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The next sentence was about true insight coming from within. But didn't all knowledge come into people's heads from the outside? On the other hand, Sophie could remember situations when her mother or the teachers at school had tried to teach her something that she hadn't been receptive to. And whenever she had really learned something, it was when she had somehow contributed to it herself. Now and then, even, she would suddenly a thing she'd drawn a total blank on before. That was probably what people meant by 'insight'.
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Jostein Gaarder (Sophie’s World)
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Louis thought he would be all for a back-to-the-basics drive in education: a teacher, an olive tree, a bit of midday wine (the Greeks had watered theirs down to keep their heads lucid), and, last but not least, six or seven eager and receptive youths seated at one’s feet.
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Paul Russell (The Coming Storm)
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Anyone or anything can be a teacher given the right audience.
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Akiroq Brost
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False faith is the major cause of most of our misfortunes. The purpose of a human life is to bring the irrational beginning of our life to a rational beginning. In order to succeed in this, two things are important: (1) to see all irrational, unwise things in life and direct your attention to them and study them; (2) to understand the possibility of a rational, wise life. The major purpose of all teachers of mankind was the understanding of the irrational and rational beginnings in our life. We should be ready to change our views at any time, and slough off prejudices, and live with an open and receptive mind. A sailor who sets the same sails all the time, without making changes when the wind changes, will never reach his harbor. —HENRY GEORGE Accept the teaching of Christ as it is, clear and simple; then you will see that we live among big lies.
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Leo Tolstoy (A Calendar of Wisdom: Daily Thoughts to Nourish the Soul, Written and Se)
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Sophie could remember situations when her mother or the teachers at school had tried to teach her something that she hadn’t been receptive to. And whenever she had really learned something, it was when she had somehow contributed to it herself.
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Jostein Gaarder (Sophie's World)
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New England, would face no real Indian challenge. Indeed, the plague helped prompt the legendarily warm reception Plymouth enjoyed from the Wampanoags. Massasoit, the Wampanoag leader, was eager to ally with the Pilgrims because the plague had so weakened his villages that he feared the Narragansetts to the west.28 When a land conflict did develop between new settlers and old at Saugus in 1631, “God ended the controversy by sending the small pox amongst the Indians,” in the words of the Puritan minister Increase Mather. “Whole towns of them were swept away, in some of them not so much as one Soul escaping the Destruction.” 29 By the time the Native populations of New England had replenished themselves to some degree, it was too late to
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James W. Loewen (Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong)
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In a field like philosophy, where understanding involves not so much the reception of knowledge but rather a transformation of the receiver itself, so that the receiver, which is to say the student, can generate the knowledge for him- or herself, then the physical presence of the teacher is essential.
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Rebecca Goldstein (Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won't Go Away)
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deriving from the research of Professor Jean-Marc Dewaele of Birkbeck College in the University of London, bilinguals and multilinguals appear in research to have higher levels of open-mindedness (being more receptive to new and different ideas and more broad-minded to the opinions of others), and of cognitive empathy (being able to understand another person's experiences and feelings and an ability to view the outside world from another person's perspective).
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Colin Baker (A Parents' and Teachers' Guide to Bilingualism)
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A good thought sets you up for a great deed.
A good desire sets you up for a great feeling.
A good intention sets you up for a great act.
A good feeling sets you up for a great experience.
A good word sets you up for a great reception.
A good mind sets you up for a great fortune.
A good deed sets you up for a great reward.
A good attitude sets you up for a great life.
A good heart sets you up for a great destiny.
A good soul sets you up for a great afterlife.
A good teacher sets you up for a great lesson.
A good job sets you up for a great career.
A good education sets you up for a great occupation.
A good school sets you up for a great future.
A good character sets you up for a great relationship.
A good mother sets you up for a great wife.
A good father sets you up for a great husband.
A good parent sets you up for a great marriage.
A good beginning sets you up for a great conclusion.
A good today sets you up for a great tomorrow.
