Quotation Saturday, on Sunday Again
Mamacita says: You all know by now that I love a good quotation. Words have such mighty and majestic power: they can make us laugh; they can make us cry; they can make us cower in fear, or stand tall with pride, or melt with love. Name it, and words can make us feel or do it. Wisely chosen words make us respect someone, or not. Words can inspire us, and words can fill us with disgust. Or longing. Or remorse. Or happiness. Or nostalgia. So much strength in words. . .there are no words to fully describe what words can do. Many words, and no words.
And, of course, other people’s words are far more powerful than mine. Funnier, too.
“There never was a rule that didn’t have to be broken at some time, and the man who doesn’t know when to break a rule is a fearful pain in the neck.” –William Feather
“The price one pays for pursuing any profession or call, is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.” –James Baldwin
“Not to know is bad; not to wish to know is worse.” –West African Proverb
“Children, I grant, should be innocent; but when the epithet is applied to men or women, it is but a civil term for weakness.” –Mary Wollstonecraft*
“So live that you wouldn’t be ashamed to sell the family parrot to the town gossip.” –Will Rogers
“. . . he who does not increase his knowledge diminishes it; he who refuses to learn, merits extinction.” –Talmud
“A mind all logic is like a knife all blade. It makes the hand bleed that uses it.” –Tagore
“I guess the definition of a lunatic is a man surrounded by them.” –Ezra Pound
“I hasten to laugh at everything for fear of being obliged to weep at it.” –Pierre De Beaumarchair
“You don’t look in the mirror to see life; you gotta look out of the window.” –Drew Brown
“We do not really know anything at all until a long time after we have learned it.” –Joseph Joubert
“Happiness is not the absence of conflict, but the ability to cope with it.” –Anonymous
“Do not assume that the other fellow has intelligence to match yours. He may have more.” –Terry-Thomas
“He who is firmly seated in authority soon learns to think security, and not progress, the highest lesson of statecraft.” –J.R. Lowell
“Do not fear when your enemies criticize you. Beware when they applaud.” –Vo Dong Giang
“Earnest people are often people who habitually look on the serious side of things that have no serious side.” –Van Wyck Brooks
“It’s the most unhappy people who most fear change.” –Mignon McLaughlin
“Eccentricity is like having an accent. It’s what “other” people have.” –Oliver Sacks
“Some people crave baseball. I find this unfathomable; however, I do understand how someone could get excited about playing a bassoon.” –Frank Zappa
“Sometimes I think war is God’s way of teaching us geography.” — Paul Rodriguez
“A headline is not an act of journalism; it is an act of marketing.” –Harold Evans
“Take a rest; a field that has rested gives a beautiful crop.” –Ovid
“If a man does not work passionately – even furiously – at being the best in the world at what he does, he fails his talent, his destiny, and his God.” –George Lois
“All of us are mad. If it weren’t for the fact that every one of us is slightly abnormal, there wouldn’t be any point in giving each person a separate name.” –Ugo Bette
A good quotation is an education, isn’t it. Sometimes, a really good one can make my skin tingle and my brain light up in one of those big areas we never use. Maybe a really good combination of words is the spark we need to heat up those empty lobes and see what’s going on in there.
*Bonus points if you know what she wrote!
Mamacita, Scheiss Weekly
Less Ignorant Daily, and the Education Buzz
Mamacita says: The latest Education Buzz (formerly Carnival of Education) is now up over at Bellringers, and if you are a parent, student, doctor, lawyer, construction worker, fireman, or any of the other Village People or citizens of the planet, you owe it to yourself, your kids, and your planet to click on over and read this month’s posts by teachers and parents. In fact, why don’t you submit something of your own, or something about education you’ve read elsewhere, for the next Education Buzz?
Remember, if you don’t take the trouble to find out what’s going on and what people are saying about it, you won’t KNOW what’s going on. Not to keep updated is to choose ignorance. Choosing ignorance is one of the most horrible things a person can do, no matter what the topic. Education is what separates the sheep from the goats, because not to understand that everything is connected to everything else, and that nothing exists in isolation, and how to connect these dots to form ideas and understanding, is to actively choose ignorance. We can’t help being ignorant about things we’ve never been exposed to, but to choose non-exposure is to choose ignorance. Oh, and those people who take great pride in refusing to learn? They are ignorance, personified. Harsh? I don’t really think so. In fact, I have not even begun to express my disgust for people who are able, yet actively choose to be ignorant. We are all ignorant of many things, but if we continue to learn, to be less ignorant daily, we’re on our way.
Oh, and please don’t forget that ignorance and stupidity are not the same thing. Not the same thing at all, at all.
Parents, professional educators, and all inhabitants of the planet, simply must keep learning. If we stop learning, “they” might as well bury us, because such people are as good as dead. Worse, even, because dead people don’t bring others down. Ignorant people do.
CONSTANT VIGILANCE, as Alastair Moody would say. To choose ignorance is to choose a kind of death.
P.S. When I took my beautiful daughter to her college dorm and went back home without her, itself a traumatic thing, “Less ignorant every day” became our rallying cry for her college education. We still quote it, laughing, when we learn new things and share them. Why don’t y’all use it, too?
