Students Quotations | Page 2

Many high school students are under so much competitive pressure. They are sometimes taught that if they don't have a 4.0 GPA, score in the 99th percentile on admissions tests, and demonstrate leadership in sports and participate in clubs, they won't get into college anywhere. Even highly credentialed professionals get caught up in this.

Students must have initiative; they should not be mere imitators. They must learn to think and act for themselves - and be free.

Rooted in the word 'history' is 'story.' And America's story is exceptional. It's amazing. Younger students should learn that we have always been and continue to be a land of immigrants - a land committed to bold new ideas.

I seem to get totally wrapped up in teaching and working with students during the school year. During the summer, I try to spend time in the real world, writing code for therapy and perhaps for some useful purpose.

The best teachers, one hopes, don't shout at their students - because they are skilled at wooing as well as demanding the best efforts of others. For the ancient Greeks and Romans, this wooing was a sufficiently fine art in itself to be the central focus of education.

Learning options will indeed mushroom for business students and leaders, but it will take prudence and shrewdness to find and utilize the best option.

The student community of Presidency College was also politically most active.

Into the soul of every student I would have instilled the patriotic fervor of Patrick Henry.

Since I was an atheist for many years and came to believe in God through my studies in science, it frustrated me to see students and parents who viewed faith and science as enemies.

My women students openly admit that they dress for interviews like dates, hoping to look their best: makeup, high heels, a well-fitting suit that shows off their figure. And I always tell them to make sure to wear a shirt under the suit jacket. Form fitting, yes. Cleavage, no.

I have always been - I think any student of history almost inevitably is - a cheerful pessimist.

I don't think I'm in any position to call myself a martial artist. I'm a student of the martial arts.

I cannot say that I was a particularly diligent student, especially during the lower grades.

Students are rewarded for memorization, not imagination or resourcefulness.

My one thing is I continue to be interested and want to be a student. I don't want to be a master. When I'm learning something, I'm in my element.

A director makes 100 decisions an hour. Students ask me how you know how to make the right decision, and I say to them, 'If you don't know how to make the right decision, you're not a director.'

The top experts in the world are ardent students. The day you stop learning, you're definitely not an expert.

It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.

I want students to understand specific technologies, but the real goal is that they should be able to reason about how systems work and be intelligently skeptical about technology so that, when they're running the world in a few years, they'll do a good job.

The universities have got a job here as well in making sure that people actually understand that we're open for university students coming into the U.K. There's a job here not just for the government, I think there's a job for the universities as well to make sure that people know that we are open.

My opportunity to design school choice systems began in 2003 with a phone call from Jeremy Lack at the New York City Department of Education. He knew of my work on the medical match and wondered if similar efforts might help reorganize the dysfunctional, congested system then used to match students to high schools.

We need to make education so much fun that students can't help but learn.

At Year Up, our students - low income 18-24 year olds - come to us having already faced substantial obstacles in life. They are not in search of a handout; what they want most of all is the ability to take ownership of their own futures.

When you teach, you need to give the students incentives by grades or by other factors. I went to the Bible to find that topic in Scripture. I was shocked that after college and graduate school I had no idea that Jesus Christ had talked so much about rewards.

Whether conservative or liberal, fundamentalist or agnostic, the more students learn of biology, the more they accept evolution.

I was an art student at the time, like thousands of others.

I recommend my students not to be professional unless they really have to be. I tell them, 'If you love music, sell Hoovers or be a plumber. Do something useful with your life.'

I love the most the students with troubled lives.

The best students come from homes where education is revered: where there are books, and children see their parents reading them.

I have always been interested in politics. I was in the student union before, very active.

High school students ought to seek out campus communities where they feel not only empowered to engage their talents, but also challenged to leave their comfort zones. The ability to embrace new opportunities emerges, in part, from a willingness to take risks and to fail.

The best thing we can do is give students the tools for constructing their own identities - powerful new tools like African fractals - and then just get out of the way.

Research shows that whether you are low-income or not, mindset is a bigger predictor of success than academic skills, and how students gain great academic skills and persevere in the face of challenges.

Students and postdoctoral fellows largely depend on the support of the public sector to finance the training and research that will make them world-renowned scientists.

If you go to an elite school where the other students in your class are all really brilliant, you run the risk of mistakenly believing yourself to not be a good student.