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Matshona Dhliwayo
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He relished learning from the voice of a teacher and from books. Each day of merely learning something was a deep adventure to him. Sometimes he laughed and told himself that he was unnatural, for American boys are supposed to hate school. They followed a pattern of Redblooded Masculinity, set up by the traditions of hookey and Mark Twain. But he had no resistance whatever to his studies. He took them supine and with gusto, with the receptively of a girl whose desires have been aroused by loving blandishment.
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John Horne Burns (Lucifer with a Book (Bard Book))
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Within this underground occulture, the reception of channeled documents recapitulates the end of adolescence and parent/child split within the student/teacher relationship—such channeled books, regardless of their valid provenance, are social markers allowing occult students to split with their symbolic parents (teachers) and families (occult orders) and their metaphors for reality, establish their own metaphors for reality, and thereafter “reproduce” and start their own “families” in the form of new occult groups established around the new channeled documents.
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Jason Louv (The Angelic Reformation: John Dee, Enochian Magick & the Occult Roots of Empire)
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Everything is linked,' said an enraptured Baremboim on stage; 'everyone is linked, all our actions have ramifications, and music is a teacher of this interconnected reality.' There was, however, in the letter a mundane, prosaic footnote that nibbled at the very edges of possible understanding, since understanding must always be preceded by human curiosity. Perhaps it will vanish in the charged space between one suicide bomber and the next military bulldozer that buries human beings alive within the imagined security of their own homes; perhaps it will join other shards of recollected moments of curiosity and discovery, to weld into a vessel of receptivity and response.
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Wole Soyinka (Climate of Fear: The Quest for Dignity in a Dehumanized World (Reith Lectures))
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Marketa really desired, with both her body and her senses, the women she considered Karel's mistresses. And she also desired them with her head: fulfilling the prophecy of her old math teacher, she wanted - at least to the limits of the disastrous contract - to show herself enterprising and playful, and to astonish Karel.
But as soon as she found herself naked with them on the wide daybed, the sensual wanderings immediately vanished from her mind, and seeing her husband was enough to return her to her role, the role of the better one, the one who is wronged, Even when she was with Eva, whom she loved very much and of whom she was not jealous, the presence of the man she loved too well weighed heavily on her, stifling the pleasure of the senses.
The moment she removed his head from the body, she felt the strange and intoxicating touch of freedom. That anonymity of the body was a suddenly discovered paradise. With an odd delight, she expelled her wounded and too vigilant soul and was transformed into a simple body without past or memory, but all the more eager and receptive. She tenderly caressed Eva's face, while the headless body moved vigorously on top of her.
But here the headless body interrupted his movements and, in a voice that reminded her unpleasantly of Karel's, uttered unbelievably idiotic words: "I'm Bobby Fischer! I'm Bobby Fischer!"
It was like being awakened from a dream. And just then, as she lay snuggled against Eva (as the awakening sleeper snuggles against his pillow to hide from the dim first light of day), Eva had asked her, "All right?" and she had consented with a sign, pressing her lips against Eva's. She had always loved her, but today for the first time sh loved her with all her senses, for herself, for her body, and for her skin, becoming intoxicated with this fleshly love as with a sudden revelation.
Afterward, while they lay side by side on their stomachs, with their buttocks slightly raised, Marketa could feel on her skin that the infinitely efficient body was again fixing its eyes on hers and at any moment was going to start again making love to them. She tried to ignore the voice talking about seeing beautiful Mrs. Nora, tried simply to be a body hearing nothing while lying pressed between a very soft-skinned girlfriend and some headless man.
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Milan Kundera (The Book of Laughter and Forgetting)
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And so I learned things, gentlemen. Ah, one learns when one has to; one learns when one needs a way out; one learns at all costs. One stands over oneself with a whip; one flays oneself at the slightest opposition. My ape nature fled out of me, head over heels and away, so that my first teacher was almost himself turned into an ape by it and was taken away to a mental hospital. Fortunately he was soon let out again.
