Inspiration

I have found the following quotes to be inspirational in both my life as a teacher and as a parent:

"I feel it is important to make a real contribution." - Louise Dermen Sparks

"Children need the tools to thrive/ survive in the public school system." - Louise Dermen Sparks

"Parents were involved and that made me want to be involved." - Sandy Escobide

"Of course children benefit from positive feedback. But praise and rewards are not the only methods of reinforcement. More emphasis should be place on appreciation—reinforcement related explicitly and directly to the content of the child's interest and efforts." - Lilian Katz

"Each of us must come to care about everyone else's children. We must recognize that the welfare of our children is intimately linked to the welfare of all other people's children. After all, when one of our children needs life-saving surgery, someone else's child will perform it. If one of our children is harmed by violence, someone else's child will be responsible for the violent act. The good life for our own children can be secured only if a good life is also secured for all other people's children." - Lilian Katz

"In the United States, it is now possible for a person eighteen years of age, female as well as male, to graduate from high school, college, or university without ever having cared for, or even held, a baby; without ever having comforted or assisted another human being who really needed help. . . . No society can long sustain itself unless its members have learned the sensitivities, motivations, and skills involved in assisting and caring for other human beings." - Urie Bronfenbrenner

"One of the most significant effects of age-segregation in our society has been the isolation of children from the world of work. Whereas in the past children not only saw what their parents did for a living but even shared substantially in the task, many children nowadays have only a vague notion of the nature of the parent's job, and have had little or no opportunity to observe the parent, or for that matter any other adult, when he is fully engaged in his work." - Urie Bronfenbrenner

"Children need people in order to become human.... It is primarily through observing, playing, and working with others older and younger than himself that a child discovers both what he can do and who he can become—that he develops both his ability and his identity.... Hence to relegate children to a world of their own is to deprive them of their humanity, and ourselves as well." - Urie Bronfenbrenner

"Development, it turns out, occurs through this process of progressively more complex exchange between a child and somebody else—especially somebody who's crazy about that child." - Urie Bronfenbrenner