I was a teacher for a long time. I taught at a community college: voice, theory, humanities. And nowadays, music education is a dying thing. Funding is being cut more and more and more.
My mother is a special education teacher but also an artist, and my father an advertising executive. They are about as wacky as you can get without being alcoholics.
I want to be a lawyer, a dancer, an actress, a mother, a wife, a children's author, a distance runner, a poet, a pianist, a pet store owner, an astronaut, an environmental and humanitarian activist, a psychiatrist, a ballet teacher, and the first wom...
But I think that any young drummer starting out today should get himself a great teacher and learn all there is to know about the instrument that he wants to play.
I have come to believe that a great teacher is a great artist and that there are as few as there are any other great artists. Teaching might even be the greatest of the arts since the medium is the human mind and spirit.
There's a film I did called 'Front of the Class', about a teacher who had Tourette's. That was a beautiful blend of drama and comedy. There's some great moments of levity in the script.
Among the great names that adorn the roll of Nobel prize-winners in Medicine is that of Otto Meyerhof, my admired teacher and friend, to whose inspiration, guidance and encouragement I owe so very much.
I started in the kitchen of a Holiday Inn in Birmingham. I wanted to be a sponge, wanted to learn and progress. I knew I didn't want to work in a hotel forever, but I had some good teachers there.
Knowing what to expect from a teacher is a really good thing, of course: It lets you get the right answers more quickly than you would otherwise.
Good teachers must inspire children to work hard - make projects and give them good marks even if genuine projects look crude and unprofessional.
I'm blessed with a good pair of ears. That's how I fooled my piano teacher. I'd watch his fingers and I'd listen to it, and I just kind of basically learned it by myself.
Teachers are sort of faced with a thankless task, because no matter how good they are, unless they find a way to personally rationalize the rewards of their effort, nobody else is really going to do it for them en masse.
From the time I was ten, I thought of myself as 'good with words,' thanks to a perceptive and supportive fifth grade teacher.
My parents wanted me to be a teacher. Because I could work most of the year and pursue the things that I love to do during the summer. It just seemed like a good plan.
I guess by taking lessons early on, and really trying to play all the rudimentary stuff, and try to have it sound as good as my teacher. It took a lot of practice, which I enjoyed, and still do.
When I talk to teachers they tell me the things they'd most like from any government are a reduction in bureaucracy, support to help ensure good discipline and a reformed Ofsted.
I think sometimes parents and teachers fail to stretch kids. My mother had a very good sense of how to stretch me just slightly outside my comfort zone.
I think good actors are born with a kind of native gift. When you study too much with an acting teacher, that gets taken away. You lose your sense of spontaneity.
Great artists make the roads; good teachers and good companions can point them out. But there ain't no free rides, baby.
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.
The parents have a right to say that no teacher paid by their money shall rob their children of faith in God and send them back to their homes skeptical, or infidels, or agnostics, or atheists.
