You know, it's been proven that 35 to 40 hours a year with one-on-one attention, a student can get one grade level higher.
Students may not remember what you try to teach them, but they will never forget who you are and what feelings you created in their mind.
Writing seems to free them (students) of the idea that math is a collection of right answers own by the teacher – a body of knowledge that she will dispense in chunks and that they have to swallow and digest.
One of our professors described a lecture as 'a mystical process by which the notes on the pad of the lecturer pass on to the pad of the student, without passing through the mind of either'.
It can be summed up in one sentence. Does this person have something to teach my students? No one has ever let us down.
As a financial historian, I was quite isolated in Oxford - British historians are supposed to write about kings - so the quality of intellectual life in my field is much higher at Harvard. The students work harder there.
We are in a time, because of the proliferation of online media and a hundred channels on cable, where teenagers and young adults and eight- and nine-year-olds do not read enough. And the SAT is very unforgiving for students who do not read.
I remember doing a little student film where we had a guy that couldn't pull focus. We ended up spending three times the amount of time shooting this thing as opposed to if the guy could've just pulled focus.
Let's say a Soviet exchange student back in the '70s would go back and tell the KGB about people and places and things that he'd seen and done and been involved with. This is not really espionage; there's no betrayal of trust.
John Milton: Law is the ultimate backstage pass. There are now more students in law schools than lawyers walking the streets.
Mr. Ray: Well, hello Nemo. Who's this? Nemo: Exchange student. Squirt: I'm from the EAC, dude. Mr. Ray: Sweet! Nemo, Squirt: Totally!
Professor McGonagall: Professor Moody! What are you doing? Professor Moody: Teaching. Professor McGonagall: Teach - is that a student? Professor Moody: Technically it's a ferret.
So that the failures to pass a civil rights bill isn't because of Black Power, isn't because of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee; it's not because of the rebellions that are occurring in the major cities.
The subject of Finnish poetry ought to have a special interest for the Japanese student, if only for the reason that Finnish poetry comes more closely in many respects to Japanese poetry than any other form of Western poetry.
Perhaps there is an idea among Japanese students that one general difference between Japanese and Western poetry is that the former cultivates short forms and the latter longer ones, gut this is only in part true.
Poetry is the most subtle of the literary arts, and students grow more ingenious by the year at avoiding it. If they can nip around Milton, duck under Blake and collapse gratefully into the arms of Jane Austen, a lot of them will.
When I was a student, I studied philosophy and religion. I talked about being patient. Some people say I was too hopeful, too optimistic, but you have to be optimistic just in keeping with the philosophy of non-violence.
If I can get some student interested in science, if I can show members of the general public what's going on up there in the space program, then my job's been done.
I joined the Wildlife Conservation Society, working there, in 1995, but I started working with them as a student in 1991. I was appointed as a teaching assistant at my university because I accomplished with honor.
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.
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.
