Best 122 quotes of Tucker Elliot on MyQuotes

After being maligned for his lack of offense for much of his career, [César] Gerónimo batted .280 with two home runs, a triple, three runs, and three RBIs vs. Boston during the 1975 World Series, and then he batted .308 with two doubles, two steals, and three runs vs. New York during the 1976 World Series. The man who’s defense Sparky Anderson called 'ungodly' became an offensive star on baseball’s biggest stage.

Ahead in the distance we could see the main gate, but there was a sea of cars, none moving, people standing, milling around, waiting nervously, perhaps fearfully, as heavily armed MPs and military working dogs searched every square inch of every vehicle, searched every bag on every person, all the while keeping a vigilant eye on the long alley we were stuck in, and on the hundreds of rooftops that overlooked that alley, wary but aware that there were people out there who would gladly hurt us again if given the chance.

All my life my dad felt this need to protect his kids from a war he fought, a war I believed could never reach out and touch us, could never hurt us—and yet he fed us lies with his answers, shielding us from the truth about what he did there, about what he saw, about who he was before the war, and about what he became because of it. He lied to protect us from his memories, from his nightmares. Standing with my dad at The Wall, I knew the truth—no one could know so many names engraved in granite if he 'never was in danger.

All over the world there are students, teachers and parents that face serious challenges every day. They need help with real problems that have life-altering consequences—and a group of intelligent professionals brought together to advise and educate stakeholders in need of help ought to be able to do so without behaving like a middle school drama queen.

Always Sami. I was tethered to her somehow. To that scared little girl I’d found on the staircase nearly a year earlier; to the past, when teaching was simpler and I could care about everyday problems, when being relentless meant running two extra laps, not waiting for an MP to search the undercarriage of a bus for bombs before letting students approach it.

America isn’t perfect but there’s not a better place in the world for people of any faith.

And then came, perhaps, the biggest offseason move in franchise history … and no, we’re not talking about inviting Carlos Peña to camp or hiring Joe Maddon or appointing Andrew Friedman as Executive Vice President of Baseball Operations—those moves had already transpired. No, we’re talking about the really big move. After 2007 the Tampa Bay Devil Rays officially released the 'Devil' and emerged in 2008 as the Tampa Bay Rays.

An individual school can handle a resident idiot from time to time, but an entire school system is only as good as its weakest leader.

As calls rang out the world over for new treaties and organizations to be established with the intent of preventing future wars, America and her allies took a more realistic approach to the problem—we maintained allied military bases across Europe and Asia and we stationed troops in these foreign territories on a permanent basis. We weren’t invaders or conquerors and for sure we had no intention of being an empire. We were liberators. That’s all. But having fought and sacrificed so much and for so long, the pragmatic thing to do was to follow this simple philosophy: it’s great to have dialogue, it just works a lot better when you have a strong military strategically placed and ready to act around the globe.

As long as you know 'to let' means to rent and not a place to pee, you’re all set to travel in the UK. The lifts and the boots and everything else don’t really matter.

A son for a flag is a lot of sacrifice.

Baseball is known for superstitious players and cursed teams—and at the root of every curse there’s a story. Boston’s curse was to trade Babe Ruth to the Yankees. Cubs fans claim a billy goat is responsible for their futility. And Cleveland’s curse? The club struggled after its Pennant-winning 1954 season, but it was rich with optimism just two years later as an onslaught of new talent promised to lift the club once more to the ranks of baseball’s elite—and by 1959 the club was contending for the Pennant again. And then GM Frank Lane traded Rocky Colavito to the Detroit Tigers and cursed everything.

Boston got Roberts on the July 31 trade deadline—exchanging prospect Henri Stanley for the fleet-footed outfielder. Roberts fittingly got 86 at bats for Boston, but it was his speed on the bases that the Red Sox sought—and it was his speed that brought to an end 86 years of frustration for the Fenway Faithful.

By any reasonable standard (i.e. he didn’t cheat), Aaron is one of the greatest sluggers in baseball history—and there shouldn’t even be a debate about who is baseball’s true all-time home run champion (again, no cheating).

Cable TV brought the Braves into homes all across America in the 1970s, by the 1980s the Braves were “America’s Team,” and by the 1990s the Braves were the most dominant team in baseball.

Cope? Adapt? Uh, no. These are military kids. They roll with it. I once asked a new student, 'See any familiar faces?' She pointed out various kids and replied, 'Seattle, Tampa, Okinawa, New Jersey.' For military dependents school is literally a non-stop revolving door of old and new friends.

Dave Concepción exceeded everyone’s expectations—everyone’s except, perhaps, his own. That’s because as a kid, Concepción idolized Major League Hall of Fame shortstop and fellow-Venezuelan Luis Aparicio, and he aspired to become that same caliber of player.

