World's Greatest Teacher (49 Quotes)

Ellen L. Kronowitz (California State University, San Bernardino)

2008 Pearson Education, Inc., U.S.A.

www.ablongman.com

Induction

I touch the future. I teach.

Christa McAuliffe (teacher & first civilian in space)

The beginning is the most important part of the work.

Plato

What teachers know and can do, makes the most difference in what children learn.

Linda Darling-Hammond (teacher educator and researcher)

All the resources we need are in the mind.

Theodore Roosevelt

First Day

You don't have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

At a round table, every seat is the head place.

German proverb

Clothes make the man.

Anonymous Latin Proverb

Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.

Mark Twain

We could learn a lot from crayons; some are sharp, some are pretty, some are dull, while others bright, some have weird names,

but they all have learned to live together in the same box.

Anonymous

The most important single ingredient in the formula of success is knowing how to get along with people.

Teddy Roosevelt

No one is ever old enough to know better.

Holbrook Jackson (English journalist)

Classroom Organization & Management

Knowledge is always accompanied with accessories of emotion and purpose.

Alfred North Whitehead

A student wants some kind of undisrupted routine or rhythm. He seems to want a predictable, orderly world.

Abraham Maslow

For every minute spent in organizing, an hour is earned.

Anonymous

Habits are cobwebs at first; cables at last.

Chinese Proverb

Great discoveries and improvements invariably involve the cooperation of many minds.

Alexander Graham Bell

Never trust a computer you can't throw out a window.

Steve Wozniak (co-founder Apple Computers)

The Internet is a giant international network of intelligent, informed computer enthusiasts, by which I mean,

"people without lives." We don't care. We have each other...

Dave Barry (humorist)

Positive Discipline

It is our continuing love for our children that makes us want them to become all they can be,

and their continuing love for us that helps them accept healthy discipline -- from us and eventually from themselves.

Fred Rogers (Mr. Rogers)

People's behavior makes sense if you think about it in terms of their goals, needs, and motives.

Thomas Mann (German novelist and essayist)

All human actions have one or more of these seven causes:

chance, nature, compulsion, habit, reason, passion, and desire.

Aristotle

Prevention is better than cure.

Proverb

No method nor discipline can supersede the necessity of being forever on the alert.

Henry David Thoreau (American poet, lecturer and essayist)

If I want to be great I have to win the victory over myself...self-discipline.

Harry S. Truman

When a teacher calls a boy his entire name, it means trouble.

Mark Twain

Planning & Organizing Subject Matter

A man who does not plan long ahead, will find trouble right at his door.

Confucius

It pays to plan ahead. It wasn't raining when Noah built the ark.

Anonymous

The best things in life are free.

American Proverb

I am not authorized to fire substitute teachers.

Bart Simpson (cartoon character)

Engaging All Learners

If you accept the expectations of others, especially negative ones, then you never will change the outcome.

Michael Jordan

A master can tell you what he expects of you. A teacher, though, awakens your own expectations.

Patricia Neal (actress)

I never teach my pupils; I only attempt to provide the conditions in which they can learn.

Albert Einstein

We have become not a melting pot but a beautiful mosaic.

Jimmy Carter

El que sabe dos lenguas, vale for dos.

(He who knows two languages is worth double.)

Spanish maxim

Saber es poder.

(Knowledge is power.)

Spanish maxim

Assessing & Communicating Student Progress

One had to cram all this stuff into one's mind for the examinations, whether one liked it or not.

This coercion had such a deterring effect on me that, after I had passed the final examination,

I found the consideration of any scientific problems distasteful to me for an entire year.

Albert Einstein

Attitude is a little thing that makes a big difference.

Winston Churchill

Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.

Sign hanging in Albert Einstein's office at Princeton

I didn't fail the test, I just found 100 ways to do it wrong.

Benjamin Franklin

But there are advantages to being elected President. The day after I was elected, I had my

high school grades classified "Top Secret."

Ronald Reagan

If you want your children to improve, let them overhear the nice things you say about them to others.

Haim Ginott (psychologist and author)

A Professional Life in a Balance

The real man smiles in trouble, gathers strength from distress, and grows brave by reflection.

Thomas Paine (patriot and philosopher)

Respect your fellow human beings, treat them fairly, disagree with them honestly,

enjoy their friendship, explore your thoughts about one another candidly,

work together for a common goal and help one another to achieve it.

