Random Quote
America believes in education: the average professor earns more money in a year than a professional athlete earns in a whole week.
---- Evan Esar
Tact is the knack of making a point without making an enemy.
---- Isaac Newton
"It was on my fifth birthday that Papa put his hand on my shoulder and said, 'Remember, my son, if you ever need a helping hand, you'll find one at the end of your arm.'"
---- Sam Levenson
It is common sense to take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.
---- Franklin D. Roosevelt
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
---- Sheik Abd-al-Kadir
Study without desire spoils the memory, and it retains nothing that it takes in.
---- Leonardo DaVinci (1452-1519)
I'm sick of following my dreams. I'm just going to ask them where they're going and hook up with them later.
---- Mitch Hedberg
I'll be more enthusiastic about encouraging thinking outside the box when there's evidence of any thinking going on inside it.
---- Terry Pratchett
We don't know a millionth of one percent about anything.
---- Thomas A. Edison
If the English language made any sense, a catastrophe would be an apostrophe with fur.
---- Doug Larson
Arguments over grammar and style are often as fierce as those over IBM versus Mac, and as fruitless as Coke versus Pepsi and boxers versus briefs.
---- Jack Lynch
One man alone can be pretty dumb sometimes, but for real bona fide stupidity, there ain't nothin' can beat teamwork.
---- Edward Abbey
Those who know nothing of foreign languages, knows nothing of their own.”
---- Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749 -1832)
Drink coffee! Do stupid things faster!
---- unknown
Man invented language to satisfy his deep need to complain.
---- Lily Tomlin
As an adolescent I aspired to lasting fame, I craved factual certainty, and I thirsted for a meaningful vision of human life - so I became a scientist. This is like becoming an archbishop so you can meet girls.
---- M. Cartmill
The important thing is not to stop questioning.
---- Albert Einstein
To get something done, a committee should consist of no more than three men, two of whom are absent.
---- Robert Copeland
Just because your voice reaches halfway around the world doesn't mean you are wiser than when it reached only to the end of the bar.
---- Edward R. Murrow
Any man whose errors take ten years to correct is quite a man.
---- J. Robert Oppenheimer
A magician pulls rabbits out of hats. An experimental psychologist pulls habits out of rats.
---- anonymous
I have never met a man so ignorant that I couldn't learn something from him.
---- Galileo Galilei
Don't knock the weather. If it didn't change once in a while, nine out of ten people couldn't start a conversation.
---- Kin Hubbard
Good teaching is one-fourth preparation and three-fourths theater.
---- Gail Godwin
Technology will not replace teachers...teachers who use technology will
probably replace teachers who do not.
---- Ray Clifford
You’ve been in TEFL too long when…
Alex Case has a MEME related to TEFL going. I’m copying it here and then adding my own to the list.
- You laminate your shopping lists
- When you have a house or family meeting, you ask people to discuss the issues in pairs first
- Two thirds of your favourite teaching books are out of print
- The worksheets at the bottom of your pile of things to try have started to decompose
- You speak to your family with Elementary level English
- Your foreign students teach you about the latest music from back home
- You even try to elicit your proposal of marriage - “What do we call it when a man and …”
- You’ve been in your host country longer than your students have been alive
- When you return to your home country it annoys you to no end that people are speaking English everywhere and you can’t tune it out
- when you return to your home country, you get reverse culture shock
- You correct everyone’s grammar, even when it’s not wrong
- you know more acronyms than anyone should ever know
- you know more than 17 different fun ways to re-seat a large group of people
- you have more non-native English speaking friends than native speaker friends
- You look at English as a means to make money, not to communicate
- you can easily explain the difference between the simple past and the present perfect
- going to work in the morning makes you want to cry.
- backpacker is a term of derision and scorn
- You actually can use the words “my privates” in a sentence without it being in a sexual context. (credit to Fencerider)




Jim wrote 12 words on Thursday Apr 10, 2008 at 09:09 AM
You put a smile on my face this morning. It’s all true!!!!
Alex Case wrote 34 words on Friday Apr 11, 2008 at 08:10 AM
Wow- I started a meme! And that without really understanding what it means!
Particularly love numbers 8, 9 and 13 above. I might have to return the compliment and borrow them for my list
fencerider wrote 71 words on Tuesday Apr 15, 2008 at 12:17 PM
i’m particularly fond of number 8...my college students are not that old but many of my private lessons are....They always look at me with this confused blank stare when I ask them in Korean...since i’ve been in Korea longer than you, am I more korean than you?
Another one you could add:
19. You actually can use the words “my privates” in a sentence without it being in a sexual context.
Sean. wrote 44 words on Tuesday Apr 15, 2008 at 12:29 PM
#8 is my personal favorite as well, mostly because I wrote it. It’s not true for me and my students (university age) yet but in a few years it will be.
I also like your #19 and will add it to the list now.