I never teach until I've spoken to the fighter. I have to first determine his emotional state, get his background, to find out what I have to do, how many layers I have to keep peeling off so that I get to the core of the person so that he can recognize, as well as I, what is there.
Interpretation
Teaching should be personalized and dependent on the emotional and personal background of the learner.
This quote emphasizes the importance of understanding a student's emotional state and personal history before imparting knowledge. Cus D'Amato suggests that effective teaching involves peeling away layers to reach the core of a person, highlighting the need for empathy and personal connection in the educational process.
In practice
In a workshop about mentoring, a speaker mentioned this quote to stress the importance of connecting with mentees.
When two men step into the ring, one and only one deserves to win. When you step into the ring, you gotta know you deserve to win. You gotta know destiny owes you victory , cause you trained harder than your opponent. You sparred harder. You ran farther.
Greatness is not a measure of how great you are but how great others came to be because of you
The hero and the coward both feel exactly the same fear, only the hero confronts his fear and converts it into fire.
Every fighter that ever lived had fear. A boy comes to me and tells me that he's not afraid, if I believed him I'd say he's a liar or there's something wrong with him. I'd send him to a doctor to find out what the hell's the matter with him, because this is not a normal reaction. The fighter that's gone into the ring and hasn't experienced fear is either a liar or a psychopath.
Boxing is a contest of character and ingenuity. The boxer with more will, determination, desire, and intelligence is always the one who comes out the victor.
To see a man beaten not by a better opponent but by himself is a tragedy.
A woman might claim to retain some of the child's faculties, although very limited and defused, simply because she has not been encouraged to learn methods of thought and develop a disciplined mind. As long as education remains largely induction ignorance will retain these advantages over learning and it is time that women impudently put them to work.
To be a well-favoured man is the gift of fortune; but to write and read comes by nature.
One glance at a book and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for 1,000 years. To read is to voyage through time.
Every time I've flown an aircraft, or visited a steelworks, or watched a panel-beater at work, I've learned something new that can be applied to buildings.
Fifty years from now if an understanding of man's origins, his evolution, his history, his progress is not in the common place of the school books we shall not exist.
Service-learning is a particularly fertile way of involving young people in community service, because it ties helping others to what they are learning in the classroom. It enables them to apply academic disciplines to practical, everyday problems. In the process, it provides a compelling answer to the adolescent's perennial question, 'Why do I need to learn this stuff?
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