Teaching quotes
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"Teaching is enormously satisfying because I'm constantly learning more. Just constantly being exposed to new voices and new life experiences and new worldviews and new structural dilemmas and new characters - it's really exciting for me."
"Teaching and writing, really, they support and nourish each other, and they foster good thinking. Because when you show up in the classroom, you may have on the mantle of authority, but in fact, you're just a writer helping other writers think through their problems. Your experience with the problems you've tried to solve comes into play in how you try to teach them to solve their problems."
"Christ and his teachings are the embodiment of submission, of inertia, of the denial of life; hence responsible for the things done in their name."
"Teaching is almost like an act of prayer for me. I feel that I am present at the intersection of people and ideas in a very holy way. There are not many places where successful adults can take a break from work or domestic issues and freely and safely explore their inner lives or global issues through an ethical lens."
"For me, study is a divine and daily imperative, and I study a page of Talmud daily so that I am not only teaching. My teaching is constantly being fed by my learning."
"Madness is a special form of the spirit and clings to all teachings and philosophies, but even more to daily life, since life itself is full of craziness and at bottom utterly illogical. Man strives toward reason only so that he can make rules for himself."
"I often find it easier to be teaching or giving to others, and often struggle with the place of my own pleasure and joy."
"Teaching Black Studies, I find that students are quick to label a black person who has grown up in a predominantly white setting and attended similar schools as "not black enough." ...Our concept of black experience has been too narrow and constricting."
"I feel that I have many real students whom I have not met. Many are in cloisters and they never get out. Others are in prison. But in many cases they practice the teachings much better than those who meet me every day."
"I discovered John Truby ten years ago when a friend told me about his screenwriting course. I studied Truby's principles for a year and -- using them -- I wrote the first draft of The Thieves of Ostia in two weeks. I go back to his teachings before each new book I write. Each time I study Truby, I learn something new."
"With students, one is often in the position where you have to be authoritative about what they're doing and connected to some principle. I prefer not really knowing the answer to anything interesting and I try to encourage that in teaching. If I start to feel certain about something my curiosity goes away, my mind shuts down. I'm sure that's not always true, it's stupid to generalise."
"Teaching is all armchair. I learn about writing by writing and thinking about what I've written and throwing it away."
"I have a seven-level program and through even into the fifth level it can be all done from a distance. "Why not?" is how I feel about it, because energy is not confined by time or space, so why should my teaching be. I'm teaching energy and how to manage it, how to handle it, and how to heal with it."
"As a writer, the ideal job is the one that allows you time and mental space away from it. Teaching seemed to me like the obvious choice - those summers off, you know - but my experience may serve as a cautionary tale."
"Grading creative writing is always an ethical dilemma. But what you brought up about grading personal stories versus the research paper is of course a truly volatile issue in teaching memoir or the personal essay, because there's no pretense that the narrator is a character."
"I've been a teacher all my life. I've had my own dance studio, my own acting studio for 18 years out here... I'm just a natural teacher. I teach on all my healing work now. I think actors teach any time they work anyway. We're teaching emotions, we're teaching how to deal with emotions, we're teaching how to get around issues and deal with them. Actors are some of the best teachers in the world, because they're teaching you through entertainment, and you don't know you're getting a message."
"You always hear about the guy who was raised by wolves. You never hear about the guy who was raised by the guy who was raised by wolves. The problem is, you have a non-wolf imparting wolf teachings."
"I hate two kinds of sentences you hear in workshops, the ones beginning "I really like ..." and the ones beginning "My problem with this poem is ...""
"There is no instinct that has been so maligned, suppressed, abused, and distorted by religious teaching as the instinct of sex."
"In Acts 14:1, we are told, "At Iconium Paul and Barnabas went as usual into the Jewish synagogue. There they spoke so effectively that a great number of Jews and Gentiles believed." This is what should be sought in Christian schools, not just teaching, but effective teaching. Christian content alone is insufficient. It must be presented in a certain way, and that way cannot be reduced to technique. Nevertheless, God has graciously made it possible to bring people the truth by how the truth is presented."
