The educational world often assumed that good teaching could be brought about by the imitation of good teachers, and there was a dreadful limit to that; because good teaching in the end is a consequence of what the good teacher irreproducibly is.

Perhaps teaching at its most delicate and fruitful is always concerned, as it points out and informs, to congratulate the taught on the knowledge they now have. It’s the instantaneous good manners of decent instruction.

(Teaching children to write poetry) She’d laid her children open to the essential notion of similarities, and of differences made remarkable by resemblances, and resemblances made startling by differences. She’d made them sensitive to the power of a verb that wasn’t quite, or altogether wasn’t, the verb you’d expect, or was a verb used in one context that had spent much of its life in idle imprisonment in another. She’d made them aware of images. She’d made them unable to tolerate idleness of language. She’d made them alert to what, when you bring words together, makes a music out of them: the echoes and hums from one word to another, and from words ten lines away to those in the line you’re now writing.