But I used up many teachers, several teachers at once. As I became more confident of my abilities, as the public took and interest in my progress and my future began to look bright, I engaged teachers for myself, engaged them in five communicating rooms, and took lessons from all at once by dint of leaping from one room to the other.
That progress of mine! How the rays of knowledge penetrated from all sides into my awakening brain? I do not deny it: I found it exhilarating. But I must also confess: I did not overestimate it, not even then, much less now. With an effort which up till now has never been repeated I managed to reach the cultural level of an average European. In itself that might be nothing to speak of, but it is something insofar as it has helped me out of my cage and opened a special way out for me, the way of humanity. There is an excellent idiom: to fight one’s way through the thick of things; that is what I have done, I have fought through the thick of things. There was nothing else for me to do, provided that freedom was not to be my choice.
As I look back on my development and survey what I have achieved so far, I do not complain, but I am not complacent either. With my hands in my trouser pockets, my bottle of wine on the table, I half lie and half sit in my rocking chair and gaze out of the window: If a visitor arrives I receive him with propriety. My manager sits in the anteroom; when I ring, he comes and listens to what I have to say. Nearly every evening I give a performance, and I have a success that could hardly be increased. When I come home late at night from banquets, from scientific receptions, from social gatherings, there sits waiting for me a half-trained chimpanzee and I take comfort from her as apes do. By day I cannot bear to see her; for she has the insane look of the bewildered half-broken animal in her eye, no one else sees it, but I do, and I cannot bear it. On the whole, at any rate, I have achieved what I have set out to achieve. But do not tell me that it was not worth the trouble. In any case, I am not appealing to any man’s verdict. I am only imparting knowledge, I am only making a report. To you also, honored Members of the Academy, I have only made a report.
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Franz Kafka (A Report for an Academy)
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Dave does extra-mural work for the University, and collects about him many youths who have a part-time interest in truth. Dave’s pupils adore him, but there is a permanent fight on between him and them. They aspire like sunflowers. They are all natural metaphysicians, or so Dave says in a tone of disgust. This seems to me a wonderful thing to be, but it inspires in Dave a passion of opposition. To Dave’s pupils the world is a mystery; a mystery to which it should be reasonably possible to discover a key. The key would be something of the sort that could be contained in a book of some eight hundred pages. To find the key would not necessarily be a simple matter, but Dave’s pupils feel sure that the dedication of between four and ten hours a week, excluding University vacations, should suffice to find it. They do not conceive that the matter should be either more simple or more complex than that. They are prepared within certain limits to alter their views. Many of them arrive as theosophists and depart as Critical Realists or Bradeians. It is remarkable how Dave’s criticism seems os often to be purely catalytic in its action. He blazes upon them with the destructive fury of the sun, but instead of shrivelling up their metaphysical pretensions, achieves merely their metamorphosis from one rich stage into another. This curious fact makes me think that perhaps after all Dave is, in spite of himself, a good teacher. Occasionally he succeeds in converting some peculiarly receptive youth to his own brand of linguistics analysis; after which as often as not the youth loses interest in philosophy altogether. To watch Dave at work on these young men is like watching someone prune a rose bush. It is all the strongest and most luxuriant shoots which have to come off. Then later perhaps there will be blossoms; but not philosophical ones, Dave trusts. His great aim is to dissuade the young from philosophy. He always warns me off it with particular earnestness.
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Iris Murdoch (Under the Net)
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Burbank's power of love, reported Hall, "greater than any other, was a subtle kind of nourishment that made everything grow better and bear fruit more abundantly. Burbank explained to me that in all his experimentation he took plants into his confidence, asked them to help, and assured them that he held their small lives in deepest regard and affection." Helen Keller, deaf and blind, after a visit to Burbank, wrote in Out look for the Blind: "He has the rarest of gifts, the receptive spirit of a child. When plants talk to him, he listens. Only a wise child can understand the language of flowers and trees."
