Phillip Done > Quotes

“The main reason I became a teacher is that I like being the first one to introduce kids to words and music and people and numbers and concepts and idea that they have never heard about or thought about before. I like being the first one to tell them about Long John Silver and negative numbers and Beethoven and alliteration and "Oh, What a Beautiful Morning" and similes and right angles and Ebenezer Scrooge. . . Just think about what you know today. You read. You write. You work with numbers. You solve problems. We take all these things for granted. But of course you haven't always read. You haven't always known how to write. You weren't born knowing how to subtract 199 from 600. Someone showed you. There was a moment when you moved from not knowing to knowing, from not understanding to understanding. That's why I became a teacher.”
― Phillip Done, 32 Third Graders and One Class Bunny: Life Lessons from Teaching

“Teachers are Peter Pans in a way. It’s so easy to lose track of time. You forget that you’re getting older, because they’re always eight years old. You teach in the same classroom year after year. You wear the same tie. You tell the same jokes. Everything is always the same.”
― Phillip Done, 32 Third Graders and One Class Bunny: Life Lessons from Teaching

“We all know the three Rs: reading, writing, and arithmetic. But I contend there is a fourth -- one that is vitally important. You need it to teach the other three. In fact, you need it to teach everything effectively. It touches on all teaching and learning. The fourth R is rapport.”
― Phillip Done, The Art of Teaching Children: All I Learned from a Lifetime in the Classroom

“Moving students around on a seating chart is like playing a game of Sudoku. No mater how you set up the chart, you still end up with children who should be separated.”
― Phillip Done, The Art of Teaching Children: All I Learned from a Lifetime in the Classroom

“We all know that teachers are doctors and dentists (for all those lost teeth), coaches and travel agents (for all those field trips), directors and handwriting analysts (for all the papers without names), and counselors and lawyers ("I'll cross-examine you in a second to find out what happened at recess").”
― Phillip Done, The Art of Teaching Children: All I Learned from a Lifetime in the Classroom

“Teachers know that love is a vital part of education. Good teaching is infused with it. The most successful classrooms are brimming with it. Love is the reason people go into teaching -- love for a subject and love for children.”
― Phillip Done, The Art of Teaching Children: All I Learned from a Lifetime in the Classroom

“Whenever a child is taking a risk, one must never make light of it.”
― Phillip Done, The Art of Teaching Children: All I Learned from a Lifetime in the Classroom

“Like all teachers in training, when I was a teacher candidate in my university's education department (Teacher School, I like to call it), I took courses in childhood development, educational philosophy, classroom management, and classes in how to teach all of the subjects.... After I landed my first teaching position, I realized that there were several topics my instructors hadn't covered. I have a theory about this: If they had told the truth about the profession, there'd be an even bigger teacher shortage.”
― Phillip Done, The Art of Teaching Children: All I Learned from a Lifetime in the Classroom

“Every child knows ho to do a drumroll. It's instinctive, just like when children pick staples out of the rug and bring them to the teacher.”
― Phillip Done, The Art of Teaching Children: All I Learned from a Lifetime in the Classroom

“I tried to keep my classroom tidy. I just wasn't very good at it. Those books on getting organized don't work for classrooms anyway. Take the popular The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, for example. The author recommends discarding anything that doesn't spark joy. Well, teachers can't do that! If we did, our kids wouldn't get any papers returned because we all would have tossed out our correcting baskets.”
― Phillip Done, The Art of Teaching Children: All I Learned from a Lifetime in the Classroom

“When I was six years old, I learned to read from a map of Disneyland.... When learning to read, kids' first words are typically ones like cat and bat. Mine were Jungle Cruise, Fantasyland, and Autopia.”
― Phillip Done, The Art of Teaching Children: All I Learned from a Lifetime in the Classroom

“Children wish to be engaged with directly, even when a parent is willing to speak for them.”
― Phillip Done, The Art of Teaching Children: All I Learned from a Lifetime in the Classroom

“There are three different ways to cross out a misspelled word: with a straight line, a squiggly one, or by scratching out the word with your pencil so many times that it ends up looking like top-secret, heavily redacted, highly classified material that must never be found out or else you will be killed.”
― Phillip Done, The Art of Teaching Children: All I Learned from a Lifetime in the Classroom

“When looking inside some kids' desks, you understand why hurricanes are named after people.”
― Phillip Done, The Art of Teaching Children: All I Learned from a Lifetime in the Classroom

“We all know the symbols for school: an apple, a red one-room schoolhouse, a bell. But those symbols never really worked for me.... If I had to pick one symbol that represents teaching, it wouldn't be any of these. It would be the bulletin board.”
― Phillip Done, The Art of Teaching Children: All I Learned from a Lifetime in the Classroom

“Reading is the king of subjects. Math and science, writing and social studies -- they all depend on it. It's the most important thing children learn in school.”
― Phillip Done, The Art of Teaching Children: All I Learned from a Lifetime in the Classroom

“As a rule, children shouldn't whine in class, of course -- unless it's at the end of story time. Then it's okay.”
― Phillip Done, The Art of Teaching Children: All I Learned from a Lifetime in the Classroom