Quotes and the "secret" to better teaching

I love collecting quotes from the books I read.  If someone stumbles onto my many journals and diaries, they will be either disappointed or relieved to find mostly quotes.  One of the first gifts my husband gave me was a small notebook that I now keep in my purse to write down books I want to read and quotes that I want to remember forever. 


Over break I was able to do some pleasure reading and I devoured An Arsonists' Guide to Writers' Homes in New England, Push, Through the Looking Glass: Further Adventures & Misadventures into the Realm of Children's Literature three days into break.  I have since then started Alice I Have Been by Melanie Benjamin and am falling in love with her writing style and her creative interpretation of the relationship between Alice Liddell and Charles Dodgson (if you have to look up that name, don't bother going to see the new Alice in Wonderland movie because you don't deserve to be a part of all the hype).


I thought I would include some of the quotes that I collected from "An Arsonists' Guide...":


"Can a story be good only if it produces an effect?  If the effect is a bad one, but intended, has the story done its job? If the story produces an effect other than the intended one, is it then a bad story?  Can a story be said to produce an effect at all?  Should we expect it to?  Can we blame the story for anything?  Can a story actually do anything at all?" 

"Once an English teacher always an English teacher."

"...love is the voice asking, What else? What else? And to those of us who have had love and lost it or thrown it away, then love is the voice that leads us back to love, to see if it might still be ours or if we've lost it for good.  For those of us who've lost if, love is also the thing that makes us speak in aphorisms about love, which is why we try to get love back, so we can stop speaking that way.  Aphorisitically, that is."  

"an old, musty colonial home full of rooms that all looked like studies and not the living and dining and parlor rooms they had probably been designed to be.  Each room had towering, overflowing bookcases, and dim lighting, and the shabby look of neglect and intellectual wear and tear."

"That was his phrase - 'the high ramparts of my defensiveness' - and I remembered it in case I ever decide to build and then describe my own ramparts."

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My husband often sends me forwarded articles from the New York Times or Yahoo!, mostly about teaching and school-related issues.  One of the most recent articles came from the New York Times and was titled "Building a Better Teacher."  It was from March 7, so I was a little behind on my reading, but last night I read through before bed, hoping to find the magical key to becoming a great teacher.  The answer was found in the last paragraph of the article:

"This record encouraged a belief in some people that good teaching must be purely instinctive, a

kind of magic performed by born superstars. As Jane Hannaway, the director of the Education Policy Center at the Urban Institute and a former teacher, put it to me, successful teaching depends in part on a certain inimitable “voodoo.” You either have it or you don’t. “I think that there is an innate drive or innate ability for teaching,” Sylvia Gist, the dean of the college of education at Chicago State University, said when I visited her campus last year."

Here I was thinking that some enlightening secret would shed light on what teachers were doing wrong, when the end result and conclusion was, teachers are born, not made.  While this could be somewhat comforting to me since I have been teaching swimming and guitar lessons since adolescence, and had a very successful student teaching experience, I think it is sad to think of all the teachers out there (and the students learning from them) whose sole purpose to be there is to coach.  This is a growing problem and it is allowed in places where a great deal of emphasis is placed on sports and not education.

I am also finding that most people want to look at the students in high school as apathetic and unable to learn. Yes students seem like the only things that interest them are found on TV or video games and they only want to sit and text to their friends.  It is a growing problem and it is only getting worse.  However, we can't just sit and snub our noses at them and say they are hopeless and ignorant.  If we do that, we are letting this generation down and not guiding them to become better.  As teachers, we have to keep reminding ourselves that we were once sitting in those same desks trying to learn with all the distractions that come with adolescence and if hopeful, hard-working teachers and parents weren't there to tell us we could be somebody, then we would have ended up a lost, apathetic generation as well.