Jo

“Teachers are Peter Pans in a way. It’s so easy to lose track of time. You forget that you’re getting older, because they’re always eight years old. You teach in the same classroom year after year. You wear the same tie. You tell the same jokes. Everything is always the same.”
― Phillip Done, 32 Third Graders and One Class Bunny: Life Lessons from Teaching

“Roy: "Looks like it's starting to rain"

Riza: "But..It's not raining..."

Roy: "Yes it is. This is the rain.”
― Hiromu Arakawa, Fullmetal Alchemist, Vol. 4

“The main reason I became a teacher is that I like being the first one to introduce kids to words and music and people and numbers and concepts and idea that they have never heard about or thought about before. I like being the first one to tell them about Long John Silver and negative numbers and Beethoven and alliteration and "Oh, What a Beautiful Morning" and similes and right angles and Ebenezer Scrooge. . . Just think about what you know today. You read. You write. You work with numbers. You solve problems. We take all these things for granted. But of course you haven't always read. You haven't always known how to write. You weren't born knowing how to subtract 199 from 600. Someone showed you. There was a moment when you moved from not knowing to knowing, from not understanding to understanding. That's why I became a teacher.”
― Phillip Done, 32 Third Graders and One Class Bunny: Life Lessons from Teaching

“Mama recently mailed me this letter, which I sent her more than twenty-three years ago. As I read it now, I don’t recognize that young boy. What happened to all that love and longing I felt for the family and friends I’d left? Separation not only divides families; separation buries emotion, buries it so far down you can’t touch it. I don’t think I would ever love Mama again in the childlike, carefree, innocent way I loved her while writing that letter. I don’t know where that young boy went.”
― Jose Antonio Vargas, Dear America: Notes of an Undocumented Citizen