Elite Classroom Quotes

The courtroom is one instance of the fact that while our society may be liberal and democratic in some large and vague sense, its moving parts, its smaller chambers--its classrooms, its workplaces, its corporate boardrooms, its jails, its military barracks--are flagrantly undemocratic, dominated by one commanding person or a tiny elite of power.

The frog at the bottom of the well does not know the depths of the sea, but it knows the height of the sky.

The world isn’t entirely beautiful. Everyone knows this, but in their hearts they still wish for that perfect, idyllic place. A bit of a contradiction.

Now, Woolf calls her fictional bastion of male privilege Oxbridge, so I'll call mine Yarvard. Even though she cannot attend Yarvard because she is a woman, Judith cheerfully applies for admission at, let's call it, Smithcliff, a prestigious women's college. She is denied admission on the grounds that the dorms and classrooms can't accommodate wheelchairs, that her speech pattern would interfere with her elocution lessons, and that her presence would upset the other students. There is also the suggestion that she is not good marriage material for the men at the elite college to which Smithcliff is a bride-supplying "sister school." The letter inquires as to why she hasn't been institutionalized. When she goes to the administration building to protest the decision, she can't get up the flight of marble steps on the Greek Revival building. This edifice was designed to evoke a connection to the Classical world, which practiced infanticide of disabled newborns.

Sun Tzu wouldn’t stand a chance of winning if he led an army of children against an army of full-grown adults.

People take joy in learning. It’s the same whether it’s studying, exercising, or even when you’re playing a game. You feel pleasure when you realize you’ve improved.

It’s great that Mommy and Daddy did all that uncool work, so you could sit in your air-conditioned classroom and shit all over them, to the approving eye of your ponytailed professor.

think, for example, has a higher suicide rate: countries whose citizens declare themselves to be very happy, such as Switzerland, Denmark, Iceland, the Netherlands, and Canada? or countries like Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Spain, whose citizens describe themselves as not very happy at all? Answer: the so-called happy countries. It’s the same phenomenon as in the Military Police and the Air Corps. If you are depressed in a place where most people are pretty unhappy, you compare yourself to those around you and you don’t feel all that bad. But can you imagine how difficult it must be to be depressed in a country where everyone else has a big smile on their face?2 Caroline Sacks’s decision to evaluate herself, then, by looking around her organic chemistry classroom was not some strange and irrational behavior. It is what human beings do. We compare ourselves to those in the same situation as ourselves, which means that students in an elite school—except, perhaps,

Dostoevsky’s Demons.

The phenomenon of relative deprivation applied to education is called—appropriately enough—the “Big Fish–Little Pond Effect.” The more elite an educational institution is, the worse students feel about their own academic abilities. Students who would be at the top of their class at a good school can easily fall to the bottom of a really good school. Students who would feel that they have mastered a subject at a good school can have the feeling that they are falling farther and farther behind in a really good school. And that feeling—as subjective and ridiculous and irrational as it may be—matters. How you feel about your abilities—your academic “self-concept”—in the context of your classroom shapes your willingness to tackle challenges and finish difficult tasks. It’s a crucial element in your motivation and confidence.

I was saddened to find it in such a state- no, no more than saddened, I was shamed. This was where I came from, this was my provenance, and it smacked of lowliness. But as I reacclimatized and my surroundings once again became familiar, it occurred to me that the house had not changed in my absence. I had changed. I was looking about me with the eyes of a foreigner, but that particular type of entitled and unsympathetic American who so annoyed me when I encountered him in the classrooms and workplaces of your country's elite. This realization angered me; staring at my reflection in the speckled glass of bathroom mirror I resolved to exorcise the unwelcome sensibility by which I had become possessed. It was only after so doing that I saw my house properly again, appreciating its enduring grandeur, its unmistakable personality and idiosyncratic charm. Mughal miniatures and ancient carpets graced its reception rooms; an excellent library abutted its veranda. It was far from impoverished; indeed, it was rich with history. I wondered how I could ever have been so ungenerous- and so blind- to have thought otherwise, and I was disturbed by what this implied about myself: that I was a man lacking in substance and hence easily influenced by even a short sojourn in the company of others.

I knew all about fear born through pain. I knew the terror and misery of being a loser. I’d seen people destroyed by it before my eyes, time and time again. But eventually, I stopped feeling fear. Instead, I just felt cold, because I’d come to realize that no matter how much suffering or despair others experienced, the same would never happen to me.