Her observation was particularly apt since all his life Burbank loved children. In his essay "Training of the Human Plant," later published as a book, he anticipated the more humane attitudes of a later day and shocked authoritarian parents by saying, "It is more important for a child to have a good nervous system than to try to 'force' it along the line of book knowledge at the expense of its spontaneity, its play. A child should learn through a medium of pleasure, not of pain. Most of the things that are really useful in later life come to the children through play and through association with nature."
Burbank, like other geniuses, realized that his successes came from having conserved the exuberance of a small boy and his wonder for everything around him. He told one of his biographers: 'Tm almost seventy-seven, and I can still go over a gate or run a foot race or kick the chandelier. That's because my body is no older than my mind-and my mind is adolescent. It has never grown up and I hope it never will." It was this quality which so puzzled the dour scientists who looked askance at his power of creation and bedeviled audiences who expected him to be explicit as to how he produced so many horticultural wonders. Most of them were as disappointed as the members of the American Pomological Society, gathered to hear Burbank tell "all" during a lecture entitled "How to Produce New Fruits and Flowers," who sat agape as they heard him say:
In pursuing the study of any of the universal and everlasting laws of nature, whether relating to the life, growth, structure and movements of a giant planet, the tiniest plant or of the psychological movements of the human brain, some conditions are necessary before we can become one of nature's interpreters or the creator of any valuable work for the world.
Preconceived notions, dogmas and all personal prejudice and bias must be laid aside. Listen patiently, quietly and reverently to the lessons, one by one, which Mother Nature has to teach, shedding light on that which was before a mystery, so that all who will, may see and know. She conveys her truths only to those who are passive and receptive. Accepting these truths as suggested, wherever they may lead, then we have the whole universe in harmony with us. At last man has found a solid foundation for science, having discovered that he is part of a universe which is eternally unstable in form, eternally immutable in substance.
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Peter Tompkins (The Secret Life of Plants: A Fascinating Account of the Physical, Emotional and Spiritual Relations Between Plants and Man)
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Few things are more discouraging or dishonoring to such men than a congregation inattentive to the Word of God. Faithful men flourish at the fertile reception of the preached Word. They’re made all the more bold when their people give ear to the Lord’s voice and give evidence of being shaped by it. As church members, we can care for our pastors and teachers and help to prevent unnecessary discouragement and fatigue by cultivating the habit of expositional listening.
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Thabiti M. Anyabwile (What Is a Healthy Church Member?)
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disparity between Louie and Woody is most pronounced. In Woody Allen comedies, the Woody protagonist or surrogate takes it upon himself to tutor the young women in his wayward orbit and furnish their cultural education, telling them which books to read (in Annie Hall’s bookstore scene, Allen’s Alvy wants Annie to occupy her mind with Death and Western Thought and The Denial of Death—“You know, instead of that cat book”), which classic films to imbibe at the revival houses back when Manhattan still had a rich cluster of them. In Crimes and Misdemeanors, it’s a 14-year-old female niece who dresses like a junior-miss version of Annie Hall whom Woody’s Clifford squires to afternoon showings at the finer flea pits, advising her to play deaf for the remaining years of her formal schooling. “Don’t listen to what your teachers tell ya, you know. Don’t pay attention. Just, just see what they look like, and that’s how you’ll know what life is really gonna be like.” A more dubious nugget of avuncular wisdom would be hard to imagine, and it isn’t just the Woody stand-in who does the uncle-daddy-mentor-knows-best bit for the benefit of receptive minds in ripe containers. In Hannah and Her Sisters, Max von Sydow’s dour painter-philosophe Frederick is the Old World “mansplainer” of all time, holding court in a SoHo loft which he shares with his lover, Lee, played by Barbara Hershey, whose sweaters abound with abundance. When Lee groans with enough-already exasperation when Frederick begins droning on about an Auschwitz documentary—“You missed a very dull TV show on Auschwitz.
