“What makes a good teacher today is what has always made a good teacher: command of a subject, a critical mind, a demanding nature, and an ability to inspire students to pursue knowledge for some end beyond mere financial rewards. A good teacher might be entertaining and funny, but shouldn’t set out to be. A good teacher may have broad experience with and skills using technology, but the mere possession of such experience and skills doesn’t make one a good teacher.”

“It is a truism today, in this highly technologically-developedculture, that students need technical computer skills. Equally truistic (and, not incidentally, true) is that the workplace hasbecome highly technological. Even more truistic – and farmore disturbing – are the shifts in education over the last twodecades as public elementary schools, public and private highschools, and colleges and universities have invested scoresof billions of dollars on “digital infrastructure,” computers,monitors and printers, “smart classrooms,” all to “meet thedemands” of this new technological workplace."We won’t dwell on the fact – an inconvenient truth? –that those technological investments have coincided with adecline in American reading behaviors, in reading and readingcomprehension scores, in overall academic achievement, in thephenomenon – all too familiar to us in academia – of “gradeinflation,” in an alarming collapse of our students’ understandingof their own history (to say nothing of the history of the rest of the world), rising ignorance of world and American geography, with an abandonment of the idea of objectivity, and with anincreasingly subjective, even solipsistic, emphasis on personalexperience. Ignore all this. Or, if we find it impossible to ignore,then let’s blame the teachers...”

“A Teacher is no good without the student and the student is no good without the teacher.”

“The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires.”

“My advice to people who want to teach is pretty simple and very likely to be ridiculed: don’t believe the bullshit. You’re not there to help students get skills for a workplace. You’re not there to make them more marketable. You’re not there to provide them with answers to petty, superficial questions. You’re not there to impress them – or yourself – with the latest technological wonder that promises to make something “better” but will probably only shorten some algorithmic process and benefit an employer. You’re not there to mass produce replaceable parts for the machinery of the global economy. You’re there for one reason and one reason only: to make them better people than they were when they came in.”

“Good teachers understand knowledge, but brilliant teachers understand ignorance”

“Experience is a good teacher, but she sends in terrific bills.”