The politics of deference focuses on the consequences that are likeliest to show up in the rooms where elites do most of their interacting: classrooms, boardrooms, political parties. As a result, we seem to end up with far more, and more specific, practical advice about how to, say, allocate tasks at a committee meeting than how to keep people alive. Deference as a default political orientation can work counter to marginalized groups' interests. We are surrounded by a discourse that locates attentional injustice in the selection of spokespeople and book lists taken to represent the marginalized, rather than focusing on the actions of the corporations and algorithms that much more powerfully distribute attention. This discourse ultimately participates in the weaponization of attention in the service of marginalization. It directs what little attentional power we can control at symbolic sites of power rather than at the root political issues that explain why everything is so fucked up.

You were almost right. But unfortunately, Horikita, you were wrong about one thing. Right now, just for this moment, I'll tell you. I have never thought of you as my friend. I've never cared about you as a classmate. In this world, winning is everything. Your methods don't matter. I don't care what I have to sacrifice. As long as I have my victory in the end, I'll be fine.You, Hirata - no, all other people are nothing more than tools. I was complicit in what drove you to this. So, don't blame yourself, Horikita. You were useful to me.

Ikicked Aiden in the balls. I kicked Aiden fucking King in the balls. My feet skid to a halt at the threshold of the classroom. I’m panting. My hands are sweaty. The wave of adrenaline vanishes from my system, leaving a tremor in my limbs. My shoulders shake with suppressed laughter. If I didn’t worry that my classmates would start calling me a lunatic, I would’ve laughed so loud right now. I want to run, jump, and bump fists with myself. It’s a strange type of freedom that I haven’t felt in like… ever. I was always quiet and introverted, but right now? I feel like I can punch the moon and kick the stars.

They found a striking difference among the groups. All three groups spent the same amount of time—over fifty hours a week—participating in music-related activities. All three had similar classroom requirements making demands on their time. But the two best groups spent most of their musicrelated time practicing in solitude: 24.3 hours a week, or 3.5 hours a day, for the best group, compared with only 9.3 hours a week, or 1.3 hours a day, for the worst group. The best violinists rated “practice alone” as the most important of all their music-related activities. Elite musicians—even those who perform in groups—describe practice sessions with their chamber group as “leisure” compared with solo practice, where the real work gets done.

They found a striking difference among the groups. All three groups spent the same amount of time—over fifty hours a week—participating in music-related activities. All three had similar classroom requirements making demands on their time. But the two best groups spent most of their music-related time practicing in solitude: 24.3 hours a week, or 3.5 hours a day, for the best group, compared with only 9.3 hours a week, or 1.3 hours a day, for the worst group. The best violinists rated “practice alone” as the most important of all their music-related activities. Elite musicians—even those who perform in groups—describe practice sessions with their chamber group as “leisure” compared with solo practice, where the real work gets done.

Montessori classrooms emphasize self-directed learning, hands-on engagement with a wide variety of materials (including plants and animals), and a largely unstructured school day. And in recent years they’ve produced alumni including the founders of Google (Larry Page and Sergey Brin), Amazon (Jeff Bezos), and Wikipedia (Jimmy Wales). These examples appear to be part of a broader trend. Management researchers Jeffrey Dyer and Hal Gregersen interviewed five hundred prominent innovators and found that a disproportionate number of them also went to Montessori schools, where “they learned to follow their curiosity.” As a Wall Street Journal blog post by Peter Sims put it, “the Montessori educational approach might be the surest route to joining the creative elite, which are so overrepresented by the school’s alumni that one might suspect a Montessori Mafia.” Whether or not he’s part of this mafia, Andy will vouch for the power of SOLEs. He was a Montessori kid for the

It is what human beings do. We compare ourselves to those in the same situation as ourselves, which means that students in an elite school—except, perhaps, those at the very top of the class—are going to face a burden that they would not face in a less competitive atmosphere. Citizens of happy countries have higher suicide rates than citizens of unhappy countries, because they look at the smiling faces around them and the contrast is too great. Students at “great” schools look at the brilliant students around them, and how do you think they feel? The phenomenon of relative deprivation applied to education is called—appropriately enough—the “Big Fish–Little Pond Effect.” The more elite an educational institution is, the worse students feel about their own academic abilities. Students who would be at the top of their class at a good school can easily fall to the bottom of a really good school. Students who would feel that they have mastered a subject at a good school can have the feeling that they are falling farther and farther behind in a really good school. And that feeling — as subjective and ridiculous and irrational as it may be — matters. How you feel about your abilities — your academic “self-concept” — in the context of your classroom shapes your willingness to tackle challenges and finish difficult tasks. It’s a crucial element in your motivation and confidence.

