The crazy ones

Here's to the crazy ones.
   The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers.
         The round pegs in the square holes.
               The ones who see things differently.  

They're not fond of rules.
         And they have no respect for the status quo.  

You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them.
         About the only thing you can't do is ignore them.
               Because they change things. 

They push the human race forward.  

And while some may see them as the crazy ones,
         we see genius. 

Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world,
         are the ones who do.

                                             Apple Computers, Think different

 

 

 

 

Too late

You got to be crazy.
Too late to be sane.
Too late.
You got to go full tilt bozo.
'Cause you're only given a little spark of madness
and if you lose that, you're nothin'.
Note from me to you:
Don't ever lose that,
'cause it keeps you alive.

           Robin Williams, A Night at the Roxy

 

 

 

 

Poem: The World Book

When the woman in blue serge
held up the sun, my mother
opened the storm door, taking
the whole volume of S
into her hands. The sun
shown as a sun should,
and we sat down at the table
leafing through silks and ships,
saints and subtraction. We passed
Scotland and Spain, street-
cars and seeds and even
the Seven Wonders until
the woman who owned them skipped
to the solar system and said
it could be ours. My mother
thought, as I held my breath,
and while she was writing the check
for everything, A through Z,
I noticed the room with its stove
and saucers and spoons. I was wearing
a sweater and skirt and shoes
and there at the window the sun
was almost as clear as it was
in the diagram where its sunspots,
ninety-three million miles
from the earth and only a page
from Sumatra, were swirling. The woman
stood up, slamming it shut,
and drove down the street to leave us
in Saginaw, where I would wait
for the world to arrive. And each morning,
walking to school, I believed
in the day it would come, when we’d study
Sweden or stars and I’d stand
at the head of the classroom and take
the words of the world from my satchel,
explaining the secrets.

                        Patricia Hooper

 

 

 

 

 

The privilege of living in another era

You should fight to be among the best in school.

The very best in every sense and you already know what that means;
                    study and revolutionary attitude.

In other words: good conduct, seriousness, love for the revolution, comradeship.

I was not that way at your age but I lived in a different society,
                    where man was an enemy of man.

Now you have the privilege of living in another era
                    and you must be worthy of it.

                                        Ernesto 'Che' Guevara, 1966 letter to his daughter

 

 

 

 

Costs

If you think education is expensive         

      – try ignorance.

               Ann Landers, advice columnist

Conjugate this

I cut class,
    you cut class,
        he, she, it cuts class.

We cut class,
    they cut class.
        We all cut class.

I cannot say this in Spanish
because I did not go to Spanish today.

Gracias a dios. Hasta luego.

             Laurie Halse Anderson, Speak

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Great teachers

I developed The Great Teacher theory late in my freshman year.
It was a cornerstone of the theory that great teachers had great personalities
and that the greatest teachers had outrageous personalities.
I did not like decorum or rectitude in a classroom;
I preferred a highly oxygenated atmosphere,
a climate of intemperance, rhetoric, and feverish melodrama.
And I wanted my teachers to make me smart.
A great teacher is my adversary, my conqueror, commissioned to chastise me.
He leaves me tame and grateful for the new language he has purloined
from other kings whose granaries are filled and whose libraries are famous.
He tells me that teaching is the art of theft;
knowing what to steal and from whom.
Bad teachers do not touch me;
the great ones never leave me.
They ride with me during all my days,
and I pass on to others what they have imparted to me.
I exchange their handy gifts with strangers on trains,
and I pretend the gifts are mine.
I steal from the great teachers.
And the truly wonderful thing about them
is that they would applaud my theft, laugh at the thought of it,
realizing that they had taught me their larcenous skills well.

                      Pat Conroy, The Lords of Discipline