Baseball is a religion in my classroom. It's a very important part of life, baseball.

I travel a lot with my students. We go on the road and even learn about things like doing your laundry and managing your time. And maybe that's not on the test at the end of the year, but it's in the test of life and that's why my classroom is successful.

To quote the exceptional teacher Marva Collins, "I will is more important than IQ." It is wonderful to have a terrific mind, but it's been my experience that having outstanding intelligence is a very small part of the total package that leads to success and happiness. Discipline, hard work, perseverance, and generosity of spirit are, in the final analysis, far more important

There's a difference between logic and what maybe people see when they're presented evidence and justice and that they're not always together.

One of the funny things about the racism of the system, when I started 30 years ago, I'm in an area called Koreatown and most of the kids were Asian. And when the kids did well, people said, "Well, of course, they did well. They're Asians." But when we had this huge influx of Latino children from Central America, they said, "Oh, you're gonna have problems now."

I have students who are PhDs in music who come back and scored the music and teach the kids the instruments that I don't know how to play. Those are the points of light, the former students.

You hear terrible stories because there'll be a story about some terrible kid, but most of the kids I work with are terrific kids. They're poor, maybe their families are broken, so they're not coming home to a mom and dad and a nice dinner every night. But these kids are capable.