Bel Kaufman Quotes
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Your fingers smell of incense—a lover sings to the corpse of his dead sweetheart.
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I had used my sense of humor; I had called it proportion, perspective. But perspective is distance.
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The clerical work is par for the course. "Keep on file in numerical order" means throw in wastebasket. You'll soon learn the language. "Let it be a challenge to you" means you're stuck with it; "interpersonal relationships" is a fight between kids; "ancillary civic agencies for supportive discipline" means call the cops; "Language Arts Dept." is the English office; "literature based on child's reading level and experiential background" means that's all they've got in the Book Room; "non-academic-minded" is a delinquent; and "It has come to my attention" means you're in trouble.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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To the young, cliches seem freshly minted.
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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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As a former student put it: “In a liberry it’s hard to avoid reading."
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To meet this expense, he sold his violin. Besides, Charlotte did not care for music.
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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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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.
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Lady stand on line before me, speak English so good, like genius, in America only four years, I ashamed tell twenty-two years; I tell twenty!” To class she went only once. “I don’t go back,” she said emphatically. “Too foolish book, Dick and Jane.” She shrugged disdainfully. “Not Tolstoi!"
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I have this colored friend Betty well, I never thought about it one way or the other until one day I went over her house for the first time and her father opened the door and I was surprized to see he was colored. Because, to me I was so used to her she always looked normal.
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She wore no make-up, and her small, tense face looked chronically embarrassed, as if it got attached by mistake to the wrong person.
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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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Is Rrawssian saying: ‘Better small fish than big cockroach.’ Some hawsband drrunk, some hawsband play all time cards, some hawsband fleert with woman. . . . Rrogov make only with brread.
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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.