A good teacher who can take the zero pay and help kids develop physically, emotionally, socially, is literally an angel.
So what does a good teacher do? Create tension - but just the right amount.
A good teacher must know the rules; a good pupil, the exceptions.
A good teacher must be able to put himself in the place of those who find learning hard.
To be successful in anything, you have to have a passion for it, and that leads to being enthusiastic and demanding. I didn't have it for history. So I wouldn't have been a good teacher in that area. But I had it for basketball. And that's what coaching is at every level: it's about teaching.
It's good to have a good teacher, but you always need a pretty good student.
I have learned that, although I am a good teacher, I am a much better student, and I was blessed to learn valuable lessons from my students on a daily basis. They taught me the importance of teaching to a student - and not to a test.
A good teacher is a determined person.
That is the difference between good teachers and great teachers: good teachers make the best of a pupil's means; great teachers foresee a pupil's ends.
Good teachers know how to bring out the best in students.
I don't have freedom in the United States to go into a public school and preach the Gospel, nor is a student free in a public school to pray, or a teacher free to read the Bible publicly to the students. At the same time, we have a great degree of freedom for which I am grateful.
I read a lot of comic books and any kind of thing I could find. One day, a teacher found me. She grabbed my comic book and tore it up. I was really upset, but then she brought in a pile of books from her own library. That was the best thing that ever happened to me.
If you are giving a graduate course you don't try to impress the students with oratory, you try to challenge them, get them to question you.
My grandmother wanted my father to be a teacher because she was a teacher. He didn't go down that road until much later in life; he just kind of retired after almost 20 years as being a visiting lecturer at Stanford, where he got his graduate degree.
Over my life as a teacher, women have been too quiet. I'm quiet myself. I don't think I said three words the whole of graduate school.
My attitude toward graduate students was different, I must say. I used graduate students as colleagues: I gave them the best problems to work on, and I encouraged them.
My art teacher told me I'd be suited to graphic design, but I just couldn't, because it was what my dad had done.
When I was very, very young, seven years old, I heard there was school where you could go to learn to draw. That was my absolute driven passion, to become an artist or a painter. So the romantic realist in me, I studied to be a graphic design artist and an art teacher.
I have come to believe that a great teacher is a great artist and that there are as few as there are any other great artists. Teaching might even be the greatest of the arts since the medium is the human mind and spirit.
Failure is a great teacher, and I think when you make mistakes and you recover from them and you treat them as valuable learning experiences, then you've got something to share.
