Many spiritual teachers - in Buddhism, in Islam - have talked about first-hand experience of the world as an important part of the path to wisdom, to enlightenment.

Suffering is one of life's great teachers.

While technology and assessment can help complement the important work of our teachers, I worry that we are spending too much of our time testing.

I believe in teaching as a real job. I don't think it's a substitute for anything else. It's been shown to me that teachers can help, and the writing today is just as good as it was when I started out. Technology hasn't changed that.

Digital technology has several features that can make it much easier for teachers to pay special attention to all their students.

My mom is a teacher, my dad was a writer for television, his dad was a writer for television, and combining those two has been sort of the goal of my life.

My parents made it clear that I should never display even the slightest disrespect to individuals who had the power to let me skip a half grade or move into more challenging classes. While it was all right for me to know more about a topic than my sixth-grade teacher had ever learned, questioning her facts could only lead to trouble.

Ineffective substitute teaching is a problem that means thousands of hours of lost learning for America's students. It cannot be dismissed with a sigh and 'Just wait for the teacher to come back on Monday.'

I had a Spanish teacher in high school. I rarely got in trouble in her room because I felt I was disappointing her if I got a bad grade. That had more power over me than teachers who told me I talked too much. That level of respect I had for her made me not want to fail for her.

I was a teacher most of my life, which I loved. I had a very happy working life, and when I retired, I thought I must do something, and I've always read a lot of fiction - you learn so much from fiction. My sentimental education came mostly from fiction, I should say, so I thought I'd try.

I think day care is terrific. Kids get to be around other kids, and they're playing, and they're teaching each other. When I was in college, my summer job was being a preschool teacher. I loved it, and after that experience, I said I can't wait to put my kid in day care because I could see how much they loved it.

I learned early on that 'rabbi' means teacher, not priest.

I loved teaching and I did a lot of work as a teacher's assistant in college, and my favorite experience was basically getting a laugh from a bunch of people because they had just understood something.

I was a trial lawyer. At the same time, I was a teacher. I taught about the political and social content of film for American University. Then I left and became a teacher at the University of California at Santa Cruz. I taught about the political and social content of film, but I also taught a course in law for undergraduates.

I'm a teacher and a writer; my life is words. When I see the denigration of language, it hurts me, and it's easy to denigrate a word by trivializing it.

My mother was a high school arts teacher, so I was always surrounded by the arts.

I was 11 when a teacher suggested to my parents that they should send me to drama classes to curb my disruptive ways in the classroom. The next Saturday I was acting, and thereafter it became a ritual of my youth to see a show at the Belvoir on Sundays and, if I was lucky, another at the Opera House on Monday after school.

My mother's not a political person. She just doesn't want me to be mean... sometimes I have to be mean. It's like a parent or a teacher. Sometimes for the good of everybody you have to be a little bit strong, a little bit confrontational.

I was never any good in the school theatrical productions. I always got a role like the March Hare. A Latin teacher told me I might make a good actress, and that stuck in my memory.

My mother was a piano teacher, my father an inventor. He invented the reflective paint they still use on airstrips. They had faith in my ambition, and I think that made all the difference.

Given my age, I am pretty near the end, probably, of my career as a writer, a scholar, a teacher. And I wanted to speak of things I will not be able to do.

During my eleven years as a New York City public school teacher, I saw firsthand the impact that poverty has on the classroom. In low-income neighborhoods like Sunset Park, where I taught, students as young as five years old enter school affected by the stresses often created by poverty: domestic violence, drug abuse, gang activity.

My history teacher was utterly terrifying, but her lessons were very inspiring. She got me interested in people and stories, which then led me to acting.

My parents, grandmother and brother were teachers. My mother taught Latin and French and was the school librarian. My father taught geography and a popular class called Family Living, the precursor to Sociology, which he eventually taught. My grandmother was a beloved one-room school teacher at Knob School, near Sonora in Larue County, Ky.