If you're a coach, you're a teacher.
'Rabbi' means 'teacher,' and I see the role of chief rabbi as chief teacher.
Feeling pummeled by the outside pounding of tests and standards, a teacher can easily hide and simply turn to the immediacy of the classroom. It is not surprising that many teachers burrow in their rooms with all that they know about their students. There is no place to take the information.
I want to be a lawyer, a dancer, an actress, a mother, a wife, a children's author, a distance runner, a poet, a pianist, a pet store owner, an astronaut, an environmental and humanitarian activist, a psychiatrist, a ballet teacher, and the first woman president.
At the end of the day, I want to be a teacher at a university, teaching film or acting.
I worked hard when I was a consultant. I worked hard when I was in graduate school looking at neuroscience. I worked hard as a teacher. But those are completely different career paths. And the lack of direction is why I didn't get far enough in any of those things.
I was born and raised in Rogers Park in Chicago. My father sold furniture, and my mother was a Chicago public school teacher and proud member of the Chicago Teachers Union for decades.
My mother was a teacher. She was grooming my brother and me to be successful, accomplished people.
My mom was a high school science teacher for decades. She just never made it feel like we had to choose between the arts and the sciences. We had bookshelves full of novels, and she also had Rachel Carson and Aldo Leopold and Carl Sagan.
I do respond well to a director, a teacher - someone who doesn't accept mediocrity.
I remember I used to come up to my teacher crying because I couldn't read. She would say: 'You can do this. You just don't want to do this.'
I did not study science at school until I was 13, when I was totally turned on by a seemingly dreary old teacher who suddenly, unannounced, manufactured a huge explosion in the middle of a totally boring monologue. From then on, all of his class wanted to make explosions.
I call myself a meditation teacher rather than a spiritual teacher.
I taught in a small teacher's college for three or four years, at which point all the administrators got a pay raise and the teaching faculty didn't.
There is no education system in the world - none at all - that's better than its average teacher.
Once I accomplish one thing and I'm satisfied, I try something else. I may be 50 and doing something totally outside of music and acting. Maybe I'll become a kindergarten teacher.
I'm into books - I love literature, so I toyed with the idea of being an English teacher. I had a fantastic English teacher at school. I think great English teachers make the world go round.
My mother had been a Latin teacher, and she was always very fascinated with words. She and I shared books and responded to them.
We must use the wrath of nature as our teacher.
My father was my trainer, my teacher. He was closer to my sister in the sense that she adored him and he adored her. He was more like my pal. Because of the 13-year gap, I think by the time I came along, it wasn't a big deal. I wasn't spoilt or cherished, I was just put to work.
You don't want to engage in road rage when the person in the next car might be your child's future teacher or your dentist's father.
Read something of interest every day - something of interest to you, not to your teacher or your best friend or your minister/rabbi/priest. Comics count. So does poetry. So do editorials in your school newspaper. Or a biography of a rock star. Or an instructional manual. Or the Bible.
Above all, we must be conscious of the primary pedagogical task, namely that we must first make something of ourselves so that a living inner spiritual relationship exists between the teacher and the children.
My first tic was to shake my head violently. I was in karate class, and I was shaking violently. All of a sudden, I just started to notice that the teacher was looking at me, and all the kids were wondering what I was doing. I suddenly felt really strange.
As soon as 'Hide Away' came out, it was like everyone knew who I was, and I started getting all this attention. It was hard to get used to at first. I just remember that I suddenly couldn't walk down the hallways without hearing a classmate or teacher playing it - it was unreal!
My chemistry teacher wanted me to do chemistry, and my art teacher wanted me to do art. Fashion seemed like a good in-between - using your brain but being creative.
As a teacher you are more or less obliged to pay the same amount of attention to everything. That can wear you down.
Growing up in this post-apartheid era, the first generation of teens in South Africa living in this new democracy, I often found myself feeling different. I was often the only person of color in an otherwise all-white school. And within the Indian community, because of my training with an English acting teacher, my accent was very different.
The first one I remember singing on stage was 'Somewhere Out There' from 'An American Tail.' I was around 7, and my choir teacher at school asked me if I would sing it. My parents told me that I needed to move around the stage, so for the entire time I just walked back and forth from side to side while I was singing - there's videotape of it.
As any parent, teacher, or librarian knows, there is no richer experience than to see children's faces light up at the suspense of a new tale or the surprise of a new poem. The uninhibited joy with which they listen is surely akin to that of adult audiences of old around campfire and hearth.
I can't tell you how many people say they were turned off from science because of a science teacher that completely sucked out all the inspiration and enthusiasm they had for the course.
I had a teacher at school who said, 'We are going to do a play next year, and you're in it.' He said, 'You should try out for the Royal Academy as an actor.' I did and got in. I was 17. My mum wasn't too happy, but it worked out OK.
I went to a performance-art high school, and a teacher there was signing me up for open-mic nights at the comedy club. I think about it now, and I think, 'Well, that may be inappropriate,' but it was great!'
My mother was an English teacher who decided to become a math teacher, and she used me as a guinea pig at home. My father had been a math teacher and then went to work at a steel mill because, frankly, he could make more money doing that.
I tend to think of a myth and then explore how it would play out if it were happening in the modern-day world. I modify all the myths I use, but I stick very closely to their structure - it is the hidden teacher in me.
In 1905, I was privileged to be given a place in the private laboratory of my revered teacher, Professor W. H. Perkin, Jr. at the University of Manchester.
