Wednesday, May 4, 2011

Thought-Provoking Quotes I've Recently Read

For the Love of Learning is a blog written by Joe Bower, a Canadian teacher I follow on my iGoogle page. He has the following words displayed prominently on his blog, “Teachers who blame students for being bored is the equivalent to yelling at the hammer after you strike your own thumb.”

Another blog that I follow, Mind Dump, written by teacher and educational leader Scott McLeod, had an interesting comment to one of his entries. “Why is it that every generation panics about the next generation, and is wrong every single time?”

David Coleman is a nationally known educational leader who has been instrumental in the creation of the Common Core Standards. I participated in a NYSED webinar who fortunately had him as a keynote speaker. I didn’t read this quote, but rather heard it and quickly wrote it down. “Much of the work done towards the development of the common core standards was done by New York State. The standards stand on the shoulders of the work done by New York."

As I experience the changes in weather that has seen bright blue skies, dark skies, rain, wind, hail, and then back to bright blue – all in the span of fifteen minutes, I have been reading a lot from the weather pages. John Ruskin, an art critic and poet, wrote, “Sunshine is delicious, rain is refreshing, wind braces up, snow is exhilarating; there is no such thing as bad weather, only different kinds of good weather.”

Kin Hubbard, cartoonist and journalist, entertained me the most when he wrote, “Don’t knock the weather. If it didn’t change once in a while, nine out of ten people couldn’t start a conversation.”

I found my final quote while moving some items around my basement in an effort to make room for rainwater. Basil Cruikshank, my grandfather, wrote a short, humorous poem on an old baseball he gave to me, which ended with the profound sentence, “Don’t give up the ship unless it’s sinking.”

Enjoy your weekend

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