“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 KAUFMANEducation is not a product: mark, diploma, job, money-in that order; it is a process, a never-ending one.
More Bel Kaufman Quotes
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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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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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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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Love is the ultimate giving, an expression of one’s best self.
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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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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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Mythology is studied in the school system because most of us come from it.
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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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… good teachers, like Tolstoy’s happy families, are alike everywhere.
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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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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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One of my students had written wistfully of a dream-school that would have “windows with trees in them.
BEL KAUFMAN