That time of year is here again - the new school year has either started or will do very soon . Those who chose to do so will be getting themselves ready for university or other higher education. It is a tense time and has followed a summer of tension for those awaiting public exam results. Anxious teenagers (and parents!) across the country have awaited their fate all sealed in an envelope!
It's very hard as parents to be totally laid back about exams and the whole education arena for that matter - especially if you have a child who seems incredibly laid back in their aproach to their studies! - and we constantly ponder about whether we are doing enough to encourage without over burdening our offspring.
However it is apparently true that Hermann & Pauline Einstein worried constantly about their shy, school hating son who disliked sport, had poor language skills and only played with jigsaws. As we all now know, despite that inauspicious start Albert Einstein went on to become the greatest physicist the world has ever known, devising the theory of relativity and the only equation most of us can ever quote - e=mc² which led to the atom bomb.
So as the new academic year gets off to a start I wish for you and your families success and happiness and leave you with a few quotes about education, exams and life....
"Parents can only give good advice or put them on the right paths, but the final forming of a person's character lies in their own hands."
excerpt from the diary of Anne Frank
You don't really understand human nature unless you know why a child on a merry-go-round will wave at his parents every time around - and why his parents will always wave back.
-- William D. Tammeus
“I was thrown out of college for cheating on the metaphysics exam; I looked into the soul of the boy sitting next to me.”
Woody Allen quotes (American Actor, Author, Screenwriter and Film Director, b.1935)
"I was thinking about how people seem to read the Bible a whole lot more as they get older; then it dawned on me . . they're cramming for their final exam.”
George Carlin quotes (American comedian)
It's not only children who grow. Parents do too. As much as we watch to see what our children do with their lives, they are watching us to see what we do with ours. I can't tell my children to reach for the sun. All I can do is reach for it, myself.
-- Joyce Maynard
The Hebrew word for parents is horim, and it comes from the same root as moreh, teacher. The parent is, and remains, the first and most important teacher that the child will have.
-- Rabbi Kassel Abelson
"History, although sometimes made up of the few acts of the great, is more often shaped by the many acts of the small."
Mark Twain
I've always wanted to be somebody, but now I see I should have been more specific.
Lily Tomlin
and finally...
"Education is what remains when one has forgotten everything he learned in school." Albert Einstein
Warmest wishes
Craig
