Quotes by Educators - Page 33

As I pen these words to leave a lasting record, I wonder myself where it all began.
Richard Peck
Grover spit expertly between his teeth. "You know, Nerburn," he said, "you're like those treaty negotiators we used to have to deal with. Always in a hurry. Sometimes there are preliminaries." "There are preliminaries and there are evasions," I said. "Look out there." I swept my hand across the blazing, parched horizon. "We've got to get moving if we want to get up there before it's a hundred and ten degrees." "Just relax. He's just doing it the Lakota way, by laying out the history. That's how we remember our history, by telling our story," "But does every story have to start with Columbus?" "Everything starts with Columbus. At least everything to do with white people." "But what's with the French fries?" "He likes to get rid of the salt." "No, the piles. First he insists on getting exactly twenty-eight, then he divides them into piles. It doesn't make any sense." A small smile crept across Grover's face. "How many piles?" he asked. "Four." He spit one more time onto the ground. It made a small puff of explosion in the dust. "Mmm. Twenty-eight French fries. Four piles of seven." He made a great charade of counting on his fingers. "Let's see. Four seasons. Four directions. Four stages of life. "Seven council fires. Seven sacred rituals. The moon lives for twenty-eight days. Yeah, I guess that doesn't make any sense." "That's crazy," I said. "What is it? Some kind of Lakota French fry rosary?
Kent Nerburn
Stories are just lies made to look like truth.
Johnny Rich
Job understood that he was nothing more than God’s invention and so too was his suffering
Johnny Rich
Is it murder to kill a man if the man never existed? To the man it is.
Johnny Rich
Is the writer cruel that makes his characters suffer only to bring them to triumph or tragedy in the end?
Johnny Rich
I know everything must be a lie, but I believe it anyway.
Johnny Rich
What has been his cause for searching the heavens day and night, for testing the limit of his reach hour by hour like a man trapped inside an expanding balloon? The reasons were as various as the days they consumed: to grasp the workings of the universe, to find something more beyond earth’s fretful compass, to put his name to a discovery and secure fame’s immortality, to be able to point to a map and proclaim simply: here I am.
John Pipkin
Her calculations have always held the utmost accuracy, but mathematics alone will not be enough to guide her; she must learn to trust in chance and, if need be, in accident.
John Pipkin
Each new scientific fact gives rise to new uncertainties, and every pattern of starlight holds both a record and a prophecy.
John Pipkin
The heavens are too immense, too beautiful and varied, to fit into the mind of any one deity; the murmured creeds of fathers and sons are no match for the astronomer’s gasp.
John Pipkin
Nothing in heaven or earth is content to be alone, and so there must always be something more. The universe is governed by a principle no more complicated than this: that a solitary body will forever attract another to itself.
John Pipkin
It is one of the great blessings of youth, this guiltlessness, the source of gentle sleep and peaceful days.
John Pipkin
Wisdom tolerates blustered opinions, the better to dismiss them later with discovery.
John Pipkin
It is only the sudden and unpredictable appearance of comets that spoils the immutable celestial sphere.
John Pipkin
The basis of English law is as simple as this: If you would know the future’s shape, look to the past.
John Pipkin
Is this not the very thing that drives an adventurous man to navigate uncharted oceans, to traverse continents and mountains, to pilot virgin estuaries and hidden coves—this promise of inscribing a name steadfast upon what he finds? There are few parcels of earth left to be claimed; yet even as the known world shrinks, the heavens grow ever more infinite. An explorer of the skies need never leave his home or fret over the swiftness of other expeditions; he might give whatever name he chooses to any new thing that wanders into his view.
John Pipkin
But if watching the sky is to be his duty, how should he begin? Now and then he has spotted one of the five bright planets or recognized a constellation, but he knows little about the turning of the heavens. When he contemplates the great distances between this and that, and the vast multitude of solitary objects spread over the celestial dome, he cannot fathom how one goes about searching for what is yet unknown.
John Pipkin
The same ratios that govern music give laws to optics and to the movement of the heavens as well. Simple. Elegant. Predictable.
John Pipkin
...but at night when he turns the awkward [telescope] skyward, he catches his breath at the clarity of the image and the vast populations of stars unknown to him until then, the riotous glittering in the dark crevices between constellations, a convocation of bright spirits waiting to be found.
John Pipkin
Sketches of mad skies spilling stars caught in spiraling gyres, diagrams for constructing sextants tall as a man and armillary spheres to mimic the motion of the cosmos. He decides that he must have all of it, that he will cram the little observatory with maps and charts, clocks and compasses, and instruments for bringing the sky nearer.
John Pipkin
As the eclipse progresses, a confusion of chattering birds sweeps low in search of dusk and their shadows skip over the water’s surface and it makes perfect sense that these small creatures should be so moved by events beyond their reckoning.
John Pipkin
So we will cover every possibility. We will take turns at the telescope. I will keep watch in the day, and at night you will take my place, and together we will see to it that no part of the sky goes unobserved.
John Pipkin
He tracks the rise and fall of the glittering darkness thronged with specks and tendrils of luminous secrets. Falling stars crackle in the cold air and prickle his skin. They flash in the corner of his vision where the eye’s discernment of light and shadow is most acute.
John Pipkin
The quiet brings to mind the multitude of men and women living out their days in solitude—each convinced that their fears and wants are unique to themselves—and she longs to press herself into their fold and be counted among those whose lives are meshed with the turning of the world.
John Pipkin
Here the sky is wrapped in silk. The breathings of so many men and animals, and the smoke of your coal, and the fog, oh, it is too much. The Paris sky is perfect. A man must see clearly, to see something new.