DPRK translates to Democratic People’s Republic of Korea—and if the words Democratic and Republic sound like a good thing, well, it’s oxymoronic because the Korea we’re talking about here is the communist one in the North, and when I said the pastor’s father was their guest, what I really meant is he was shot down, captured, tortured, and held prisoner by a depraved enemy in what today can only be described as a failed state.

Educators are in the news, too. Usually that’s bad. I had a favorite college professor. He used to tell us, 'If you make CNN as a teacher, you’re probably going to jail.

Farid asked, 'Do American teachers care about every student?' I thought about a humanities teacher I’d worked with in Korea and more recently a science teacher I’d worked with in Germany. I said, 'I think most schools have a resident idiot.

Far to our left I could see a commercial airliner on final approach to Soekarno-Hatta. Far to our right I could see the outline of tall city buildings. The imagery was hard to ignore. In the midst was an impoverished world filled with dangerous radicals. Some believed it was God’s will to crash airplanes into buildings. Some recruited children to self-detonate on buses and in coffee shops. It must be incredibly difficult to hold fast to hope when you live in such a world. It’s also hard to keep faith with humanity when religious ideology is used as an impetus for war. But I also believe that for every war there is a hero … and for me, Jakarta will always be Indira’s city.

For the first time in a decade I felt a voice rising from deep inside my soul. It cried out ‘what will you be today?’ and I heard ‘relentless’ booming from the rafters inside an old gym as Sami and a group of young men chased dreams and trophies while their fathers went to war.

For your own security it’s imperative you blend in with the native population.

Free agency changed the baseball landscape in many ways. It created more opportunities for players, but it also meant increasingly fewer players would spend an entire career playing for one franchise—and that’s especially true for players capable of becoming “legends,” the ones in such demand on the free agent market.

General manager Frank Lane made his mark on the club by making several unpopular or unsuccessful trades. Among the guys he traded to other teams are Rocky Colavito, Roger Maris, Norm Cash, and … manager Joe Gordon? Uh, yes. Lane and Detroit GM Bill DeWitt traded managers—Joe Gordon for Jimmy Dykes. Lane’s tenure ended shortly thereafter, long before the damage he caused.

[George] Foster lacks the name recognition outside of Cincinnati that other members of the Big Red machine maintain, but that doesn’t diminish his contributions to the club—he followed his MVP campaign with three more seasons of 20-plus home runs and 90-plus RBIs, never mind the fact he batted .326 during three trips to the World Series. And just like Rose and Morgan and Bench during their MVP seasons, Foster can say, if only for that one summer, he was the best in the game.

God does not care where you pray. He only cares what is in your heart.

He [Ted Williams] was only a 23-year-old kid when he batted .406 in 1941, but then the season ended and our country came under attack at Pearl Harbor—and by 1943 he was a Marine fighter pilot serving overseas who cheated death on several documented occasions. He came back in 1946, and he won his first career MVP after hitting 38 home runs.

Honestly, I had no idea how to respond. My senior year of college I’d taken a seminar titled Public Education: Situations and Strategies. I thought about emailing my professor, maybe suggest some new topics and help him get current. Maybe he’d invite me back as a guest lecturer. He’d probably expect some strategies along with the situations though, so I guess that wouldn’t work, but whatever.

I asked my dad once if his high school teachers began treating kids differently during Vietnam, when they knew some of their students would be drafted and sent to war. I was curious because for sure we’d started treating our military kids differently after 9/11. He just shrugged and changed the subject, like he always did. And that was okay with me. He’d go back and change a lot of things if he could; and like everyone else, I’d give anything to go back to the day before 9/11—but all we can do is move forward.

I don’t know how long we talked about that game the first time my dad showed me the ticket stub. He admitted he hadn’t even been sure that he still had it, that he was surprised when he’d been able to find it. But we’ve spent hours and hours and hours talking about it since. And it’s pretty amazing, because that ticket stub sat in a box for two decades—once it let my dad into a stadium to see a baseball game, and then later, it let me into my dad’s world, into his past, to learn about the man who taught me to love a game so passionately that it shaped nearly every aspect of my life.

I don’t like it when Christianity and western cultures are used as propaganda to sway impoverished Muslims into becoming self-detonating radicals.

I’d see the arrow. I’d think about attitude and perception. Maybe the green arrow on the ceiling is to Muslims as the KJV in the Motel 6 nightstand is to Christians.

I felt a hand on my back, movement behind me, my guys making room, someone squeezing into our circle, and then one last hand joined the pile: my Korean aide. I guess it made sense. We were her real family. The closest thing she’d ever had to a real family, at least. All year she said maybe five words a day. 'Now kick some ass,' she said.

I felt like I should salute. If only I knew how.

I felt so much pride, so much love. You get a handful of days like this in a lifetime. Take in every minute. They’ll be over soon enough, and you never know what tomorrow will bring.

If I can be perfectly blunt, his humanities teacher was an ass.

