Bel Kaufman Quotes

With me they get a solid foundation, the disciplines of learning. In my class they don't get away with hot air discussions and exchanging their opinions and describing their experiences. What opinions can they have? What have they experienced? What do they know? That's an affront! They learn what I know.

How can I take seriously such mimeographed absurdities as "Lateness due to absence," "High under-achiever," and "Polio consent slips"?
—Syl<p>Dear Syl,
I'll match yours any day with "Please disregard the following."
—Bea

Mythology is studied in the school system because most of us come from it.

A teacher is frequently the only adult in the pupil's environment who treats him with respect.

Why did you fail me? I didn't do nothing!" The reply, of course, is: "That's just it.

We got this jerky sub. she don't know a thing and she's trying to teach it.

You teachers are all alike, dishing out crap and expecting us to swallow it and then give it back to you, nice and neat, with a place in it for the mark to go in. But you're even phonier than the others because you put on this act — being a dame you know how — and you stand there pretending that you give a damn. Who you kidding?
We're dirt to you, just like you're dirt to the fatheads and whistle-blowers who run this jail, and they're dirt to the swindlers and horn-tooters who run the school system.

Teaching here isn't so bad. Once you accept as one of the ineluctable laws of nature that kids will continue to say "Silas Mariner" and "Ancient Marner" and "between you and I" and "mischievious" and that the administration will continue to use phrases like "egregious conduct" and "ethnic background" you can go on from there.

My words never reached him; I could almost hear them drop, one by one, like so many pebbles against a closed window.

During what was presumably my lunch period, Admiral Ass (a Mr. McHabe, who signs himself Adm. Asst.) appeared in my room with Joe Ferone.
"This boy is on probation," he said. "Did he show up in homeroom this morning?"
"Yes," I said.
"Any trouble?" the Admiral asked.
There we stood, the three of us, taking each other's measure. Ferone was watching through narrowed eyes.
"No. No trouble," I said.

One of my students had written wistfully of a dream-school that would have "windows with trees in them."

The building itself is hostile: cracked plaster, broken windows, splintered doors and carved up desks, gloomy corridors and metal stairways, dingy cafeteria (they can eat sitting down only in 20 minute shifts) and an auditorium which has no windows. It does have murals, however, depicting mute, muscular harvesters, faded and immobile under a mustard sun.