As you begin the 2009-2010 school year it’s good to keep the significant role that teachers play in the lives of our students in proper perspective. Here are a few words from some famous individuals with their thoughts on teachers. (Quotes courtesy of The Quote Garden):

I like a teacher who gives you something to take home to think about besides homework.  ~Lily Tomlin as “Edith Ann”

The dream begins with a teacher who believes in you, who tugs and pushes and leads you to the next plateau, sometimes poking you with a sharp stick called “truth.”  ~Dan Rather

In teaching you cannot see the fruit of a day’s work.  It is invisible and remains so, maybe for twenty years.  ~Jacques Barzun

Modern cynics and skeptics… see no harm in paying those to whom they entrust the minds of their children a smaller wage than is paid to those to whom they entrust the care of their plumbing.  ~John F. Kennedy

Good teaching is one-fourth preparation and three-fourths theater.  ~Gail Godwin

A teacher who is attempting to teach without inspiring the pupil with a desire to learn is hammering on cold iron.  ~Horace Mann

A teacher’s purpose is not to create students in his own image, but to develop students who can create their own image.  ~Author Unknown

What the teacher is, is more important than what he teaches.  ~Karl Menninger

Teaching should be full of ideas instead of stuffed with facts.  ~Author Unknown

One looks back with appreciation to the brilliant teachers, but with gratitude to those who touched our human feelings.  The curriculum is so much necessary raw material, but warmth is the vital element for the growing plant and for the soul of the child.  ~Carl Jung

The teacher who is indeed wise does not bid you to enter the house of his wisdom but rather leads you to the threshold of your mind.  ~Kahlil Gibran

The task of the excellent teacher is to stimulate “apparently ordinary” people to unusual effort.  The tough problem is not in identifying winners:  it is in making winners out of ordinary people.  ~K. Patricia Cross

When you teach your son, you teach your son’s son.  ~The Talmud

The best teachers teach from the heart, not from the book.  ~Author Unknown

Often, when I am reading a good book, I stop and thank my teacher.  That is, I used to, until she got an unlisted number.  ~Author Unknown

Who dares to teach must never cease to learn.  ~John Cotton Dana

Here are a few more from Teacher Appreciation

“We think of the effective teachers we have had over the years with a sense of recognition, but those who have touched our humanity we remember with a deep sense of gratitude.”
Anonymous student

“If a doctor, lawyer, or dentist had 40 people in his office at one time, all of whom had different needs, and some of whom didn’t want to be there and were causing trouble, and the doctor, lawyer, or dentist, without assistance, had to treat them all with professional excellence for nine months, then he might have some conception of the classroom teacher’s job. ”
Donald D. Quinn

“None of us got where we are solely by pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps. We got here because somebody – a parent, a teacher, an Ivy League crony or a few nuns – bent down and helped us pick up our boots. ”
Thurgood Marshall

“Education…beyond all other devices of human origin, is a great equalizer of conditions of men –the balance wheel of the social machinery…It does better than to disarm the poor of their hostility toward the rich; it prevents being poor.”
Horace Mann

“Public education rests precariously on the skill and virtue of the people at the bottom of the institutional pyramid.”
Tracy Kidder
“The direction in which education starts a man will determine his future life.”
Plato

“The very spring and root of honesty and virtue lie in good education.”
Plutarch

“I am indebted to my father for living, but to my teacher for living well”
Alexander the Great

“A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.”
Henry Adams

Have a GREAT school year! Your students are counting on you!