Great Throughts Treasury

"A mother or father might be too preoccupied with how one child compares with another to be able to fully appreciate the uniqueness of the individual child."

"Because once upon a time, we grew up on stories and the voices in which they were told. We need words to hold us and the world to behold us for us to truly know our own souls."

"And I want to tell her? [that] changing your mind is one of the best ways of finding out whether or not you still have one."

"Everything I do is kind of a lesson, even if I am the only person who learns it."

"Here, let me break it down for you, so you know what I say is true: Teachers? Teachers make a difference! Now what about you?"

"By the time these students enter the workforce, many of the jobs they will apply for ill be in industries that don't even exist yet. That's a hard future to prepare someone for. Teachers have their sights set on the real goal: not to produce Ivy League graduates, but to encourage the development of naturally curious, confident, flexible, and happy learners who are ready for whatever the future has in store."

"How can you study geometry and not believe in a god? A god of perfect points and planes, surrounded by angels and angles of all different degrees..."

"Certainly teachers themselves can do a better job of letting the world know how hard their profession is, but frankly, they have real work to do and a lot of it, so they don't have a whole lot of free time on their hands."

"Great teachers will never be able to make up for bad parents, nor should they be expected to."

"In many ways, 'What Teachers Make: In Praise of the Greatest Job in the World' is just one big thank-you note to my teachers. The book is dedicated to my fifth and sixth grade English teacher, Dr. Joseph D'Angelo, a massive force of erudition, martial artistry, culture, and love."

"I grew up writing thank-you notes. Real, honest-to-goodness, pen-and-ink, stamped and posted letters. More than simple habit, it's about what the commitment to expressing your thoughts and feelings in writing says about the character of the writer. About the joy such notes bring to the reader."

"If you've ever been to a poetry slam, you know that the highest scoring emotion is self-righteous indignation: how dare you judge me. So in that way, the poem, 'What Teachers Make,' is an absolutely formulaic slam poem designed to allow me to get up on my soap box and say, 'Let me tell you what really makes me angry.'"

"In addition to being beat down, insulted, and burnt out ? or even as a result of those things ? teachers get lazy."

"No graduation speaker will ever tell you that the future is anything but uncertain. It never is. But graduations need not only be obsessed with looking ahead; a graduation can be a day on which we turn back and trace our steps to see how we ended up where we are."

"Not everything you learn in high school needs to be ?useful in life? in order to have value. Sometimes what you?re actually learning is how to buckle down and do the stuff you have to do whether you like it or not. When you?re in the middle of that and you haven?t been adequately briefed on why it?s important, I?m sure it feels like tedium."

"One definition of the word listening is ?being open to the possibility that you are wrong.? If you go through life knowing you are 100 percent right about everything, then you?re never really listening to anyone."

"One of the most important things that teachers teach students is you, you can work harder. You are mentally tougher than you think."

"Teachers get comfortable teaching the way they always have, and they forget to push the students to achieve a little more than everyone thought possible."

"Teachers shouldn't make the mistake of always thinking they're the smartest person in the room"

"Simply put, the best teachers are the ones you work your tail off for because in the end you just don't want them to think any less of you. You want and need their approval."

"Read to your children all of the time novels and nursery rhymes, autobiographies, even the newspaper. It doesn't matter; it's quality time. Because once upon a time we grew up on stories in the voices in which they were told we need words to hold us and the world to behold us for us to truly know our souls"

"Suzy smiled and the whole class laughed at me, but when she spoke, I heard a new sound, not the song of an angel, but the words of a woman on a pedestal, coming down."

"That's what teaching is, the art of explanation: presenting the right information in the right order in a memorable way."

"The best teachers that I had were always the ones I never wanted to disappoint."

"Teachers today are breaking down obstacles, finding innovative ways to instill old lessons, proving that greatness can be found in everyday places."

"The memory is a muscle, the more you use it, the stronger it gets."

"The only thing that surprises me is the characterization of teachers as lazy and greedy. Only someone with very little understanding of what teaching requires would say such a thing."

"The poem 'What Teachers Make' is not without its detractors. This one person wrote to me and said: 'Gee, Mr. Mali. You don't possibly have a teacher-God complex, do you?' And that was the first time I'd ever heard of that expression. So, yeah, I'm sure I have a teacher-God complex."

"There is no better outcome of one?s education, which the American philosopher William Durant called a progressive discovery of our ignorance."

"We're the most aggressively inarticulate generation to come along since, you know, a long time ago!"

"When students have thanked me in the past for being their teacher, I have always felt that it was actually my love for the art of teaching they were speaking to."

"Throw things away and love will bring them back, again, and again, and again. But most of all, love needs love, lots of it. And in return, love loves you and never stops."

"What kept me from wanting to ?kill all lawyers? was the knowledge that to despise an entire group based on the behavior of a few individuals is the definition of prejudice. I know there are good lawyers out there who fight for justice and get paid little. And yes, my poem takes a cheap shot at lawyers in general because it?s so irresistible. But my poem is also based in truth. That I had the patience to bite my tongue on the night of that party has more to do with not being witty enough to craft the poem (or something like it) on the spot."

"You see, I have a policy about honesty and ass-kicking, which is, if you ask for it, then I have to let you have it."