"The aim of education should be to teach us rather how to think, than what to think - rather to improve our minds, so as to enable us to think for ourselves, than to load the memory with thoughts of other men." Bill Beattie
"Think what the teacher's job entails. First, a textbook must be chosen, a syllabus prepared, and the material being taught (which your teacher may or may not have worked with in some time) completely mastered. This is before you ever step into class on that first day. Second, for every lecture the teacher gives, there is at least an hour's preparation, writing down lecture notes, thinking about how best to present the material, and so on. This is on top of the time spent grading student work - which itself can be done only after the instructor works the exercises for him or herself. Finally, think about the anxiety you feel about speaking to an audience, and about your own math anxiety, and then imagine what a math teacher must do: manage both kinds of anxiety simultaneously. It would be wonderful if every instructor were a brilliant lecturer. But even the least brilliant deserves consideration for the difficulty of the job." Source: www.mathacademy.com
"Good teaching is one-fourth preparation and three-fourths theatre." Gail Godwin
"In what may as well be starkly labelled smug satisfaction, an amazing 94% [of college instructors] rate themselves as above average teachers, and 68% rank themselves in the top quarter of teaching performances." K. Patricia Cross
"Students ratings collected a year apart from the same students correlated significantly, though the later ratings tended to rate the teacher as less effective than those collected at the end of the course." John Centra
"A university is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest in students." John Ciardi
"The best learners... often make the worst teachers. They are, in a very real sense, perceptually challenged. They cannot imagine what it must be like to struggle to learn something that comes so naturally to them." Stephen Brookfield
"If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough." Albert Einstein
"If I could explain it to the average person, I wouldn't have been worth the Nobel Prize." Richard Feynman