What is it in you that brings you to a spiritual teacher in the first place? It's not the spirit in you, since that is already enlightened, and has no need to seek. No, it is the ego in you that brings you to a teacher.

I feel so very grateful to have the voice God gave me. It takes a lot of rest and training to sing, and I was lucky that I found a great teacher when I first moved to New York.

Not to belittle what we do as actors, but my wife Helen is a teacher, and she makes a real difference to kids. So it's unusual to see people thinking of us as something special.

As a teacher I realize that what one learns in school doesn't serve for very much at all, that the only thing one can really learn is self-understanding, and this is something that can't be taught.

When I was eight, an uncle, great uncle, gave a violin to me, and my father took me off to have lessons. After about six weeks, the violin teacher told my father he was wasting his money, wasting his time, and wasting my time, and it's one of my big regrets.

I don't believe in acting teachers for me, so it's God's joke that he gave me a best friend who's an acting teacher.

In my work as a historian and in my relationships as a friend, teacher, wife, and mother, I have come to think that the most useful way to understand the past and make it work for you is to look at the trade-offs and contradictions that, however deeply buried, can be uncovered in every memory, good or bad.

And I found out, the other part of it is that I found out and in my desire to life successfully, that baseball fit very well into my life. It's been a great teacher, trainer, mentor and you'll see what I mean in the next few minutes that I have to speak.

Nearly everyone I met, worked with, or read about was my teacher, one way or another.

I want to work with kids. I would love to be a teacher.

If you put down a list of jobs, doctor, lawyer, janitor, teacher or movie star, everybody would pick the movie star. And why? So you could lie around the pool, drink margaritas and send money to your parents. So that's what I did.

To the teacher weighed down with paperwork, I say: you've been messed around too often. You came into teaching to spend your time teaching children not filling in forms.

My dance teacher will show me pictures of girls who are rhythmic gymnasts, and they are super skinny. But I don't want to be too skinny. I think that looks a little gross when you are dancing. You don't want to be a scrawny, bony thing.

If a lawyer, if a teacher, if a bus driver, if they're on $40,000 and they get offered a lot more to go somewhere else, what do you think they're going to do?

My teacher told me I'd never amount to anything. I left high school at 15, after one year. But my real teachers were all the people around me. And I was a good listener.

I'm home schooled, and I have a teacher that goes with me on all my movies.

I got into acting because my teachers kept nudging me into it. The power a teacher has to influence someone is so great. I can't think of a profession I have more respect for.

When I was a student at Mizzou, I was a daycare teacher. I did it because was a latchkey kid.

Ensuring all kids have access to an effective, talented teacher needs to be a national priority.

Teacher compensation isn't the only factor in cultivating great teaching. Other important priorities include changing how we measure student performance, providing more flexibility to teacher-preparation programs, and improving how we train and support principals.

My time at the Denver Public Schools taught me there is no harder, or more important, job than being a teacher.

I can remember exactly where I sat when my teacher first read Roald Dahl's 'James and the Giant Peach'.

Often, when people ask me what I read as a young girl, I lie. Or, I should say, I lie by omission. I tell them about my brilliant fourth-grade teacher, Miss Artis, who assigned us 'Johnny Tremain' and 'Where the Red Fern Grows' and 'Tuck Everlasting,' all books that made an impression on me. And people nod in approval.

I was used to theatre classes. I studied with my mother; she was a theatre teacher and directed, too, so it was very family-like. Then I studied with a great teacher in Paris, and she was wonderful; she pushed me, but she was a warm soul.

I was the worst teacher you have ever imagined - not that we did not have fun. We had a ton of fun. We just did not learn any scripture. I would think all week long what could I talk about on Sunday, and then I would scramble on Saturday to find some kind of scripture to go with it. This was my teaching.

I told my mom the reason I started working out was because I wanted to break the necks of the people picking on me. I wanted to hurt them. I said I didn't want any teacher to put me down any more.

When I was 11, I played the part of Rumpelstiltskin, and my teacher told me I would make a great actor.

No matter how much you like your local school teacher, he or she is a government agent.

As a master of graphic creation, as teacher, historian, and roving ambassador of comics, Jerry Robinson has ensured that future generations of talented kids will continue to imagine and then put marks on paper.

My family was going back to England to visit my mother's grandmother, who was very ill. We went up to Liverpool and I met my great-aunt, who was just a force of nature. She was an elocution teacher and a huge enthusiast for theater and the classics. I took her amateur acting class, and she was really impressed with me.

My mother worked in the white world, but I lived almost exclusively in a black world. I don't think I had ever seen a white teacher until I got to high school.

My dad worked for a generator company and then UC Berkeley, and my mom was as a dental hygienist and then eventually a history teacher. My uncles and aunts, all of them are elementary school teachers or scientists.

During my childhood, my father, a Southern Baptist minister, and my mother, a teacher, made sure I took educational trips to cities such as Washington, D.C., Williamsburg, Va., Philadelphia, and Boston to learn about America's history.

We all go back to our roots. My father went to the central west, went to Ilfracombe in 1919. He was the manager of the wool scour there. And, Ilfracombe was right at the heart of Australia's great wool industry, and my mother was a teacher at Winton.

In the depth of the near depression, that he faced when he came in, Barack Obama and Democratic leaders in Congress provided 'recovery funds' that literally kept our classrooms open. Two years ago, these funds saved nearly 20,000 teacher and education jobs - just here in North Carolina.

A self-defined challenge is an irresistible teacher.

As a teacher, as a propagandist, Mr. Shaw is no good at all, even in his own generation. But as a personality, he is immortal.

Following my junior year in high school, I went on a camping trip through Russia in a group led by Horst Momber, a young language teacher from Roosevelt.

I was introduced to theater by a teacher that found me when I was in elementary school. She tested me for the Gifted and Talented program, started taking me to see the 'Nutcracker Ballet.' I got involved.

Effective teacher support in my mind is the same thing as effective management. Our teachers need strong management, just like anyone in any profession.

If we freed up all the money in the certification process, think about how much more money we'd have to put into teacher salaries.

If a teacher does not involve himself, his values, his commitments, in the course of discussion, why should the students?

I had an acting teacher tell me once that if you're playing a car salesman, you don't want to be an OK car salesman, you want to play the best car salesman.

Connie Heermann is a Freedom Writer teacher. I believe she represents the best of what dedicated teachers can be because she chose to serve her students, not her school board.

When I was in the first grade I was afraid of the teacher and had a miserable time in the reading circle, a difficulty that was overcome by the loving patience of my second grade teacher. Even though I could read, I refused to do so.

'Expect nothing and hope for the best' is my mantra. A drama teacher called Joseph Blatchley told me that, and it's the best advice I've had. If you keep an open mind and don't expect too much, then you won't be disappointed.

I am inspired by Nelson Mandela. I was a volunteer teacher in South Africa during apartheid, where I witnessed his success liberating black South Africans.

The average American worker gets something like 14 days of paid vacation. In my school, you'd use up ten of those taking care of your kids on teacher professional days, then tack on a couple more for kids getting sick.

I'm very grateful and fully aware that 90 percent of actors are not working. Going from public school teacher to a show like 'Grey's Anatomy', I love what I do.

I got an old school coach who's more of a teacher than a coach.