How many different schools and educational resources are there to continue educating the elite, while other children live with sale of drugs and violence in the classroom? How can we talk about civilization?

But the classroom and the dorm room are two ends of the same stick. The first puts ideas into your head; the second makes them part of your soul. The first requires stringency; the second offers freedom. The first is normative; the second is subversive.

From kindergarten through senior year of high school, Evan attended Crossroads, an elite, coed private school in Santa Monica known for its progressive attitudes. Tuition at Crossroads runs north of $ 22,000 a year, and seemingly rises annually. Students address teachers by their first names, and classrooms are named after important historical figures, like Albert Einstein and George Mead, rather than numbered. The school devotes as significant a chunk of time to math and history as to Human Development, a curriculum meant to teach students maturity, tolerance, and confidence. Crossroads emphasizes creativity, personal communication, well-being, mental health, and the liberal arts. The school focuses on the arts much more than athletics; some of the school’s varsity games have fewer than a dozen spectators. 2 In 2005, when Evan was a high school freshman, Vanity Fair ran an exhaustive feature about the school titled “School for Cool.” 3 The school, named for Robert Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken,” unsurprisingly attracts a large contingent of Hollywood types, counting among its alumni Emily and Zooey Deschanel, Gwyneth Paltrow, Jack Black, Kate Hudson, Jonah Hill, Michael Bay, Maya Rudolph, and Spencer Pratt. And that’s just the alumni—the parents of students fill out another page or two of who’s who A-listers. Actor Denzel Washington once served as the assistant eighth grade basketball coach, screenwriter Robert Towne spoke in a film class, and cellist Yo-Yo Ma talked shop with the school’s chamber orchestra.

Liberals don't know what they want. But they say"Watch for what you wish for it". 1990 I escaped from communist regime, I put my life in risk to have the freedom we have here in America and these idiots want communism. To some people Socialism and Communism might sound good but you have to give up a lot and you might get luckier if you know some one in the communist party or you can sell your soul to the devil to get the "FREE" stuff they offer. From free housing, but you don't get the house you want or when you wanted, you are luckily if you get 1 or 2 bedroom apt regardless the number of your family. or you might not get a house at all because elites always come 1st. that free health care come free death also because Dr.s decried you should live or die, the free schooling is for elites 1st then you maybe is is space in the classroom for your child. in Communism, Socialism, Islamism and Monarchy they all play the same rules is called "only one way." 1. Your freedom. 2. Freedom of speech. 3. Freedom of press. 4 Freedom of ownership. 5. Freedom of protection/Gun will be taken away. 6. You can't protest. 7. You don't choose who to vote. 8. You don't have any chooses they make the choices for you. 9. no religions believe at all. 10. Police can beat you up, can arrest you for no reason and get prosecuted for no reason and no one have right to an attorney because there don't exist one for you. Is this the life you LIBERALS/idiots want? Good luck on that but I'm pretty sure Americans are not ready to give up their freedom and their wealth for no one.

Henry Kissinger said "Control the Oil you can control a country, controle the food you can control the people" Some America liberals protest but they don't know why they protesting for. Some they say they don't like Republicans, to me it looks like they want government to pay for everything, There is a say "Watch for what you wish for it". 1990 I escaped from communist regime, I put my life in risk to gain the freedom we have here in America where many Americans take that for granted. "FREE" thinks are only in the communist system, basically they want other to pay for their housing , schooling, health care and so on... To some people Socialism and Communism might sound really good but you have to give up a lot and to get a little and you are luckier if you know some one to get the "FREE" stuff they offer. For example "fee" housing, but you don't get the house you want or when you wanted and you are luckily if you get 1 or 2 bedroom apt regardless the number of your family. or you might not get a house at all because elites and their friends and family always comes 1st. Oh ya that free health care come free death also because Dr.s decide who lives and who dies,and the free schooling is for elites and their friends and family 1st then you maybe is a free space in the classroom for your child. All I can say in any country where leaders dictate the luck of our life and our, freedoms has to be a Communism, Socialism, and Monarchy they all play the same rules is called "Only one way." Did you know even food sources is controlled from them.? They deceit how much your family need to eat. here is a list of privileges are taken away from you 1. Your Human Rights /freedom. 2. Freedom of speech. 3. Freedom of press. 4 Freedom of ownership. 5. Freedom of protection/Gun will be taken away. 6. You can't protest. 7. You don't choose who to vote. 8. You don't have any chooses they make the choices for you. 9. no religions believe at all. 10. Police can beat you up, can arrest you for no reason and get prosecuted for no reason and no one have right to an attorney because there don't exist one for you. Is this the life you LIBERALS want? Good luck on that but I'm pretty sure Americans are not ready to give up their freedom and their wealth for no one

