18 quotes
One of my students had written wistfully of a dream-school that would have "windows with trees in them."
Up the Down Staircase (1965)
A teacher is frequently the only adult in the pupil's environment who treats him with respect.
Up the Down Staircase (1965)
Mythology is studied in the school system because most of us come from it.
Up the Down Staircase (1965)
Like most chairmen, he teaches only one class of Seniors; the most experienced teachers are frequently promoted right out of the classroom!
Up the Down Staircase (1965)
"Why did you fail me? I didn't do nothing!" The reply, of course, is: "That's just it."
Up the Down Staircase (1965)
My words never reached him; I could almost hear them drop, one by one, like so many pebbles against a closed window.
Up the Down Staircase (1965)
We got this jerky sub. she don't know a thing and she's trying to teach it.
Up the Down Staircase (1965)
When I had asked why they were taking English, a boy said: "To help us in real life."
Up the Down Staircase (1965)
I had used my sense of humor; I had called it proportion, perspective. But perspective is distance.
Up the Down Staircase (1965)
If a teacher wants to know something why doesn't she look it up herself instead of making we students do it? We benefit ourselves more by listening to her, after all she's the teacher!
Up the Down Staircase (1965)
Being a female, she spurns him on.
Up the Down Staircase (1965)
I don't allow anyone to talk to me like that.
So you're lucky — you're a teacher.
Up the Down Staircase (1965)
Teachers try to make us feel lower than themselves, maybe because this is because they feel lower than outside people. One teacher told me to get out of the room and never come back, which I did.
Up the Down Staircase (1965)
In Memory of Those Who Died Waiting for the Bell
Up the Down Staircase (1965)
Your lesson plan is excellent — except for the Emily Dickinson line: "There is no frigate like a book." The sentiment is lovely, the quotation is apt — only trouble is the word "frigate." Just try to say it in class — and your lesson is over.
Up the Down Staircase (1965)
Teaching here isn't so bad. Once you accept as one of the ineluctable laws of nature that kids will continue to say "Silas Mariner" and "Ancient Marner" and "between you and I" and "mischievious" and that the administration will continue to use phrases like "egregious conduct" and "ethnic background" you can go on from there.
Up the Down Staircase (1965)
The building itself is hostile: cracked plaster, broken windows, splintered doors and carved up desks, gloomy corridors and metal stairways, dingy cafeteria (they can eat sitting down only in 20 minute shifts) and an auditorium which has no windows. It does have murals, however, depicting mute, muscular harvesters, faded and immobile under a mustard sun.
Up the Down Staircase (1965)
Paul asks how I would have handled a love letter from a student. I don't know — by talking, maybe, by listening. I don't know.
How sad that we don't hear each other — any of us.
Major issues are submerged by minor ones; catastrophes by absurdities.
Up the Down Staircase (1965)