Bel Kaufman Quotes
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She hasn't been back since, and we have a young per diem substitute who had taught shoes in a vocational high school on her last job. Though her license is English, she had been called to the Shoe Department, where she traced the history of shoes from Cinderella and Puss in Boots through Galsworthy and modern advertising. "Best shoe lesson they ever had," she told me cheerfully. "Until a cop came in, dangling handcuffs: 'Lady, that kid I gotta have.'" To her, Calvin Coolidge is Paradise.
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Your fingers smell of incense—a lover sings to the corpse of his dead sweetheart.
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That was what marriage was: the ultimate knowledge of each other, with no need to preen or to pretend. Even its irritations came from closeness.
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But I am busiest outside of my teaching classes. Do you know any other business or profession where highly-skilled specialists are required to tally numbers, alphabetize cards, put notices into mailboxes, and patrol the lunchroom?
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Children are the true connoisseurs. What’s precious to them has no price, only value.
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Then, aware once more of her obligation, she asked politely: “You only wrriter, or your work also?” “I hope to teach English one day.”
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A marriage, she thought, had to have a reason for being.
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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!
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This is from Payroll Division: I wasn’t even teaching in June, and I certainly don’t have $2.75. Apparently they don’t know I’m file # 443-817 and have got me confused with another–possibly.
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To the outside world, of course, this job is a cinch: 9 to 3, five days a week, two months' summer vacation with pay, all legal holidays, prestige and respect. My mother, for example, has the pleasant notion that my day consists of nodding graciously to the rustle of starched curtsies and a chorus of respectful voices bidding me good morning.
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Each country has its own manner of telephoning. The Russians, at least, are honest. They say, “It is Ivan Ivanovich who is bothering you.”
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Happy? It was a word she had been fond of using when she was young. But it meant one thing at eighteen, another at thirty-two. Its only test was contrast with unhappiness.
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To the young, cliches seem freshly minted.
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I haven’t seen her since. I wrote to her a few times, not really expecting an answer, for—as she often used to say—the tongue is longer than the pen and can lead you straight to Kiev.
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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.
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Dear Bea— I've been wading through a pile of "Due before 3" mimeos—but now at last I know what to do with them: into the wastebasket! I'm also hep to the jargon. I know that "illustrative material" means magazine covers, "enriched curriculum" means teaching "who and whom," and that "All evaluation of students should be predicated upon initial goals and grade level expectations" means if a kid shows up, pass him. Right?
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Dear Bea—Can’t make it today—sorry. Parent arriving lunch per. to ask why son got 35% on Midterm. Must answer him. How? Sylvia Dear Syl—Don’t try. There’s no communication; no one really listens. Every man is an island. Give him a container of coffee instead.
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Never mind the cream; it will always rise to the top. It's the skim milk that needs good teachers.
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Appreciation is appreciated.
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But if there is such a thing as social commitment in literature, I think it must manifest itself in a reader's awareness of the human condition, in the writer's touching some common nerve ending. I think this kind of social commitment, like a lady's slip, should be there but it must not show.
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To meet this expense, he sold his violin. Besides, Charlotte did not care for music.
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As a former student put it: “In a liberry it’s hard to avoid reading."
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Like a child, too, he was warm, unaffected, and selfish. He had the combination, irresistible to women, of ruthlessness and tenderness.
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Almost through force of habit, she found her lips saying the words she had so often said before: “Let’s not spoil it . . . You will write to me, my dear, my dear . . .” His face was impassive. “I never write,” he said.