Teacher Quotes

“Teaching is about helping students to cultivate talents, foster understanding, and develop skills.”
― Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr

“Rules and consequences are not the best tools for classroom management. Giving students goals and rewards is more effective. It’s about putting systems in place that actively incentivize good behavior and passively decentivize bad behavior. In this way, as a teacher you can spend less time on managing behaviors and more time on educating and leading.”
― Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr

“Teachers have to model the behaviors they expect from students. If you expect your students to be respectful, you need to be the first one to be seen showing respect to every student and every other teacher. If you expect your students to be curious learners, then you yourself should be a curious learner who is willing to learn from your students sometimes. Do not ask of your students any behavior which you are not willing and able to model.”
― Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr, The Wealth Reference Guide: An American Classic

“Allowing bullying in the classroom is equivalent to excluding learning from the classroom. If bullying is present in the classroom it causes the classroom to not feel like a safe environment, and people do not learn in unsafe environments - except for those things which they feel will ensure their present safety.”
― Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr

“Teachers should treat students like the potential of who they are becoming and not who they are now. For example when you’re teaching a 12 year old student, remember that in only five years they will likely have a job and/or be preparing for university. This is how you cultivate the greatness in a person.”
― Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr

“The business of education is the most influential business in existence. Teachers collectively influence the minds of everyone to ever live. There's no one working in any company in any role that hasn't been influenced by several teachers on their journey; teachers whose lessons equipped them to succeed in some way.”
― Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr

“Every teacher should have real world experience in the subject they teach. To teach science, you should now be or have been a scientist or been in a job that uses science a lot. To teach business, you should now be or have been an entrepreneur or worked in the corporate world. This way, we can teach for real life and not for tests or abstractions.”
― Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr, The Wealth Reference Guide: An American Classic

“Every school should be a hub of creativity.”
― Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr

“Business Education starts in Elementary School and continues through to High School and then to University. The sooner we teach students the essentials of business, the more capable they'll be at thriving in business when they're older.”
― Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr, CEO of Mayflower-Plymouth

“Students need a teacher who inspires them. When students view their teacher as inspirational, it increases their appetite for learning.”
― Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr

“Teacher is the most important career in society. Without teachers, no other career would exist in mature form.”
― Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr

“She seems fragile in a way I wasn’t able to see before, not when she and I were in the coffee shop or in any of the stuff she posts online. I see now what should have been obvious, that she was lost and looking for a way to understand it all—him, herself, what he did, and why it still means so much despite it being so seemingly small. I can hear Strane asking, impatient and impenitent, the question that must still ring through her head: When are you going to get over this? All I did was touch your leg.”
― Kate Elizabeth Russell, My Dark Vanessa

“When students are inspired, they’ll do anything to gain new knowledge and understanding. They will seek to learn even more than the teacher seeks to facilitate learning.”
― Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr

“She looks up at me then, her eyes two blue pools. “What could we have done? We were just girls.” I know what she means—not that we were helpless by choice, but that the world forced us to be.”
― Kate Elizabeth Russell, My Dark Vanessa

“Thank you, Roa," said Instructor Ally. "And, Topher, is your mother still out of work?"

"Uh, yeah," Topher growled, picking at his fingernails.

"Thought so," said Instructor Ally. "If you're going to make fun of someone in my class, you might consider that you have yet to pass a single test and are more useful to your family as dragon food than as a student.”
― Alex London, City of Thieves

“He smiles, cocks his head. 'Why would it matter if someone saw you saying hello to me?'

I clench my jaw and breathe hard through my nose. His innocence feels put on, like he’s playing with me by playing dumb.

Still smiling, he leans back in his chair, and him doing that—leaning back, crossing his arms, looking me up and down as though I’m entertaining, just something to look at—makes anger flare up inside me, so sudden and strong I ball my hands into fists to stop from screaming, lunging forward, grabbing the Harvard mug off his desk and hurling it at his face.

I turn on my heel, stomp out of the room and down the hallway. I’m furious the whole way back to Gould, but once I’m in my room, the anger disappears and all that’s left is the dull-ache desire for meaning I’ve had for weeks now. He said he wanted to kiss me. He touched me. Every interaction between us is tinged now with something potentially ruinous, and it isn’t fair for him to pretend otherwise.”
― Kate Elizabeth Russell, My Dark Vanessa

“শিক্ষা ও শিক্ষক, দুটোই জাতির মেরুদন্ড।”
― Somen Kanungo, Founder, DEC Bangladesh

“Once in the taxi he recalled how Herbert had introduced him to a group of strangers. ‘I want you to shake the hand of the most brilliant student of our class at McGill. He could have been a success at anything he wanted. Instead he’s devoted his life to teaching.’ It was clear that they still took him for the freshly scrubbed idealist who had left McGill twenty years ago. They had no idea that he was exhausted, bitter, and drained, and that given the chance he would never become a teacher.”
― Mordecai Richler, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz

“There is no great teacher like God.”
― Lailah Gifty Akita

“Kids inherently love to learn. Adults either cultivate this love and multiply it, or they cause them to throw it away. You can be sure that if you have kid in your class who seems to despise learning, it is not of their own error but of the perversion of the school they have attended or the home where they reside.”
― Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr

“Good teachers make good citizens.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Either Reformist or Terrorist: If You Are Terror I Am Your Grandfather

“Pain is an unbelievable teacher if you lean into the lesson.”
― Carrie Fabris, All In: A Working Mom's Unapologetic Quest for a Juicy Life

“If I were a teacher, I would have a concealed handgun permit.”
― Steven Magee

“Be thankful to your teacher.”
― Lailah Gifty Akita

“Thank your teacher.”
― Lailah Gifty Akita

“I want to teach more than one hundred fifty kids a day," I told Adam. "I want to teach 150,000 kids a day.”
― Yousef Alqamoussi, Hadha Baladuna: Arab American Narratives of Boundary and Belonging

“Education and teachers, Both are the backbone of the nation.
- Somen Kanungo, Founder, DEC”
― Somen Kanungo

“Education and teachers, Both are the backbone of the nation.”
― Somen Kanungo, Founder, Nexgen Bangladesh

“A teacher is just like a candle, who provides hope, direction, and light in life while also nourishing the souls of individual students for a lifetime. All the time and effort invested in bringing out the best in children can never be repaid in mere words. We can be grateful for having wonderful teachers in our lives. Happy Teachers’ Day to all the teachers!”
― Shree Shambav, Journey of Soul - Karma

“Regret telling my English teacher in middle school that I would never like reading, sadly I can't write an email or letter though.”
― Zöe Surratt