Less ignorant daily. Bring it on, universe.
Hope Is More Than Just The Thing With Feathers. . . .
While it is true that I tend to rant and rave about how far too many students (one is too many) can’t read or write or add two numbers together, and how far too many students (one is too many) can’t behave themselves, have no intention of learning anything, and have dedicated themselves to preventing the nice kids from learning anything, either, it is also true that I have nothing but admiration and fondness for the students who work hard, pay attention, behave themselves, and laugh at my jokes have a pleasant attitude. Add a quirky sense of humor, and I’m hooked.
I never minded the “stupid questions” and I still don’t mind them, because if a question is sincere, it is not a stupid question; it’s a legitimate question and isn’t that what it’s all about? I love a student who asks questions; that student means more to me than a student who answers questions. If the question is about a connection between the lesson and something out in the world, even better. Better? It’s FANTASTIC!!!
I’ve had my share of teachers who were interested only in what was in the textbook. Questions that dealt with a connection or a tangent were dismissed completely; I’ve actually seen students punished for asking questions. I know tons of teachers who are lost without the answers pre-printed in their Teacher’s Edition.
What the heck is up with that? I have always assumed that a teacher who doesn’t already know those answers has no business standing before a group of learners in the first place! Sometimes those Teacher’s Editions have mistakes in them, and I’ve known teachers who will count the student’s correct answer wrong because the teacher is fixated on believing that the Teacher’s Edition is always right. I do not believe that these are good teachers, and I really don’t care what kind of scores that particular school is making. Scores are not education, but if I start in on that one again I’ll never make my dental appointment in a half hour.
Now, we all know that there are kids who will pester the teacher with questions just to get attention or get a laugh from his/her classmates; that’s not what I’m talking about here.
I’m talking about students with eager minds who genuinely want to know something. I’m talking about students who suddenly see and understand a connection between a few words in our book and something out there in “real life.” I’m talking about the wide eyes and the amazed expression and the gasp of realization that teachers come back year after year hoping to see. I’m talking about that moment when the student gazes at his/her pen and realizes that it’s actually a magic wand, and that with that wand the student wields power the likes of which make atomic energy seem feeble.
Every year, teachers have less and less authority. Every year, teachers must work in environments that would have most adults calling the authorities on the first day. Every year, teachers must deal with a population that is dangerous to the point of being criminal, and every year teachers risk their lives to try to bring a little light to the few actual learners and workers who hover quietly, in fear of their lives, too, on the sidelines. Every year, teachers must deal with parents who won’t support them, children who won’t try, administrations that won’t guarantee a safe habitat for either the teacher or the students, and buildings that are crumbling. Our students are hungry and sleepy, and far too many of them know far too much about the dregs of society: some because their families ARE the dregs of society, and others because they spend too much unsupervised time watching the trash on Jerry Springer and various television shows that teach our young people to be smartassed single parents who sleep around, long for designer shoes, and respect nothing. Every year, teachers must deal with more and more evidence that too many stupid people are breeding, too much time, attention, and money is spent on the lowest common denominator in the building and not nearly enough on the students who would really love to be taught something, and the very real possibility of being disciplined or sent to the Rubber Room if they speak out, try to help, or in any way upset the status quo of our extremely dysfunctional school systems. It’s dangerous to speak out, and it’s dangerous to show up for work, and it’s dangerous to walk across the parking lot before and after school, and it’s dangerous to mow your lawn on the weekend because you never know which disgruntled moron – parent or child – is going to show up demanding “justice,” ie entitlements, favors, exceptions, and freebies.
But I digress.
The students I have now are not, for the most part, like the students in our public schools. Today, for example, we were discussing the fact that many words we all consider to be English were actually stolen borrowed from other languages. The students caught on immediately to the fact that if a person speaks English, a person is actually also speaking Spanish, and French, and Italian, and Russian, and German, and Yugoslavian, and Aztec, and Hawaiian, and Chinese, and Outer Mongolian, not to even mention the dialects of the Fiji Islanders and assorted Scandanavian nations, because our language is not only vaguely reminiscent of Shakespeare’s English, it’s also a big stewpot full of every other language on the planet. This is a partial explanation of why we have so many odd spellings and strange plurals and exceptions to all the grammar rules. I love it. Today, my students loved it, too. Watching them love it made me love it, and them, even more.
I tried this lesson back in the public schools and several parents complained because I was telling their kids that the language of the true patriotic Americans wasn’t “pure.” Of course, this was the same group of parents who were irate because we were talking about homonyms. Can you guess why? I mean, jeepers.
See above, “Too many stupid people are breeding.”
But a student who asks questions, questions that show a longing to KNOW, questions that demonstrate an understanding of a connection. . . questions that tell me that there is yet hope for the human race because in this classroom, today, students were laughing and excited about a few WORDS, and looking at their pens in awe as though they’d just that moment understood the amount of power they had with it?
This is why teachers come back, year after year. This is why we hope. This is what makes it all worthwhile. This is why we risk everything we have and everything we are.
I wonder how many professions require as much hope as teaching? I’d bet money, if I had any, that educators lean on hope even more than the medical professions and the ministers do.