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James Wolcott (King Louie (Kindle Single))
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Every year, in every state across the country, politicians and union reps make decisions that detrimentally affect teachers and the profession on a grand scale. They take away our benefits, freeze our pay, and decide they can no longer compensate us for the advanced degrees we have earned. They also continue to find ways to tie our evaluations to test scores, totally oblivious of the fact that we teachers cannot control when or if students show up in our classrooms regularly, if they have had proper rest and a nutritious breakfast, let alone if they are receptive to learning the content we work so hard to prepare and teach. It simply isn’t fair.
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M. Shannon Hernandez (Breaking the Silence: My Final Forty Days as a Public School Teacher)
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The Phlegmatic-Sanguine Person (PHLEG-SAN) These people are mostly seen as introverts. They are most peaceful people who go forgo their rights in order to live peacefully with others. Their temperament combination makes them very ideal people to get along with. Strengths of the PHLEG-SAN person They are gentle people who are honored in any group they find themselves. They are also very thoughtful and diplomatic. They are dependable and will rarely let the secret confided to them by friends. They have self-control. They are rarely seen exchanging words with people. They prefer forfeiting their rights and living peacefully with people to demanding these, which may lead to married relations. They enjoy the quiet life. They are the types who tell jokes without laughing. while others are laughing, they remain quiet, as if the humor came from somewhere else. It seems all fields of work are open to them. For example, they are good accountants, registrars, ministers, mechanics, teachers, and counsellors. This group of people do not enjoy trading activities but can do them when motivated Weaknesses of the PHLEG-SAN person These types of people are almost similar to their counterpart- the SAN-PHLEG. They lack motivation. They need to be motivated else they will leave their responsibilities undone. They allow themselves to be instructed and directed by people around them. Thus here, they fall victim to the sin of negligence. They procrastinate and often come out late. As senior officers their trays are always full of pending letters. They build shells around themselves and avoid many people and activities that could be useful to them in future. They let golden opportunities to pass by peacefully. Unless they develop personal discipline, they may never develop their natural potential. They are fearful; they need little motivation to put them to action. They lead a too relaxed life; they can even fall asleep while waiting for friends at the reception. A person of this temperament can always move peacefully with the strong willed CHOL-MEL person.
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Emmanuel Koranteng (TEMPERAMENTS: WHY PEOPLE BEHAVE THE WAY THEY DO)
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This means we need to separate our children from their behaviors. As it turns out, there’s a significant difference between you are bad and you did something bad. And, no, it’s not just semantics. Shame corrodes the part of us that believes we can do and be better. When we shame and label our children, we take away their opportunity to grow and try on new behaviors. If a child tells a lie, she can change that behavior. If she is a liar—where’s the potential for change in that? Cultivating more guilt self-talk and less shame self-talk requires rethinking how we discipline and talk to our children. But it also means explaining these concepts to our kids. Children are very receptive to talking about shame if we’re willing to do it. By the time they’re four and five, we can explain to them the difference between guilt and shame, and how much we love them even when they make bad choices. When Ellen was in kindergarten, her teacher called me at home one afternoon and said, “I totally get what you do now.” When I asked her why, she said that earlier in the week, she had looked over at Ellen, who was in the “Glitter Center” and said, “Ellen! You’re a mess.” Apparently, Ellen got a very serious look on her face and said, “I may be making a mess, but I’m not a mess.” (That’s the day I became “that parent.”) Charlie also gets the distinction between shame and guilt. When I found our dog pulling food out of the trash can, I scolded her by saying, “Bad girl!” Charlie came sliding around the corner, shouting, “Daisy is a good girl who made a bad choice! We love her! We just don’t love her choices!” When I tried to explain the difference by saying, “Daisy is a dog, Charlie,” his response was, “Oh, I see. Daisy is a good dog who made a bad choice.