I had assumed 'a man’s character is his fate' meant if my students worked hard they would get good grades, and if they were lazy they would fail—but any idiot could have seen that interpretation. It took no thought whatsoever, and it isn’t at all what Joe was trying to teach me. No, what Joe meant was this: my character shapes what my students become, and what they become is my fate. I began to see teaching in a whole new light. From that day forward, I knew everything that happened to my students would haunt me or bless me—and I began to teach as if my happiness depended on their happiness, my successes depended on their successes, and their world was the most important part of my world.

I have this thought, it’s horrible, and it makes me sick, but it’s true: one day these students will grow up and have their own kids, and they’re going to name them for men and women who will die in this war.

I knew a teacher that kept a calendar on his desk. He didn’t use it for lesson planning though. Instead he was marking time until summer. That’s what prisoners do on walls. They mark the days until they go free. But if you’re marking time as a teacher, you aren’t redeeming the time with your students. A parent drops a child off at the beginning of the year and it’s your job to redeem the time and educate that child. It’s your responsibility to see that child progress throughout the year. The child should be a better student as a result of being in your classroom. You are responsible—for successes and failures—and you have an obligation to students and parents to redeem every precious minute you’re given as an educator.

I’m clinging to one last thought: pain is the harbinger of hope. You have to be alive to feel pain. If you are alive, then you have purpose. If you have purpose, then you have hope.

I’m glad there are organizations like Dale Murphy’s I Won’t Cheat Foundation. I’m glad there are athletes with standards and morals who kids can look up to and learn from. I’m glad that for every bad example my nephew sees today on ESPN that I can share with him stories about truly heroic ballplayers like Cal Ripken, Jr. or Dale Murphy or Kirby Puckett.

I’m in my classroom and I’m looking at this girl, but all I can see is my dad on the ground, in front of The Wall, telling the truth, finally—his knees drawn and his chest heaving—and when people pass by they look the other way, except for this one lady who stops to give my dad a hug. She gets down on her knees to reach him, and now she’s crying with a stranger, and without asking I know it’s because she’s lost something, too, and I wonder if in comforting my dad she thinks she can find it again. Probably not. It doesn’t work that way.

I’m not sure I ever met an American teacher in Korea that hadn’t volunteered at an orphanage at least once—even our resident idiot could be surprisingly decent on occasion—but I’ve also visited foreign countries where children are taught hatred. I’ve seen it up close and personal. It’s antithetical to everything I believe in as a teacher. The mandate for all teachers is to instill hope, not fear and hatred.

I’m sure the driver was a great guy and all he wanted was to drive me to my hotel—but he was a complete stranger to me and the truth is that being vigilant isn’t a part-time job, it’s not about being nice to people, it’s about reality. I made a terrible mistake once, believing the monsters that want to hurt us are easily labeled and identified, rather than walking and hiding amongst us. That’s my reality.

Indira was surrounded by people who had given up hope, who blamed their own misery on the influence of Christianity and western cultures, and yet, literally in the midst of squalor, her family had created a place of real beauty. It really makes you stop and think. Uncle Google should be spitting out eight hundred million things American schools have done right. The fact things are so screwed up makes no sense. If you believe Uncle Google, then we’ve done the exact opposite from Indira’s family—in the land of hope and plenty we’ve created a place that’s ugly. We have so much. Can things really be so bad? Maybe we can’t fix our schools because as individuals we’ve never truly been broken. Or maybe Chinese lanterns make everyone wax philosophical.

I needed to talk to my dad. My dad who had been to war, who had seen its horrors, who suffered from its nightmares, my dad who was a good man, the best man I’d ever known, who, along with my uncle, I wanted to honor by teaching military kids—my dad, the only one who I would believe if he would just tell me I could be good, too, that I could do right by my students, because for sure they were going to suffer. It’s just cause and effect. We’re at war. The military fights wars. I teach military kids. I’d never served, but now I could make a difference. I just needed my dad to tell me what to do, to tell me I was good enough to get it done.

In Korea I’d been so afraid that Sami would lose her dad. She did, but she didn’t get a flag. He went to Doha, then to Baghdad, then to Kabul, then to someplace else, and then to a different someplace else, on and on. He’d come home, leave again, come home, leave again, until one day he came home a different person altogether. Sami lost Angel, lost her family, and then she lost herself.

In large part, we are teachers precisely because we remember what it was like to be a student. Someone inspired us. Someone influenced us. Or someone hurt us. And we’ve channeled that joy (or pain) into our own unique philosophies on life and learning and we’re always looking for an opportunity to share them—with each other, our students, parents, or in our communities.

In my life I’ve been very lucky to travel around the world and see students and teachers in nearly two dozen countries—but the most awe-inspiring experience I’ve ever had was two years after 9/11 when I had the chance to attend a conference in Manhattan and personally meet many of the heroic teachers who persevered under conditions that in our worst nightmares we could never have imagined. In my opinion there’s not been nearly enough written about those teachers, and I hope that changes soon.