Education Quote by Dan Simmons

A soft confession with a sly edge: Simmons frames teaching as a near-total love affair, then twists the knife with “but.” That pivot does the real work. “I loved almost everything” signals genuine affection for the classroom’s daily intimacy - the small dramas, the moment a student gets it, the sense of purpose - while also implying a few hard exceptions he’s choosing not to name. The omission is strategic; it invites you to project your own list of institutional irritants: bureaucracy, standardized testing, burnout, the quiet grind of being responsible for other people’s futures.

Then comes the self-mythologizing, in the best writerly way. “I was an unusual teacher” is modest on the surface, but it’s also a claim of difference, even of misfit status. Simmons doesn’t say “bad” or “frustrated” or “out of place.” He says unusual - a word that flatters without boasting, suggesting creativity, iconoclasm, maybe a teacher who smuggled art and story into a system built for compliance. For a novelist, that’s not incidental; it’s origin-story language. He positions teaching as both apprenticeship and pressure cooker, a place where narrative instincts either get suppressed or sharpened.

Context matters: Simmons taught before becoming known for big-idea, genre-bending fiction. The subtext reads like an explanation for departure that avoids bitterness. He’s not repudiating the vocation; he’s protecting it - and himself - with a careful, human contradiction.