To teach in a manner that respects and cares for the souls of our students is essential if we are to provide the necessary conditions where learning can most deeply and intimately begin.

bell hooks

Society and action without solitude would be meager and in the end make for a dwindling personality, perhaps. You can't eat with others and for others all day and all night. There has to be something that brings life-food from the inside.

May Sarton

In teaching you cannot see the fruit of a day's work. It is invisible and remains so, maybe for twenty years.

Jacques Barzun

Most teachers have little control over school policy or curriculum or choice of texts or special placement of students, but most have a great deal of autonomy inside the classroom. To a degree shared by only a few other occupations, such as police work, public education rests precariously on the skill and virtue of the people at the bottom of the institutional pyramid.

Tracy Kidder

Who dares to teach must never cease to learn.

John Cotton Dana

James Womack

Unless commitment is made, there are only promises and hopes; but no plans.

Peter F. Drucker

The only reason I always try to meet and know the parents better is because it helps me to forgive their children.

Louis Johannot

If schools are to be places that encourage new teachers, causing them to see teaching as an interesting and unique career, they have to be intellectually and socially challenging environments in which teachers read together, reflect on practice, develop curriculum with a local situated quality, and become conscious about the development of a learning community.

Vito Perrone

At times I feel drained, uninspired, and just plain tired. I've considered leaving teaching. . .

Elementary School Teacher

In his book Lives on the Boundary, Mike Rose describes teaching as 'a kind of romance.' Teaching as a kind of romance, the teacher the wooer: giving a pat on the back, offering conversation. Intriguing and novel imagery of what we do. Love for our students is one major impetus for keeping our passion in teaching alive.

Sonia Nieto

" Just make it through the year," said the teacher sitting next to me at one of the first department meetings of the school year. "Wait to think about what worked and what didn't until it's all over."

And though my colleague was trying to be supportive, his words served as a reminder that many teachers--both new and seasoned--think that a new teacher's major goal is to survive the school year.

Portland (OR) High School Teacher (First Year)

You need only claim the events of your life to make yourself yours. When you truly possess all you have been and done. . .you are fierce with reality.

Florida Scott-Maxwell

From grade school on, education is a fearful enterprise. As a student, I was in too many classrooms riddled with fear, the fear that leads many children, born with a love of learning, to hate the idea of school. As a teacher, I am at my worst when fear takes the lead in me, whether that means teaching in fear of my students, or manipulating their fears of me.

Parker Palmer