<p>Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe and not make messes in the house.
–Lazarus Long, “Time Enough for Love”, (Robert A. Heinlein)</p>
<p>my algebra and geometry teacher had this quote hanging in their room. “Factor or die”</p>
<p>“It’s kind of fun to do the impossible.”
- Walt Disney </p>
<p>“I find that the harder I work, the more luck I seem to have.”
- Thomas Jefferson </p>
<p>Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls, and looks like work.
- Thomas Edison</p>
<p>If its to be, its up to me.
- Colonel Truman Crowford - Director of the Chicago Royal Aires Drum and Bugle Corps, the USMC Commandants Own, and the USAF Drum and Bugle Corps</p>
<p>You miss 100% of the shots you dont take.
- Wayne Gretzky</p>
<p>Even the lowly woodpecker owes his success to the fact that he uses his head.
- Joe Marcucci</p>
<p>The difference between a successful person and others is not a lack of strength, not a lack of knowledge, but rather a lack of will.
-Vince Lombardi </p>
<p>Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety nine percent perspiration.
- Thomas Alva Edison</p>
<p>I do not think much of a man who is not wiser today than he was yesterday.
- Abraham Lincoln</p>
<p>I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.
- Confucius</p>
<p>Well done is better than well said.
- Benjamin Franklin</p>
<p>… I collect quotes.</p>
<p>Attitude + aptitude = altitude.</p>
<p>“Let no one enter here who does not know geometry [mathematics].” – Plato</p>
<p>Avalon - LOL. If you posted that in a middle school math class, the whole class might walk out!</p>
<p>I teach multicultural students from low income neighborhoods and I appreaciate these quotes, which I will put on my wall or on my overhead or handouts.</p>
<p>“The Unknown”
As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don’t know
We don’t know. </p>
<p>Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense<br>
from the Feb. 12, 2002, Department of Defense news briefing
hey its profound …and funny</p>
<p>My favorites…</p>
<p>“Never discourage anyone who continually makes progress, no matter how slow”
Plato</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.theotherpages.org/unsort02.html[/url]”>http://www.theotherpages.org/unsort02.html</a></p>
<p>“No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.”
– Eleanor Roosevelt
<a href=“http://www.quotedb.com/quotes/1918[/url]”>http://www.quotedb.com/quotes/1918</a></p>
<p>just a quick thought here …i gotta get going and do some work…Mr. B…just dont be too pedantic with this stuff… you don’t want to come off like those motivational posters that you can buy at office depot (with the photo of the mountains or sky and a quote that says “Aim high” or something) that we parody. (we had a bunch of parodies of those posters up in our school library for laughs)… middle schoolers have pretty good BS detectors.</p>
<p>I take no credit for finding this but recently on the Musical Theater Forum, another poster put up this quote amidst a discussion about majoring in musical theater, even if parents/others might discourage you from doing so: (this applies to other things of course)</p>
<p>“You can only become truly accomplished at something you love. Don’t make money your goal. Instead, pursue the things you love doing, and do them so well that people can’t take their eyes off you.”
Maya Angelou</p>
<p>You must understand the whole of life, not just one little part of it. That is why you must read, that is why you must look at the skies, that is why you must sing and dance, and write poems and suffer and understand, for all that is life."</p>
<p> .J Krishnamurti, Think on These Things</p>
<p>No society that feeds its children on tales of successful violence can
expect them not to believe that violence in the end is rewarded. -Margaret Mead</p>
<p>The fingers of your thoughts are molding your face ceaselessly. -Charles Reznikoff, poet (1894-1976)</p>
<p>Even after all this time, the sun never says to the earth, “You owe me.” Look what happens with a love like that - it lights the whole sky.
—Hafiz, 14th century Iranian poet</p>
<p>What’s done to children, they will do to society. -Karl A. Menninger,
psychiatrist (1893-1990)</p>
<p>It’s impossible to be loyal to your family, your friends, your country, and your principles, all at the same time. -Mignon McLaughlin, author (1915-)</p>
<p>“Should any political party attempt to abolish social security,
unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs,
you would not hear of that party again in our political history.
There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes that you can
do these things. Among them are a few Texas oil millionaires, and an
occasional politician or businessman from other areas. Their number
is negligible and they are stupid.”
----President Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1952-----</p>
<p>The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher
esteem those who think alike than those who think differently. -Friedrich Nietzsche, philosopher (1844-1900)</p>
<p>If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about the answers. -Thomas Pynchon, writer (1937- )</p>
<p>Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.
Mohandas Gandhi</p>
<p>Victory attained by violence is tantamount to a defeat, for it is momentary.
Mohandas Gandhi</p>
<p>When one door closes another door opens; but we so often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door, that we do not see the ones which open for us. -Alexander Graham Bell, inventor (1847-1922)</p>
<p>In order to improve the mind, we ought less to learn than to contemplate.
