John Adams Quote on Teaching

I sometimes, in my sprightly moments, consider myself, in my great chair at ashool, as some dictator at the head of a commonwealth. In this little state I can discover all the great geniuses, all this surprising actions and revolutions of the great world in miniature. I have several renowned generals but three feet high, and several deep-projecting politicians in petticoats. I have others catching and dissecting flies, accumulating remarkable pebbles, cockleshells, ets., with as ardent curiosity as any virtuoso in the Royal Society . . . at one table sits Mr. Insipid foppling and fluttering, spinning his whirligig, or playing with his fingers as gaily and wittily as any Frenchified coxcomb brandishes his cane and rattles his snuff box. At another sits the polemical divine, plodding and wrangling in his mind about Adam's fall in which we sinned, all as his primer has it.

John Adams as quoted by David McCullough in "John Adams" (pg 38)

John Adams, a significant leader in the American Independence movement and 2nd President of the United States, taught for one year in Worcester, Massachusetts beginning in 1755, after graduating from Harvard, and before studying law.