You’re not lonely when you’re teaching, you’re not quiet, you’re laughing most of the time, you’re having a wonderful time interacting with young people. It’s the best fun in the world.
The fire of literacy is created by the emotional sparks between a child, a book, and the person reading.
The fastest way to teach a child to read is to teach them to write.
Books don’t harm kids; they arm them.
If you are not a writer, you will not understand the difficulties of writing. If you are not a writer, you will not know the fears and hopes of the writers you teach.
You experience other cultures to give you a kind of shock that makes you look at your own culture. You appreciate it more as a result of being out of it, but you also realise there are some things lacking in your culture.
I realized with grief that purposeless activities in language arts are probably the burial grounds of language development and that coffins can be found in most classrooms, including mine.
I don’t go to church much anymore, but Methodist values still wind me up and send me ticking into my daily life.
I made a lot of friends at school, and they were all Africans. I could have felt very different. I didn’t feel different, I didn’t notice the color of their skin, I didn’t notice the color of my skin and I have remembered that all my life.
I don’t know why some people have children at all if they know that they can only take a few weeks off work.
I think that my favourite animal is a baby possum, or a joey. The face of a really little joey is so divine – so, so gorgeous.
As everyone knows, nothing is sweeter than tiny baby fingers and chubby baby toes.
DO NOT attempt to bring up other people’s children through your text.
My mother was a very difficult woman to please. She was the sort of woman who thought that if I were praised I would get above myself.
I think sometimes we rush through countries, ticking off the attractions, but that’s missing the point.
Babies have much higher levels of stress in childcare.
My Mother was a very wild Australian woman. When we were in Africa she could kill a snake with one blow from a crow bar, which she kept at the back door.
I was the most Australian child ever in the world, even though my home was in Africa.
Writing a picture book is like writing ‘War and Peace’ in Haiku.
I have very little patience with children.