Bill Bradley (NBA player and presidential candidate)

Don't worry about the world ending today. It's already tomorrow in Australia.

Charles Schulz

Your work is to discover your work and then with all your heart

give yourself to it.

Buddha

Last Day

No more pencils, no more books, no more teachers' dirty looks.

Nursery Rhyme

There will come a time when you believe everything is finished. That will be the beginning.

Louis L' Amour

Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.

Albert Einstein

There are no secrets to success. It is a result of preparation, hard work, and learning from failure.

Colin Powell

Digital Workshops for Teachers of Native American Students

The U.S. Department of Education's Teacher-to-Teacher Initiative, in collaboration with Office of Indian Education, is proud to announce the launch of the Digital Teacher Workshops for Teachers of Native American students. The workshops are designed to provide professional development opportunities for teachers of American Indians and Alaska Natives in all grade levels and content areas. The workshops support mastery of academic content and application by modeling strong teaching methods that have been successful in the classroom and providing a classroom application component, and additional resources.

These workshops are available FREE on the Internet at www.t2tweb.us/nativeamerican. Our first workshops focus on literature, community outreach, and reading.

November 27, 2007

Reluctant Disciplinarian - Phone Call Parent

A phone call to the student's parents is a common threat used. It is ineffective for any or all of the following eight reasons:

1. The student doesn't care.
2. The student likes to pretend that he doesn't care.
3. The student's parents do not have a phone.
4. The student's parents have phone, but the student does not live with his parents.
5. The student's parents have phone, the student lives with parents, but the number he gives on his information card is actually the number for Blockbuster Video.
6. The student's parents have phone, the student lives with parents, and the given number is correct. However, when called, the student would intercept the phone and tell the teacher that his parents are not home.
7. The student's parents have phone, the student lives with parents, and the given number is correct. However, when called, the student puts his older cousin on the phone to imitate the parent. If the student has a deep enough voice, he might even do the impersonation himself.
8. The student's parents have phone, the student lives with parents, the given number is correct, and his parent answered the phone. However, the parent will not want to do anything to help, despite the call.

1999 by Cottonwood Press, Inc., U.S.A.

www.cottonwoodpress.com

Doing What Works

The U.S. Department of Education has launched a new Web site to provide teachers, administrators and other educators with recommendations on effective teaching practices and examples of possible ways to implement those practices to help promote excellence in American education and improve student achievement. The first in the series focuses on English language learners. The new "Doing What Works" site, <http://dww.ed.gov/>, offers a user-friendly interface to quickly locate teaching practices that have been found effective by the department's research arm, the Institute of Education Sciences, and similar organizations. In addition, it cites examples of possible ways, although not necessarily the only ways, this research may be used to help students reach their academic potential.

November 20, 2007

Humorous Essay

Student Feedback

At the end of each lesson, it is wise to request feedback from students to check what was learned....

Written individualized feedback allows us to see how a student is integrating new knowledge with prior knowledge. The following humorous essay demonstrates that what we say is not always what a student hears. An upper grade student wrote this paper:

The human body is composed of three parts: the Brainium, the Borax, and the Abominable Cavity.

The Brainium contains the brain. The Borax contains the lungs and the liver. The Abominable Cavity contains the bowels. The bowels are a, e, i, o, and u.

Famous men with learning disabilities:

Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Galileo Galilei, Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, Louis Pasteur, Auguste Rodin, Thomas Alva Edison, Woodrow Wilson, Winston Churchill, George Patton, Albert Einstein, Nelson Rockefeller, George Burns...

The Duck

Duck walks into a hardware store. "Got any duck food?"

he quacks. "Sorry, no," says the proprietor. Duck leaves.

Next day the duck is back. "Got any duck food?" "No,"

says the proprietor. "I told you before. We don't carry it."

Next day he's back again: "Got any duck food?" The

proprietor glares at him. "Look, buddy, we don't sell duck

food. We never have and never will. And if you ask me

that one more time, I'll nail your webbed feet to the

floor."

Next day the duck is back. "Got any nails?"

"We're out of nails today," says the proprietor.

"Got any duck food?"

Reading to Learn - Extreme Positive Results

Children's Literature, Briefly 2nd Edition (pp. 282, 286-288)

Michael O. Tunnel & James S. Jacobs

Copyright 2000 by Prentice-Hall, Inc., Pearson Education, New Jersey

Readers usually underestimate their own importance. If a reader cannot create a book along with the writer, the book will never come to life. Creative involvement: That's the difference between reading a book and watching TV.