Cute + Pleading + Upturned Eyes = Lethal.

Well, this is also your White Day gift. You know, as payback for Valentine’s Day. On top of being a birthday gift,” I told her.

But to force students, many of whom were still children in both mind and body, to make that judgment was far from kind. This test might cause lasting emotional damage.

but I think that being a bystander means I’m equally guilty,” he replied.

Now, a few years later, their faces still come to me, one by one, and this motherly feeling overwhelms me. I taught them how to speak, this strange breed of children, unaware of the world outside. Yet I hope they have forgotten everything I inspired in them and have simply grown to become soldiers of the regime. I do not want to imagine what might happen if they retained my lessons, remembered me, began questioning the system. I cannot bear the idea that any of my students—my boys who so eagerly shouted, “Good morning, Professor Kim! How are you?” every time I walked into the classroom—might end up somewhere dark and cold, in one of the gulags that exist all over North Korea. The thought keeps me awake at night still.

But sensei’s aspirations were stronger than anyone else’s, and he has an indomitable fighting spirit that made him refuse to give up. That’s precisely why he became so great.

clamor

fraught.

hazy

feigning

bestow

thumbtacks

trepidation.

respite

impertinent

Normally, it would be dangerous to try and drink water straight from rivers, so you would need to sterilize it by boiling it beforehand. But this product claimed to eliminate more than 99.9 percent of bacteria like E. coli, as well as parasites like echinococcus, and so on. It looked like this would make the water completely safe to drink.

When the time finally came, the subject matter for the quiz was displayed on all our tablets simultaneously. “Category: Anime

…What in the hell?” I muttered aloud, the words spilling out of my mouth before I could even think.

I can’t say that this is a beautiful situation for me to be in,” said Kouenji. “I do not have a preference for men.

Ow! You might’ve broke my arm!” wailed Morooka, ranting and raving, making a spectacle like a soccer athlete trying to show how badly they were hurt. “Looks like you did something pretty terrible, Kouenji,” Mikitani said. “I think you really hurt Morooka.” “It looks to me like he’s faking it,” said Kouenji.

At first, I cried. I cried because I missed people, and then I learned that no one was coming to help me.

He had mounted the first three steps of the scaffold, when a young newsman tore forward, ran to him and, from below, seized the railing to stop him. “Dr. Stadler!” he cried in a desperate whisper. “Tell them the truth! Tell them that you had nothing to do with it! Tell them what sort of infernal machine it is and for what purpose it’s intended to be used! Tell the country what sort of people are trying to rule it! Nobody can doubt your word! Tell them the truth! Save us! You’re the only one who can!” Dr. Stadler looked down at him. He was young; his movements and voice had that swift, sharp clarity which belongs to competence; among his aged, corrupt, favor-ridden and pull-created colleagues, he had managed to achieve the rank of elite of the political press, by means and in the role of a last, irresistible spark of ability. His eyes had the look of an eager, unfrightened intelligence; they were the kind of eyes Dr. Stadler had seen looking up at him from the benches of classrooms. He noticed that this boy’s eyes were hazel; they had a tinge of green. Dr. Stadler turned his head and saw that Ferris had come rushing to his side, like a servant or a jailer. “I do not expect to be insulted by disloyal young punks with treasonable motives,” said Dr. Stadler loudly. Dr. Ferris whirled upon the young man and snapped, his face out of control, distorted by rage at the unexpected and unplanned, “Give me your press card and your work permit!” “I am proud,” Dr. Stadler read into the microphone and into the attentive silence of a nation, “that my years of work in the service of science have brought me the honor of placing into the hands of our great leader, Mr. Thompson, a new instrument with an incalculable potential for a civilizing and liberating influence upon the mind of man. . . .

