Quotes on my classroom wall

Over the years I have been collecting quotes that strike me as profoundly insightful so that I can post them on the walls of my classroom. Here is a list of some of the quotes that I have on the walls of my classroom and hallways in my school:

• Students should experience success and failure not as reward and punishment, but as information.
• The most important attitude that can be formed is that of a desire to go on learning.
• The passion for learning is not something you have to inspire kids to have; it’s something you have to keep from extinguishing.
• A mark or grade is an inadequate report of an inaccurate judgment by a  biased and variable judge of the extent to which a student has attained an indefinite amount of material.
• Chasing testsandgrades may be a good way of passing school and failing life.
• Is understanding passively absorbed or actively constructed?
• Should learning be more about thinking or remembering?
• When students are simply told the most efficient way of getting the answer, they get in the habit of looking to the adult or the book instead of thinking things through.
• Think for yourself. Your teacher might be wrong!
• Question Authority
• “If you punish a child for being naughty and reward him for being good, he will do right merely for the sake of the reward; and when he goes out into the world and discovers that goodness is not always rewarded, nor wickedness always punished, he will grow into a man who only thinks about how he may get on in the world, and does right or wrong according as he finds advantage to himself.”
• "I don’t want to feel good when someone else fails, but I’m so afraid of failing that I feel relieved when someone else does. I feel bad, but it makes it easier for me to get a good grade."
• The more you use power to try and control people, the less real influence you’ll have on their lives.
• Mistakes are our friends.
• We must constantly remind ourselves that the ultimate purpose of evaluation is to enable students to evaluate themselves.
• It is better not to make merit a matter of reward, lest people conspire and contend.
• Who would have thought that play could be turned into work by rewarding people for doing what they like to do?
• Children have an intrinsic desire to learn. Praise and manipulation can only serve to stifle that natural motivation and replace it with blind conformity, a mechanical work style, or open defiance toward authority.
• We are interested in observing how students produce knowledge rather than how they merely reproduce knowledge.
• If you never change your mind, why have one?
• When the mind is thinking, it is talking to itself.
• A man who has committed a mistake and doesn’t correct it is committing another mistake.
• Insanity is continuing to do the same thing over and over and expecting different results
• The purpose of education is not primarily to help children know more; rather, it is to help children become better able to think, care, imagine, understand, and adapt – to become autonomous learners.
• Too many people fail to understand the difference between harder and better – or, for that matter, between working and learning. It reflects a naïve belief that one can get meaningful results from coercion.
• Why waste time proving over and over how great you are, when you could be getting better?
• People don’t grow into creativity. Unfortunately, we tend to grow out of it.
• Learning, after all, depends not on what students do so much as on how they regard and construe what they do.
• Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.
• Technocrats value what they measure instead of measuring what they value.
• When kids do something bad, something bad must be done to them – Perhaps it’s time to rethink this archaic strategy!
• Parents who find unacceptable a great many things that their children do or say will inevitably foster in these children a deep feeling that they are unacceptable as persons.
• The ultimate goal of authentic assessment must be the elimination of grades. But rubrics actually help to legitimate grade by offering a new way to derive them.
• Just as standardizing assessment for teachers may compromise the quality of teaching, so standardizing assessment for learners may compromise learning.
• It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit.
• I never let my schooling get in the way of my education.
• Students who have been led to focus on producing the right answer or scoring well on a test tend to think more superficially.
• No one succeeds all the time, and no one can learn very effectively without making mistakes and bumping up against his or her limits. It’s important, therefore, to encourage a healthy and resilient attitude toward failure. As a rule, that is exactly what students tend to have if their main goal is to learn: When they do something incorrectly, they see the result as useful information. They figure out what went wrong and how to fix it.
• It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.
• The more we want our children to want to do something, the more counterproductive it will be to reward them for doing it.
• Children, after all, learn how to make good decisions by making decisions, not by following directions.
• Relying on power to induce conformity rarely produces lasting solutions
• You can’t start the next chapter of your life if you keep re-reading the last one.
• A diamond is a piece of coal that stuck to its job.
• The best things in life aren’t things.
• If you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always gotten.
• Know that we humans do not have to be stuck in our ways. We choose to do so.