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Brené Brown (Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead)
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For instance, Vedic knowledge was imparted to Brahmä through oral reception. Indeed, Brahmä received the knowledge directly from the Supreme Lord, who then instructed it to his son Närada, whose realizations appear throughout Vedic literature. And Närada instructed it to His disciple, the sage Vyäsadeva. Thus, the message of Vedic literature descends through a chain of disciplic succession that is still present today. Formerly Vedic scripture came down by word of mouth from teachers to their disciples, but thousands of years ago, the sage Vyäsadeva compiled all the Vedic scriptures in written form.
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Rasamandala Das (ISLAM And The VEDAS)
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The boy’s first day of school in the North, he was assigned to a grade lower than the one he’d been in where he had come from, and the teacher couldn’t understand his southern accent. When she asked him his name, he said he was called J.C. The teacher misheard him and, from that day forward, called him Jesse instead. So did everyone else in this new world he was in. He would forever be known as Jesse Owens, not by his given name. He would go on to win four gold medals at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, becoming the first American in the history of track and field to do so in a single Olympics and disproving the Aryan notions of his Nazi hosts. It made headlines throughout the United States that Adolf Hitler, who had watched the races, had refused to shake hands with Owens, as he had with white medalists. But Owens found that in Nazi Germany, he had been able to stay in the same quarters and eat with his white teammates, something he could not do in his home country. Upon his return, there was a ticker-tape parade in New York. Afterward, he was forced to ride the freight elevator to his own reception at the Waldorf-Astoria. “I wasn’t invited to shake hands with Hitler,” he wrote in his autobiography. “But I wasn’t invited to the White House to shake hands with the President either. I came back to my native country, and I could not ride in the front of the bus. I had to go to the back door. I couldn’t live where I wanted. Now, what’s the difference?
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Isabel Wilkerson (The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration)
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As spiritually conscious adults we consider everyone our teacher an no one our competitor. Thus, to react defensively to feedback means losing out on useful input. To defend how we are is to stay as we are, and it ruins our chances at personal development and intimacy too. Instead, listen to feedback in such a way as to find a useful truth in it. Nothing is so disarming as receptivity. Receiving feedback willingly soon reveals itself to be a way of receiving more love.
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David Richo (How to be an Adult in Relationships: The Five Keys to Mindful Loving (Chinese Edition))
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To receive the gospel tradition does not mean merely to accept the truthfulness of a report about certain historical facts, nor does it mean simply to receive instruction and intellectual enlightenment. To receive the tradition means to receive (parelabete) Christ Jesus as Lord (Col. 2:6). In the voice of the tradition, the voice of God himself is heard; and through this word, God himself is present and active in the church (1 Thess. 2:13). Thus the Christian tradition is not mere instruction passed on like Jewish oral tradition from one teacher to another. The tradition handed on in the form of preaching (euēngelisamen, 1 Cor. 15:1) and the reception of the message involve a response of faith (episteusate, 1 Cor. 15:2). The tradition about the resurrection of Jesus must be believed in the heart and confessed with the mouth (Rom. 10:8-9), and issues in salvation. Such confession is possible only through the Holy Spirit (1 Cor. 12:3).
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George Eldon Ladd (A Theology of the New Testament)
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To increase the chances of reversing the rejection of one language, parents can talk to the teenager in that language. The teenager may insist on responding in a different language, but at least ‘passive’ or ‘receptive’ bilingualism will be maintained by the child consistently hearing the other language. It makes it easier for them to speak that language again later in life.
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Colin Baker (A Parents' and Teachers' Guide to Bilingualism)
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It is only when the mind is open and receptive that learning and seeing and change can occur.