Between colonizer and colonized there is room only for forced labor, intimidation, pressure, the police, taxation, theft, rape, compulsory crops, contempt, mistrust, arrogance, self-complacency, swinishness, brainless elites, degraded masses. No human contact, but relations of domination and submission which turn the colonizing man into a class-room monitor, an army sergeant, a prison guard, a slave driver, and the indigenous man into an instrument of production.

I have coffee, café au lait, and cocoa,

There’s the five million for nullifyin’ the contract, plus what you have on hand. The remainder of the points we need to bring ya over has already been collected from the rest of the class. I’ve forced our folks into poverty to bring ya over to our side,” said Ryuuen.

By the way, Ayanokouji, what are you doin’?” asked Ryuuen suspiciously, watching me pour some water into the remaining one-fifth of my coffee that was still in my cup.

rotund

bespectacled

navel-gazing.

dour.

audacious

lenient,

linchpin,

ineligible.

platitudes,

chaperone,

dawdle,

illicit

The annoyingly high number of textbooks we needed to lug around were now all stored neatly inside this twelve-inch tablet, as data.

of what I learned at Yale,” writes Lewis Lapham, “I learned in what I now remember as one long, wayward conversation in the only all-night restaurant on Chapel Street. The topics under discussion—God, man, existence, Alfred Prufrock’s peach—were borrowed from the same anthology of large abstraction that supplied the texts for English 10 or Philosophy 116.” The classroom is the grain of sand; it’s up to you to make the pearl.

We view elite performance as the product of a decade or more of maximal efforts to improve performance in a domain through an optimal distribution of deliberate practice. (p. 400)

In a now-famous experiment, he and his colleagues compared three groups of expert violinists at the elite Music Academy in West Berlin. The researchers asked the professors to divide the students into three groups: the “best violinists,” who had the potential for careers as international soloists; the “good violinists”; and a third group training to be violin teachers rather than performers. Then they interviewed the musicians and asked them to keep detailed diaries of their time. They found a striking difference among the groups. All three groups spent the same amount of time—over fifty hours a week— participating in music-related activities. All three had similar classroom requirements making demands on their time. But the two best groups spent most of their music-related time practicing in solitude: 24.3 hours a week, or 3.5 hours a day, for the best group, compared with only 9.3 hours a week, or 1.3 hours a day, for the worst group. The best violinists rated “practice alone” as the most important of all their music-related activities. Elite musicians—even those who perform in groups—describe practice sessions with their chamber group as “leisure” compared with solo practice, where the real work gets done. Ericsson and his cohorts found similar effects of solitude when they studied other kinds of expert performers. “Serious study alone” is the strongest predictor of skill for tournament-rated chess players, for example; grandmasters typically spend a whopping five thousand hours—almost five times as many hours as intermediatelevel players—studying the game by themselves during their first ten years of learning to play. College students who tend to study alone learn more over time than those who work in groups. Even elite athletes in team sports often spend unusual amounts of time in solitary practice. What’s so magical about solitude? In many fields, Ericsson told me, it’s only when you’re alone that you can engage in Deliberate Practice, which he has identified as the key to exceptional achievement. When you practice deliberately, you identify the tasks or knowledge that are just out of your reach, strive to upgrade your performance, monitor your progress, and revise accordingly. Practice sessions that fall short of this standard are not only less useful—they’re counterproductive. They reinforce existing cognitive mechanisms instead of improving them. Deliberate Practice is best conducted alone for several reasons. It takes intense concentration, and other people can be distracting. It requires deep motivation, often self-generated. But most important, it involves working on the task that’s most challenging to you personally. Only when you’re alone, Ericsson told me, can you “go directly to the part that’s challenging to you. If you want to improve what you’re doing, you have to be the one who generates the move. Imagine a group class—you’re the one generating the move only a small percentage of the time.” To see Deliberate Practice in action, we need look no further than the story of Stephen Wozniak. The Homebrew meeting was the catalyst that inspired him to build that first PC, but the knowledge base and work habits that made it possible came from another place entirely: Woz had deliberately practiced engineering ever since he was a little kid. (Ericsson says that it takes approximately ten thousand hours of Deliberate Practice to gain true expertise, so it helps to start young.)

In this world, winning is everything. As long as I win in the end… That's all that matters. You may come to regret trying to manipulate me.