to the top. It’s the skim milk that needs good teachers.
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I feel no different than I felt at 99, 98 or 97. Just because you live a long time, you get all this attention. Just because you survived? Of course, I survived a lot.
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“Language Arts Dept.” is the English office; “literature based on child’s reading level and experiential background” means that’s all they’ve got in the Book Room; “non-academic-minded” is a delinquent; and “It has come to my attention” means you’re in trouble.
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Learning is a process of mutual discovery for teacher and pupil. Keep an open mind to their unexpected responses.
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I like the word OLD. Not senior, that’s for proms. Older? Older than whom? ‘Old’ is honorable and ripe
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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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One of my students had written wistfully of a dream-school that would have “windows with trees in them.
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Time collapses and expands like an erratic accordion.
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Love is the ultimate giving, an expression of one’s best self.
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I’ll never retire as long as I live—that’s like retiring from life! I’ll never stop writing, teaching, lecturing. If you’re in good health, living is exciting on its own.
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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