… good teachers, like Tolstoy’s happy families, are alike everywhere.
BEL KAUFMANLearning is a process of mutual discovery for teacher and pupil. Keep an open mind to their unexpected responses.
More Bel Kaufman Quotes
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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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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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Mythology is studied in the school system because most of us come from it.
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The heart has its reasons; it’s the mind that’s suspect.
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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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A teacher is frequently the only adult in the pupil’s environment who treats him with respect.
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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 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.
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Education can’t make us all leaders, but it can teach us which leader to follow.
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To the young, cliches seem freshly minted.
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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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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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You can’t laugh and be angry, you can’t laugh and feel sad, you can’t laugh and feel envious.
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Love is the ultimate giving, an expression of one’s best self.
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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 suggest just Good and Bad at the end of the term on report cards. Or maybe nothing. Frank Allen
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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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When giving comes directly from the heart, it can never disappoint or embarrass.
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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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One of my students had written wistfully of a dream-school that would have “windows with trees in them.
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People ate bread made of the shells of peas because there was no flour.
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Time collapses and expands like an erratic accordion.
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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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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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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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Education is not a product: mark, diploma, job, money-in that order; it is a process, a never-ending one.
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