Teaching is so much more than standing in front of a room of dozens of random students year after year and training them in their multiplication tables, or listing the dates of historical battles, or leading them in an analysis of Keats’s poetry. Teachers help to build the foundations for the people we will become.  They have the responsibility of inspiring the dreams and passions of every individual.  Each new year, they are faced with the challenge of developing relationships with all of their students, forming links with their fragile minds, and motivating them in the direction of their dreams and passions.  Teachers are the people who can take a classroom and decorate it with ideas and possibilities.  They do not tell us who to be, but they help us find who we want to be, and show us how to get there.  While knowledge of the subject matter is important, it does not matter what teachers say unless they have a way to reach their students and a way to make them want to learn.  More than anything, teaching is the process of connecting with students and forming a relationship that will stretch further than the confines of one small classroom.

 My Favorite Quotes on Teaching

No man can be a good teacher unless he has feelings of warm affection toward his pupils and a genuine desire to impart to them what he himself believes to be of value.

Bertrand Russell

A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops. 

Henry Adam

The job of an educator is to teach students to see the vitality in themselves.

Joseph Campbel

I put the relation of a fine teacher to a student just below the relation of a mother to a son.

Thomas Wolfe

A hundred years from now it will not matter what my bank account was, the sort of house I lived in, or the kind of car I drove , but the world maybe different because I was important in the life of a child.

Kathy Davis

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

Horace Mann

I touch the future. I teach.

Christa McAuliffe.

Teachers don't just teach; they can be vital personalities who help young people to mature, to understand the world and to understand themselves. A good education consists of much more than useful facts and marketable skills.

Charles Platt

Never, never, never, never give up. 

Winston Churchill

e-mail your comments or questions to prahl@usc.edu