I teach one semester a year, and this year I'm just teaching one course during that semester, a writing workshop for older students in their late 20s and early 30s, people in our graduate program who are already working on a manuscript and trying to bring it to completion.
When schools produce students who learned to think on the left or on the right, they're not thinking for themselves.
A hallmark of the Latino community is to help one another, if students are interested in a way to give back and help their communities, becoming a teacher is probably one of the very best ways of doing that.
Over the years, my students influenced me greatly, and I've learned many lessons from them. I have an immense amount of respect for them, and I think that respect for your audience is the foremost requirement for anyone who wants to write.
When nearly a third of our high school students do not graduate on time with their peers, we have work to do. We must design our middle and high schools so that no student gets lost in the crowd and disconnected from his or her own potential.
I'm so disturbed when my women students behave as though they can only read women, or black students behave as though they can only read blacks, or white students behave as though they can only identify with a white writer.
I once knew a house rather like The Land of Smiles - an old house occupied by a varied collection of young people, mainly students. However none of these people were true models for the characters in the book, though their way of life may have been.
It is not only my laboratory and my place of work but also my home, so that on the 30th October I was able to share my happiness immediately with my students and collaborators and, at the same time, with my wife and family.
Students can spend their money better than government can. It should not require a federal loan and decades of debt for students to get a college degree. Price limits access - plain and simple.
You have to give kids things they're interested in reading. That's what teachers do who are engaged in what their students want.
I'd never been a teacher before, and here I was starting my first day with these eager students. There was a shortage of teachers, and they had been without a math teacher for six months. They were so excited to learn math.
As physics students, we are taught that physicists are smart, that chemists are moderately acceptable, and that biologists are certainly not very intelligent. So I wasn't inclined to take a biology course. But my father insisted, and maybe what he had in mind was that, if there were no jobs in physics, I would end up being a doctor.
Technology is mostly a force for good, but it has its downsides, too. I want my students - and my readers - to be intelligently skeptical about technology and be informed about the good and the not-so-good parts.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology accepts blacks in the top ten percent of students, but at MIT this puts them in the bottom ten percent of the class.
It's going to take a while before we see a real shift in the students and the dancers that are going into professional companies because it takes so many years of training, but I do think that there's a new crop of dancers, of minority dancers that are entering into the ballet world.
I used to tell my writing students that they must write the books they wished they could come upon - because then the books they hungered and thirsted for would exist.
I tell students that the opportunities I had were a result of having a good educational background. Education is what allows you to stand out.
I was studying with Peter Carey, Colum McCann; but also, my fellow students were really critical readers for me.
On the one hand, we had great filmic spectacles that brought in big audiences, adults as well as primary and secondary school students. On the other hand, there were attempts to create contemporary Polish film.
But the fact is, no matter how good the teacher, how small the class, how focused on quality education the school may be none of this matters if we ignore the individual needs of our students.
Students in the '60s were responsible for great changes, politically and socially.
University of California students can look forward to the same authoritarian management style Secretary Napolitano brought to the Department of Homeland Security, hardly a bastion of free speech and open government.
There are a lot of thought leaders who don't want to see their students. We don't want to hire them. If students are allured to come to the school because of famous faculties, and if they never see them, that leaves very bad taste.
I am often amazed at how much more capability and enthusiasm for science there is among elementary school youngsters than among college students.
I teach a 14-week semester, and one of the things I do when I have to teach literature is, for the first half hour of the class, I have the students write the beginning of a new story every week. At the end of the semester, even if they have learned nothing about literature, at least they'll have 14 beginnings that they can take with them.
I was at a benefit for some imprisoned students in the '60s at San Francisco State, and there were lots of poets reading for the benefit: one was Elizabeth Bishop.
While we should certainly be investing in our own STEM education, we should take advantage of the thousands of international students who come here to study and are ready to fill these gaps immediately upon graduation.
Right around the end of the fifties, college students and young people in general, began to realize that this music was almost like a history of our country - this music contained the real history of the people of this country.
Immortality awaits the legislator fortunate enough to have a significant law named after him. Think of Pell grants or Stafford loans for students, Sarbanes-Oxley to regulate Wall Street, or the Hyde Amendment on abortions.
Good teachers know how to bring out the best in students.
Experimental high energy physics research is a group effort. I have been very fortunate to have had outstanding students and colleagues who have made invaluable contributions to the research with which I have been associated.
Now, after the communist take-over in 1948, the amount of feature films produced dwindled to three a year, while the school was, you know, every year another three, four, five students.
Typically, students slide into debt through the extension (by credit card companies) of unaffordable credit lines.
Students never think it can be the teacher's fault and so I thought I was stupid. I was frustrated and would come home and cry because I couldn't do it. Then we got a new teacher who made math accessible. That made all the difference and I learned that it's how you present it that makes it scary or friendly.
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.
Many schools desperately need caring professionals like guidance counselors and social workers to ensure students' emotional, social and educational needs are met. But proposals to arm teachers are irresponsible and dangerous. The role of educators is to teach and nurture our children, not to be armed guards.