John Pipkin
Sometimes he counts himself to sleep by imagining the miles between stars like the succession of footsteps cleaving him from his home, as if mastering the distance in thought might blunt the separation. But if a man cannot return to the place of his birth, then what is there to stay his restless feet? What center will hold him from wandering endlessly? It should not be so difficult, he thinks, to know one’s place in the order of things.
John Pipkin
Time lost to pointless delay can never be regained. It is the most reprehensible kind of theft. Why was it that men did not grasp this simple fact? Money comes and goes and comes again, and knowledge can be acquired and forgotten and rediscovered, but time once lost is lost for good, each passing second irretrievable.
John Pipkin
Do you want the truth or fiction?
Jon Chopan
I played with children so that I could learn from them.
Shinichi Suzuki
TIME WENT ON, life with the children unfolding in its own ecosystem, small plastic toys seeming to grow up from the carpet like mushrooms, clothes falling to the floor like autumn leaves. Every once in a while she would blaze through the house and clean everything--at which point, the process would start all over.
Erica Bauermeister
She found herself wondering at what point in her life she had ceased to be Gulliver and had become the strings holding him to the ground.
Erica Bauermeister
No parent/home/child/teacher/school has an all-round 100 percent wholeness. We all have limitations and problems. But I must never think it is all or nothing. Perhaps I'd like to live in the country, but I don't. Well, maybe I can get the family to a park two times a week, and out to the country once every two weeks. Maybe I have to send my child to a not-so-good school. Well, maybe we can read one or two good books together aloud. If you can't give them everything, give them something.
Susan Schaeffer Macaulay
From the time he was young, he dressed the way you told him to dress; he acted the way you told him to act; he said the things you told him to say. He's been listening to somebody else tell him what to do... He hasn't changed. He is still listening to somebody else tell him what to do. The problem is, it isn't you any,ore; it's his peers.
Barbara Coloroso
Stories of her children when they were small, their round little bodies barely containing their personalities, which bloomed and glittered and melted into her.
Erica Bauermeister
It was interesting. Isabelle thought, the children that chose you. Some come through your body; others came in cars in the middle of the night.
Erica Bauermeister
The joy of reading with our children doesn't stop as they, and we, get older; it simply changes.
Paul Kropp
Children are not the people of tomorrow, but are people of today. They have a right to be taken seriously, and to be treated with tenderness and respect. They should be allowed to grow into whoever they were meant to be. 'The unknown person' inside of them is our hope for the future.
Janusz Korczak
It takes courage and maturity to realise your own story.
Horst Kornberger
There is a wisdom in children, a kind of knowing, a kind of believing, that we, as adults, do not have. There is a time when a kingdom needs its children.
Adam Gidwitz
Children love to polish brass and silver, then move on to polishing their own shoes.
Tim Seldin
Children with autism are colourful - they are often very beautiful and, like the rainbow, they stand out.
Adele Devine
My aim is to sort the jumble of information we throw at these children and present it in such a way that they will have a greater chance of achieving independence and fulfilment.
Adele Devine
Parents in the early half of the twentieth century were primarily concerned with the development of character in their children. They wanted to be certain that their children were ready to cope with adversity, for it was surely coming to them one day whether in personal or national life. The development of character involves self-discipline and often sacrifice of one's own desires for the good of self and others. Montessori education, developed in this historical period, reflects this emphasis on the formation of the child's character. However, parents today are more likely to say their primary wish for their children is that they be happy. In pursuit of this goal they indulge their children, often unconsciously, to a degree that is startling to previous generations. All parents need to remember that true happiness comes through having character and discipline, and living a life of meaningful contribution -- not by having and doing whatever you wish.
Paula Polk Lillard
To stimulate life, leaving it free, however, to unfold itself--that is the first duty of the educator.
Maria Montessori
There is no substitute for books in the life of a child.
Mary Ellen Chase
...we are partisan in favor of our own children and grandchildren, who we hope can live in a world that doesn't poison them when they drink the water, breathe the air, or make a living.
Bill Bigelow
We cannot live without meaning, that would preclude any sense of identity, any hope, any future.
Carlina Rinaldi
Standing side by side children with our heads together, we are trying to understand their learning based on what we observe as they use the social, technical, symbolic, and material resources at their disposal.
Denny Taylor
Between the dark and the daylight, When the night is beginning to lower, Comes a pause in the day's occupations, That is known as the Children's Hour.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Teachers should not fear going off plan if a better learning opportunity presents itself. Plans are plans, but children are living, breathing, creative people, who deserve to have their questions answered and original ideas explored.
Adele Devine
I urge you to be teachers so that you can join with children as the co-collaborators in a plot to build a little place of ecstasy and poetry and gentle joy
Jonathan Kozol
To reform the world - means to reform upbringing...
Janusz Korczak
It is the mystery of the unknownThat fascinates us; we are children stillWayward and wistful; with one hand we clingTo the familiar things we call our own,And with the other, resolute of will,Grope in the dark for what the day will bring
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Because most of us recognize that we will fight to protect our children, we cannot be absolute pacifists.
Nel Noddings
Love every child without condition, listen with an open heart, get to know who they are, what they love, and follow more often than you lead.
Adele Devine
This boy needs a dog.What makes you say that?He needs someone or something to play with besides his phone and an old man and an old woman doddering around.
Kent Haruf
I wuz bad. I did not meen to be. I wanted to see the litle peeple who lives in the radio. I could see the lits on. The radio fel on the flor. The lites won't even werk an thos peeple is ded.
Beatrice Culleton
It's our children who teach us how to be parents.
Susie Morgenstern
Just that sons and fathersAre like mirrors and daughters are soft
Richard L. Ratliff