-Rene Descartes, philosopher and mathematician (1596-1650)</p>
<p>I didn’t fight to get women out from behind vacuum cleaners to get them onto the board of Hoover.
Germaine Greer</p>
<p>Every act of conscious learning requires the willingness to suffer an
injury to one’s self-esteem. That is why young children, before they are
aware of their own self-importance, learn so easily; and why older persons, especially if vain or important, cannot learn at all. -Thomas Szasz, author, professor of psychiatry (1920- )</p>
<p>If we don’t believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we
don’t believe in it at all. -Noam Chomsky, linguistics professor and
political activist (1928- )</p>
<p>If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten we belong to each other. Mother Teresa</p>
<p>Although the world is full of suffering, it is full also of the overcoming of it.
–Helen Keller</p>
<p>Many persons have a wrong idea of what constitutes true happiness. It is not attained through self-gratification but through fidelity to a worthy purpose.
Helen Keller</p>
<p>Only morality in our actions can give beauty and dignity to our lives.
Albert Einstein</p>
<p>“We shall not cease from exploration.
And the end of all our exploring,
Will be to arrive where we started,
And to know that place for the first time.”</p>
<p>T.S. Eliot</p>
<p>Don’t say you don’t have enough time. You have exactly the same number of hours per day that were given to Helen Keller, Pasteur, Michaelangelo, Mother Teresa, Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson, and Albert Einstein.
-H. Jackson Brown, Jr., writer</p>
<p>To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness.
Bertrand Russell</p>
<p>Man is ready to die for an idea, provided that idea is not quite clear to him.
Paul Eldridge</p>
<p>A teacher who is attempting to teach, without inspiring the pupil with a
desire to learn, is hammering on a cold iron. -Horace Mann, educational reformer (1796-1859)</p>
<p>Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.
Horace Mann</p>
<p>Too many parents make life hard for their children by trying, too
zealously, to make it easy for them. -Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, poet, dramatist, novelist, and philosopher (1749-1832)</p>
<p>“Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore, we must be saved by hope. Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore, we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, could be accomplished alone; therefore, we must be saved by love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as it is from our own standpoint; therefore, we must be saved by the final form of love, which is forgiveness.”
Reinhold Niebuhr from The Irony of American History</p>
<p>Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.
–Frederick Nietzsche</p>
<p>Live as if you were living a second time, and as though you had acted
wrongly the first time. -Viktor Frankl, author, neurologist and
psychiatrist, Holocaust survivor (1905-1997)</p>
<p>“We don’t have to engage in grand heroic actions to participate in the process of change. Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people can transform the world. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.”…Howard Zinn, “The Possibility of Hope”</p>
<p>I could go on and on… I have a document I keep on my desktop at all times called “quotes” and I collect them constantly. The source of many of the shorter ones here is <a href=“http://wordsmith.org/awad/subscriber.html[/url]”>http://wordsmith.org/awad/subscriber.html</a>, a fun, enriching daily listserve.</p>
<p>Math students function periodically.</p>
<p>(legend on back of Smith College Math Dept. t-shirt.)</p>
<p>My D’s middle school math classroom had pi written out around the circumference of the room. By the end of the year, she had memorized (and can still recite over 3 years later) pi to the 142nd place.</p>
<p>My favorite, but I don’t know who said it:</p>
<p>There are three kinds of people: those who can count, and those who can’t.</p>
<p>binx - I LOVED that one!</p>
<p>It goes with 5 out of 4 people aren’t good with ratios.</p>
<p>The late Dave Allee (a great professor and friend) lived by Margaret Mead’s dictum, which appeared on his email signature: "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed it’s the only thing that ever does.</p>
<p>“Gravity explains the motions of the planets, but it cannot explain who set the planets in motion. God governs all things and knows all that is or can be done.”</p>
<p>“I have a fundamental belief in the Bible as the Word of God, written by those who were inspired. I study the Bible daily.”</p>
<p>Alexander Pope on Newton:
“Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night: God said, Let Newton be! and all was light.”</p>
<p>Just having a little fun…
btw–“tolerance and good health” are now important subjects in public middle school math classes? And you’re concerned about a little intelligent design discussion infringing on the curriculum?</p>
<p>Actually, scientists <em>can</em> explain the setting of planets in motion. Other scientists have stood on the shoulders of Newton and others upon them. They can also explain that the vast majority of the non-hydrogen atoms in our bodies and in the Earth are the left-over debris from the death of Population I stars that have gone nova.</p>
<p>Driver, I believe that kids are so flooded with advertising and media garbage that I like to offer alternative advertising in my classroom and school. Slogans that will help them to lead better lives. It isn’t part of the limited curricullum we are handicapped with, but it is part of why I became a teacher.</p>
<p>Incidentally, I have taught Intelligent Design, in my Sunday school class, but not in my science class, but that is another post.</p>
<p>What was that Mark Twain quote? “You can judge the quality of a man by the confederacy of Dunces that raises up against him.”</p>