Practice Makes Perfect (and other quotable quotes)

Debbie Willingham
Apr 05, 2010

I recently visited a fifth grade classroom in a school where the teacher had a daily "food for thought" quote on the board. I asked how she used it with her students, and she said that often that was how they would begin the day-by working with a partner to come up with paraphrases, illustrations, or just discussion to practice "working together" and "working under pressure" skills (she gave students five minutes or less to do this). She felt that not only did they get some interesting insights from the quotes, but they had learned much better how to work together during distributed summarizing with her Assessment Prompts during lessons.

This makes an important point; our students have to see and practice what we expect them to do well. I sometimes hear teachers say that it is a lot of trouble to use Collaborative Pairs, but like anything else worthwhile we want to become a successful practice in our classrooms, we have to teach our students how to work with a partner effectively, efficiently, and automatically. With that in mind, here are some quotable quotes from Education World (http://www.education-world.com) to use with fellow teachers or in some cases with students.

Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body. (Joseph Addison)

We must be the authors of the history of our age. (Madeline Albright)

Like a ten-speed bike, most of us have gears we do not use. (Charles Schultz)

There is a great distance between said and done. (Puerto Rican proverb)

If you were in your class, would you be happy? (unknown)

Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is probably why so few engage in it. (Henry Ford)

If you fail to plan, you plan to fail. (unknown)

We haven't failed. We now know a thousand things that won't work, so we're much closer to finding what will. (Thomas Edison)

You can't unscramble eggs. (John Pierpont Morgan)

He that is good at making excuses is seldom good at anything else. (Benjamin Franklin)

The way to be nothing is to do nothing. (Nathaniel Howe)

The reason a dog has so many friends is that he wags his tail and not his tongue. (unknown)

You can encounter many defeats, but you must not be defeated. (Maya Angelou)

There is a certain relief in change, as I have found travelling in a stagecoach; it is often a comfort to shift one's position and be bruised in a new place. (Washington Irving)