In classrooms full of students who range from brilliant to sullen disaffection, it's games - and often games alone - that I've seen engage every single person in the room. For some, the right kind of play can spell the difference between becoming part of something, and the lifelong feeling that they're not meant to take part.

You can do and use the skills that you have. The schools need you. The teachers need you. Students and parents need you. They need your actual person: your physical personhood and your open minds and open ears and boundless compassion, sitting next to them, listening and nodding and asking questions for hours at a time.

With nearly all students leaving public high school having taken some vocational education, this bill continues to provide communities with the funding necessary to give students an edge on career training.

I was a better writer when I was teaching. I was constantly going over the basics and constantly reminding myself, as I reminded my students, what made a good story, a good poem.

My students know I have a life, they know I've written about my life. They know some detail, probably more than they know about their physics teacher, but I would've told them anyway!

I debated in high school! If you told things that weren't true or just made things out of whole cloth, you were penalized. It's too bad they don't apply the same standards to presidential candidates as they do to high school students.

Working together we can strengthen Delaware State University and the students who attend it.

I came into the Republican party in 1980, when I was a college student at Georgetown.

I've always been a writer because I've always been a student. My mom's a retired professor, so I come from a very academic background. I love writing, you know?

I feel like a 1960s graduate student. I still work on note cards. I've never found a better system.

I would have to say I was an excellent student. I was the type to always do my homework and study when I needed to. I never really partied or did anything like that.

In my introductory course, Anthropology 160, the Forms of Folklore, I try to show the students what the major and minor genres of folklore are, and how they can be analyzed.

We've been doing this here since 1968, so we have been identified as an example of a free, democratic school, and many professors want to expose their students to our philosophy.

Without question, students need to practice, review, and drill skills, but they should do so only in the spirit of working toward more complex mastery of those skills. Redundant drill of skills is inherently boring and insulting to the learner, and it is one of the most effective methods for turning students off to learning.

Not only does neoliberalism undermine both civic education and public values and confuse education with training, it also treats knowledge as a product, promoting a neoliberal logic that views schools as malls, students as consumers, and faculty as entrepreneurs.

In the 1960s when the recording studio suddenly really took off as a tool, it was the kids from art school who knew how to use it, not the kids from music school. Music students were all stuck in the notion of music as performance, ephemeral. Whereas for art students, music as painting? They knew how to do that.

How do you manage your online identity? It's something I talk about with my students all the time.

No student of history can fail to see the moral interest of the Middle Ages, any more than an artist can fail to see their aesthetic interest.

I told the students that whatever they did in class was for the wastebasket.

I like to tell students, 'I didn't burst on to the literary scene.' I'm never good at things at the beginning. I was terrible at the start. I need to work and work.

Through art and science in their broadest senses it is possible to make a permanent contribution towards the improvement and enrichment of human life and it is these pursuits that we students are engaged in.

I have taught my students not to apply rules or mechanical ways of seeing.

I had studied piano since I was 13, but I was surrounded by students who'd been playing since they were 5. I realized I was never going to be anything but mediocre.

I was a student at Peking University for close to a decade, while a so-called 'knowledge explosion' was rapidly expanding. I was searching for not just knowledge, but also to mold a temperament, to cultivate a scholarly outlook.

A student never forgets an encouraging private word, when it is given with sincere respect and admiration.

Half of architecture students are women, and you see respected, established female architects all the time.

The obsessive focus on a college degree has served neither taxpayers nor students well. Only 35 percent of students starting a four-year degree program will graduate within four years, and less than 60 percent will graduate within six years. Students who haven't graduated within six years probably never will.

As a student I learned from wonderful teachers and ever since then I've thought everyone is a teacher.

When the students are occupied, they're not juvenile delinquents. I believe that education is a capital investment.

This year, we must address the Colorado Paradox. We have more college degrees per capita than any state. Yet we lag the nation in the percentage of students who go on to higher education.

Most of my teachers wanted to send me to the principal's office. But my fourth-grade teacher once put her arms around me and said, 'You sure write well.' And I've had good penmanship until this day. She was the only one who ever said anything nice to me. That's the kind of motivation that students need.

I was always a good student, but I didn't read that much until I was 18 and I was working my way through college.

For-profit higher education is today a booming industry, feeding on the student loans handed out to the desperate.

Negativity sells. I have been labelled a rebel. If I had been one, would I have got married at 23? Would I have been a straight A student?