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Jon Kabat-Zinn (Letting Everything Become Your Teacher: 100 Lessons in Mindfulness)
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As mandatory reporting laws and community awareness drove an increase its child protection investigations throughout the 1980s, some children began to disclose premeditated, sadistic and organised abuse by their parents, relatives and other caregivers such as priests and teachers (Hechler 1988). Adults in psychotherapy described similar experiences. The dichotomies that had previously associated organised abuse with the dangerous, external ‘Other’ had been breached, and the incendiary debate that followed is an illustration of the depth of the collective desire to see them restored. Campbell (1988) noted the paradox that, whilst journalists and politicians often demand that the authorities respond more decisively in response to a ‘crisis’ of sexual abuse, the action that is taken is then subsequently construed as a ‘crisis’. There has been a particularly pronounced tendency of the public reception to allegations of organised abuse. The removal of children from their parents due to disclosures of organised abuse, the provision of mental health care to survivors of organised abuse, police investigations of allegations of organised abuse and the prosecution of alleged perpetrators of organised abuse have all generated their own controversies.
These were disagreements that were cloaked in the vocabulary of science and objectivity but nonetheless were played out in sensationalised fashion on primetime television, glossy news magazines and populist books, drawing textual analysis. The role of therapy and social work in the construction of testimony of abuse and trauma. in particular, has come under sustained postmodern attack. Frosh (2002) has suggested that therapeutic spaces provide children and adults with the rare opportunity to articulate experiences that are otherwise excluded from the dominant symbolic order. However, since the 1990s, post-modern and post-structural theory has often been deployed in ways that attempt to ‘manage’ from; afar the perturbing disclosures of abuse and trauma that arise in therapeutic spaces (Frosh 2002). Nowhere is this clearer than in relation to organised abuse, where the testimony of girls and women has been deconstructed as symptoms of cultural hysteria (Showalter 1997) and the colonisation of women’s minds by therapeutic discourse (Hacking 1995). However, behind words and discourse, ‘a real world and real lives do exist, howsoever we interpret, construct and recycle accounts of these by a variety of symbolic means’ (Stanley 1993: 214).
Summit (1994: 5) once described organised abuse as a ‘subject of smoke and mirrors’, observing the ways in which it has persistently defied conceptualisation or explanation.
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Michael Salter (Organised Sexual Abuse)
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start on time? Is the bathroom clean? Are your feelings positive in that space? You won’t find perfection anywhere, nor do you need it. Just go in with a humble attitude and soak up everything you can. Come a few minutes early and sweep the floor or tidy the bathroom. Bring fresh flowers. Contribute, and learn whatever you can, and when the time comes to move on, leave on good terms with everyone. Don’t show up at all unless you’re willing to commit to at least six months of humble receptiveness. And don’t quit without notifying the instructor and thanking him or her sincerely. Present a small gift, nicely wrapped, to cement what should be a lifelong relationship. In China, they say a teacher for a day is a parent for a lifetime.
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William Broughton Burt (Tai Chi: Moving at the Speed of Truth)
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By the time I emerged from the end of the Gauntlet, my eye had almost swollen shut.
Coach Fritz grinned when he spotted me. “Run into trouble, did you?”
“Nope. I’m just trying to start a new fashion trend—black-eye foundation,” I said, cupping a hand over my eye. The pain made me forget the dangers of mouthing off, but to my shock, Fritz chuckled.
“Well, then, I’d say you’re off to a great start.”
Asshole.
But Fritz’s sudden receptiveness to my sarcasm put me on edge, and I dropped all the snark from my voice as I said, “Um, can I go to the infirmary?”
Fritz’s grin widened. “I don’t think that’s necessary. A little bruising never hurt anyone. You can wait until after class.”
“But I have detention after class.”
Fritz’s shoulders rose and fell in an exaggerated shrug. “Not my problem. But I’m sure the teacher will understand if you’re late.” Something about Fritz’s triumphant tone told me that he knew very well who my detention was with and that Corvus would be about as understanding as a swarm of pissed-off killer bees.
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Mindee Arnett (The Nightmare Dilemma (The Arkwell Academy, #2))
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Manne’s theory of misogyny as the punishment arm of sexism sheds considerable light on the tenor of Plath’s continued reception, one that emerged from a need to discipline and contain a woman writer who had fled the control of her husband, lovers, and teachers
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Emily Van Duyne (Loving Sylvia Plath: A Reclamation)