Great teachers emanate out of knowledge, passion and compassion.
I was a disadvantaged child from a non-educated family, yet I had the advantage of being in the company of great teachers.
My father, I think he played percussion in high school. My mother played piano when she was very young, but only for a brief while. I don't think she had a great teacher. In any case, neither of them were really into music at a young age.
The best thing we can do with rejection is to make it a learning experience - rejection is a great teacher.
I am a big believer in education, because when I grew up in Austria - when I grew up in Austria I had a great education. I had great teachers.
Teaching is hard. It takes a lot of skill. Not everyone who tries can do it well. We need to admit that and act accordingly. We should reward and respect great teachers by paying them more, and we should stop rewarding seniority over effectiveness.
I need to stress that I could not be more supportive of great teachers and great teaching, no matter what kind of delivery vehicle they are teaching through. We have to support great teachers. They just have to be freed up to do what they do best.
Everything good that I know was taught to me by great teachers and I feel like giving back and sharing the technique is the thing to do.
Research shows that there is only half as much variation in student achievement between schools as there is among classrooms in the same school. If you want your child to get the best education possible, it is actually more important to get him assigned to a great teacher than to a great school.
I didn't learn much about writing at Sarah Lawrence, but I learned a lot about the sources of poems - dreams, myth, history - from the really great teachers, Joseph Campbell, Charles Trinkhaus, Bert Loewenberg, and a young Australian anthropologist named Harry Hawthorne.