In watching TV, we are passive -- sponges; we do nothing. In reading we must become creators, imagining the setting of the story, seeing the facial expressions, hearing the inflection of the voices. The author and reader "know" each other; they meet on the bridge of words. (L'Engle 1980, p. 37-38).

The Classroom - Education and Trade Books

When children are interested in what they read, and read broadly -- whether fiction, nonfiction, or both -- they can learn much of value from trade books. People are able to grow and develop intellectually without the carefully monitored presentation of information typical of textbooks, as these examples show:

1. Robert Howard Allen has never seen his father. Robert's mother left him at age six to be raised by his grandfather, three great-aunts, and a great-uncle, all of whom lived in the same house in rural Tennessee. After his grandfather taught him to read, Robert regularly read the Bible to a blind great-aunt. "From age seven he read thousands of books -- from Donald Duck comics to Homer, James Joyce and Shakespeare...He began picking up books at yard sales, and by his early 20s he had some 2000 volumes" (Whittemore 1991, p. 4).

Robert Howard Allen stayed home and helped and read. He never went to school, not even for a day. At age 30 he easily passed a high school equivalency test, and at age 32 he showed up at Bethel College in McKenzie, Tennessee. Three years later he graduated summa cum laude (3.92 GPA), and continued his education by enrolling in graduate school at Vanderbilt University. Having earned his Ph.D. in English, he is currently a visiting lecturer at Murray State College in Kentucky (Whittemore 1991).

2. During her childhood, Lauralee Summer and her mother moved frequently from one homeless shelter to another. She remembers sitting on her mother's lap listening to stories. "'She was about 20 months old when I began reading to her every single night,' says [Lauralee's mother], who recalls a well-thumbed book of nursery rhymes. 'I read the same book every night. That was the only book we had'" (Gloster 1994, p. 1).

With money for her fourth birthday, Lauralee bought a See & Say book and taught herself to read. She soon was visiting libraries as mother and daughter moved among shelters and welfare hotels in three states. At age 10, Lauralee tried fourth-grade classes in two Santa Barbara schools, then quit in favor of reading to herself at the shelter. Eventually, she did attend school, an alternative program for nontraditional students during her senior year, where she took the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) and scored 1460, putting her in the 99.7 percentile of America's high school seniors. Lauralee applied to Harvard University and was admitted to the 1994 freshman class with a full scholarship (Gloster 1994).

3. Cushla Yeoman was born with multiple handicaps. Chromosome damage caused her spleen, kidneys, and mouth cavity to be deformed and prevented her from holding anything in her hand until she was three years old. She was diagnosed as mentally and physically retarded, and doctors recommended that she be institutionalized.

Cushla's parents had seen her respond to the picture books they read aloud, so they kept her home and increased their reading to fourteen picture books a day, week after week and month after month. By age five, Cushla was pronounced by doctors to be socially well adjusted and intellectually well above average (Butler 1980).

4. Wilbert Rideau committed a crime and was sent to the Louisiana State Prison for life. After a few angry years doing nothing but sitting and rebelling, Rideau picked up a book and spent a number of weeks reading it. Then he picked up another. Although he left school in eighth grade and English was his least favorite subject, soon he was reading two books a day on a variety of subjects. But he liked history best.

"I read about Napoleon, Mohammed, Lincoln, Washington, Bolivar, Sukarno," says Rideau. "I came to realize that a lot of people had terrible beginnings, but they lifted themselves up and gave something back to the world. I read Profiles in Courage (Pulitzer prize winner by John F. Kennedy). I'll never forget what it said -- that a man does what he must, regardless of the cost." One day, a guard passed him a copy of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. Its message of self-reliance became Rideau's credo. "I started seeing that no matter how bad things looked, it was all on me whether I made something of myself or I died in some nameless grave." (quoted in Colt 1993, p. 71)

What Rideau did was initiate and become editor of the The Angolite, the convict magazine that is required reading in training classes for new correctional officers and also the first prison publication ever nominated for a National Magazine Award (an honor it has since earned six times). In addition, it is the first to win the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award, a George Polk Award, and the American Bar Association Silver Gavel Award (Colt 1993, p. 72).

We are not suggesting that the best way to learn is outside of school. Yet people can and do learn beyond the walls of formal education. All of us need to recognize that books can create interest in readers, that people learn better when they are interested, and that people can learn a great deal by reading widely on their own.