School district policies and practices have not kept pace with student and teacher needs.

I was a good student. My mom is a teacher, and her side of the family is all teachers. She put a big emphasis on getting good grades.

I have taught some master classes and things at my alma mater and sometimes at my kids' school. I will go in and talk to the theater students. I wouldn't really call myself a teacher.

My students know I have a life, they know I've written about my life. They know some detail, probably more than they know about their physics teacher, but I would've told them anyway!

Writing is very cathartic for me. As a teacher, I hear many students say that writing can be painful and exhausting. It can be, but ultimately I believe that if you push through, the process is healing and exhilarating.

I've always been - as a teacher, as graduate student, as a student, and I think, really, as a child - I've been interested in poems, but not so much for what the take home pay is, what you might sum up from them in moral or intellectual terms or whatever, but what's in the certain lines and how lines relates to other lines.

For one thing, I teach my students what my teacher for twenty years, Paul Gavert, told me, 'The voice follows... the voice follows everything about you... who you are.'

As a student I learned from wonderful teachers and ever since then I've thought everyone is a teacher.

Students never think it can be the teacher's fault and so I thought I was stupid. I was frustrated and would come home and cry because I couldn't do it. Then we got a new teacher who made math accessible. That made all the difference and I learned that it's how you present it that makes it scary or friendly.

This is at the heart of all good education, where the teacher asks students to think and engages them in encouraging dialogues, constantly checking for understanding and growth.

Prior to being allowed to enter the profession, prospective teachers should be asked to talk with a group of friendly students for at least half an hour and be able to engage them in an interesting conversation about any subject the prospective teacher wants to talk about.

In a Glasser Quality School there is no such thing as a closed book test. Students are told to get out their notes and open their books. There is no such thing as being forbidden to ask the teacher or another student for help.

What students lack in school is an intellectual relationship or conversation with the teacher.

Faulkner turned out to be a great teacher. When a student asked a question ineptly, he answered the question with what the student had really wanted to know.

It is not easy to imagine how little interested a scientist usually is in the work of any other, with the possible exception of the teacher who backs him or the student who honors him.

Teachers make a difference, and we would serve our students better by focusing on attracting and retaining the quality teachers by raising teacher pay.

I felt like I was a teacher. But nowadays, I am as much a student of his. He writes a lot of what we play.

In a sinful world, no community can exist for long where nobody is ever held accountable: no teacher would grade a student's performance; no citizen would sit on a jury or call a failed leader to account.

Yeah, I would go to New England Conservatory a lot. My orchestra teacher ran a program for minority students there.

The crudest thing I've done as a teacher was to require students to write a national anthem for their country and sing it themselves.

I'd never been a teacher before, and here I was starting my first day with these eager students. There was a shortage of teachers, and they had been without a math teacher for six months. They were so excited to learn math.

I loved the idea of making history interesting for kids! When Scholastic approached me about 'The 39 Clues', I immediately started going through the 'greatest hits' from my years as a social studies teacher, and picked the historical characters and eras that most appealed to my students.

Connie Heermann is a Freedom Writer teacher. I believe she represents the best of what dedicated teachers can be because she chose to serve her students, not her school board.

As a former high school teacher and a student in a class of 60 urchins at St. Brigid's grammar school, I know that education is all about discipline and motivation. Disadvantaged students need extra attention, a stable school environment, and enough teacher creativity to stimulate their imaginations. Those things are not expensive.