A Quote by Earl Butz

Teaching was the most pleasant thing I did. — © Earl Butz
Teaching was the most pleasant thing I did.
I do many kinds of work, and if you forbid me from binding books, from gardening, from writing poetry, from practicing walking meditation, from teaching children, I will be very unhappy. To me, work is pleasant. Pleasant or unpleaseant depends on our way of looking.
The truth is, I should have never done teaching. I did teaching because I didn't have the bottle to have a go at comedy. Whether there's any gain to comedy is not for me to say. But certainly it was no loss to teaching.
I am relieved that, in my own teaching, I don't have to moderate between high stake teaching and education for the virtues. If I did, I would give students the tools to take the tests but not spend an inordinate amount of time on test prep nor on 'teaching to the test.' If the students, or their parents, want drill in testing, they'd have to go elsewhere. As a professional, my most important obligation is to teach the topic, skills, and methods in ways that I feel are intellectually legitimate.
I wonder if that isn't the most sinful thing of all -- thinking all the pleasant things are wicked.
Teaching, I find, is not the most amusing thing on earth; in fact, with a stupid lump for a Pupil, it is about the most irksome.
While I would agree that I write about serious subjects, and that they're not necessarily the most pleasant subjects or even the most pleasant people, as a writer I just think about the humorous aspects of these things - that's what keeps me going when I'm writing a story.
I did end up doing substitute teaching, but there's not a lot of teaching involved in that.
I was unable to walk for a whole week after that, so much did the race take out of me. But it was the most pleasant exhaustion I have ever known.
As a teacher and parent, I've had a very personal interest in seeking new ways of teaching. Like most other teachers and parents, I've been well aware painfully so, at times that the whole teaching/learning process is extraordinarily imprecise, most of the time a hit-and-miss operation. Students may not learn what we think we are teaching them and what they learn may not be what we intended to teach them at all.
One of the most memorable and frightening things when I was four or five was Kate Bush doing 'Wuthering Heights.' She did it outside, in a forest, and she did this thing where she looked straight into the camera, and it's the most frightening thing for a kid to see, but it just stuck in my head.
The thing that I think about the most, and is the most rewarding to me, is the whole past. That I kind of went from nothing to something and I did it on my own, and I did it through hard work and smarts.
If it's one thing my parents did right, it was teaching me to have a good work ethic, and I plan on doing the same with my kids!
I learn more about how to run a set teaching six-year-olds. You go into a classroom as a teacher, and the most important work you do is create an infrastructure and an environment that's safe, in which children will feel able and free to take risk. Working with actors, you have to establish the same thing. Teaching a class is not so different than mounting a production.
I'd say the vast majority of my interview experiences have been pleasant, better than pleasant. But sometimes there will be people who will size you up. There can be that "rock star" thing where they think it's cool to pull back.
Housework is a breeze. Cooking is a pleasant diversion. Putting up a retaining wall is a lark. But teaching is like climbing a mountain.
It's probably similar to being in New York City and having a cab driver behind you and you're driving too slow. It's not the most pleasant thing.
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