I had many moments of disappointment, despondency, and exhaustion, but I always found that by reading the literature and showing up at my lab looking at the data as they emerged day by day and discussing them with my students and postdoctoral fellows, I would gain a notion of what to do next.

Harvard Law provided an opportunity to learn from a faculty that had shaped the laws of our country and helped to change the world around us. It also offered an opportunity to study with the brightest students and to test myself against the best.

Sure, one can always get the students to relax and be happy - entertained, but although being laid back and relax can also lead to creativity, mostly it means that nothing much gets done.

The faith I was born into formed me. I come from a missionary family - I grew up in China - and in my case, my religious upbringing was positive. Of course, not everyone has this experience. I know many of my students are what I have come to think of as wounded Christians or wounded Jews.

I attribute my success to my mental approach to the game. I have always been a serious student of umpiring. I enjoy studying rules, situations, and positioning.

Students of America, working families of America: President Obama will not turn his back on you.

When I was a student I was very, very ambitious, completely immersed in my comedy career. I never had that period of reckless hedonism that you should get out of your system in your youth.

I was a good student, sort of funny and athletic. I had friends.

The faster you go, the more students you leave behind. It doesn't matter how much or how fast you teach. The true measure is how much students have learned.

I'll be honest; I'm a student of fashion. I say that because I just wear what I feel. I'm not led by name brands and things like that.

American high school students trail teenagers from 14 European and Asian countries in reading, math and science. We're even trailing France.

I wanted my students to leave my classroom loving reading and wanting to read more, and if they left my classroom thinking that reading is boring, then I haven't done my job.

The old university attitude of 'publish or perish' has changed. Students and academics are realising that institutions such as Imperial College are also wealth-generators. It is very satisfying to be in a university where you have the freedom to innovate and yet know that there is a path to translate your work into industry.

Grades can matter, especially for those students and parents who live for the next round of applications to graduate or professional schools. But there's a problem with the grade emphasis. Math or science graduates earn more than students majoring in the humanities.

When I speak to students and they ask how much money you can make in art, as if that is a reason to persue it, I tell them to do something else.

We often forget that Iran has a long tradition and history with the United States. Iranians have been coming to the United States as students for decades. American businessmen were in Iran developing the oil fields. ...There was an American financial advisor to the Iranian government in the early part of the century.

I schooled in Himachal Pradesh. I had taken up science and, initially, wanted to become a doctor. There are few career options for students of science though, so I shifted to Delhi and decided to try theater instead.

I had a hard time convincing students that they were going to North Africa to understand the North Africans, not to understand themselves.

I'm a part-time student, and I plan to finish my degree. I think there are a lot of part-time students with jobs on the side or stressful careers. I'm certainly not the first person to be working while I'm in university.

Excitement in education and student productivity, the ability to get a result that you want from students, go together and cannot be separated.

There's something melancholy about professors because they're chronically abandoned. They form these lovely relationships with students and then the students leave and the professors stay the same. It's like they're chronically abandoned.

The difference between the student and the born composer is he really hears the thing, and they have to stage it and manipulate it by technical equipment.

Within one hour of touching the brush to canvas for the first time, my students have a total, complete painting.

Most students are presented only with the evolutionary belief system in their schools, and they are censored from hearing challenges to it. Let our young people understand science correctly and hear both sides of the origins issue and then evaluate them.

People would react to books by authors like James and Austen almost on a gut level. I think it was not so much the message, because the best authors do not have obvious messages. These authors were disturbing to my students because of their perspectives on life.

There's no authoritarian structure at Reed College, but the education is conservative. So what you have is a lot of students who are very authentically looking for truth.

At Year Up, we have helped thousands of students rise from poverty into a professional career in a single year.

I used to love being the class clown. I loved to make jokes and make people laugh. There was a set of students who would find it funny. But the cool students were like, 'Eeew!'

You know, there are some areas of the state that are providing enormous help to their students; there are others where they're not doing what they can.

The subject of Finnish poetry ought to have a special interest for the Japanese student, if only for the reason that Finnish poetry comes more closely in many respects to Japanese poetry than any other form of Western poetry.

American secretaries of state have typically been more buttoned up than bon vivant, but John Quincy Adamss diplomatic successes - bigger than anything presidential or legislative that he achieved - still surprise a student of his personality.