I often say to my students in workshops that if they are trying to find literary inspiration, they should not go and read novels, because novels are more appropriate for series. Where as they should read short stories - that's the right format for you to be able to actually display the narrative in a film.
I strive to find materials that will engage students, expand their capacities as critical readers and thinkers, and feel immediately relevant to their daily lives and future work in court and social service systems.
One of the things that make community colleges so special is they do not pick and choose their students - they work with all students.
The ideal college is Mark Hopkins on one end of a log and a student on the other.
By the time a student gets to college, he's spent a decade curating a bewilderingly diverse résumé to prepare for a completely unknowable future. Come what may, he's ready-for nothing in particular.
When students scoff at the idea of a magical relation between a picture and what it represents, ask them to take a photograph of their mother and cut out the eyes.
On some level students are essentially the same. They are people with fears and dreams. They laugh and cry over many of the same things. They share an essential humanity as young people always have. hey differ in some significant ways now, too, I believe. They are forced to grapple with complex issues at a much younger age.
President Bush delivered a commencement speech at a university in Wisconsin. A very inspirational speech. Apparently Bush told the students, 'You can do anything in life if your parents work hard enough. '
The student learns rules but all the rules in the world never make a picture.
I'm amazed when I think about students today. They know from day one what they are going to be. We didn't. We just coasted. We just knew that things would work out.
John Updike is always fun. And one of my former students, Tom Pynchon. And Harold Bloom, another former student.
The students [of the 60s] substituted conspicuous compassion for their parents conspicuous consumption.
You have to have students wanting to take the courses, otherwise you're not going, they're not going to be very effective.
I always had good students.
Tthe first rule is that you can't really know anything if you just remember isolated facts and try and bang 'em back. If the facts don't hang together on a latticework of theory, you don't have them in a usable form. . . . You may have noticed students who just try to remember and pound back what is remembered. Well, they fail in school and in life.
I smoked with a lot of college students. . . Most of em wasn't graduatin, and they knew it.
Blue cheese contains natural amphetamines. Why are students not informed about this?
Authentic thinking, thinking that is concerned about reality, does not take place in ivory tower isolation, but only in communication. If it is true that thought has meaning only when generated by action upon the world, the subordination of students to teachers becomes impossible.
Give more than you receive. That is the principle I tell all my students.
By the time they get to 6th grade honor roll students won't risk making a mistake, and sometimes to be successful, you have to risk making mistakes.