Tim Gunn Teaching Quotations

I found early on in teaching, if you're too blunt an instrument, the students discredit you and think you're just being mean. They're not interested in what you have to say.

I learned early on in teaching how easy it is to hurt a young person and that's never my intention.

On my first day teaching my own classroom, I threw up before I entered the building.

I've never mentioned this, but when I was at Parsons teaching, the other design disciplines, they don't like fashion design. They see it as very nineteenth-century.

When it comes to my vocabulary, I felt a responsibility when I was teaching to raise the bar of conversation in my classroom. And with my own students, I refused to let them use the phrase "I like" or "I don't like" when we were engaged in a critique.

If you want to, you can share my teaching refrain: I can't want you to succeed more than you do.

I learned from teaching. If you are perceived by the student to be belittling them or purely criticizing them without offering up words of encouragement and support, they shut down and discredit you.