Determination and perseverance move the world; thinking that others will do it for you is a sure way to fail.

Once children learn how to learn, nothing is going to narrow their mind. The essence of teaching is to make learning contagious, to have one idea spark another.

I believe the more difficult a child is, the more I want that child. But I won't take a child until the parent brings him to us. So it is just the opposite - we get the ones that no one else will take. We get sawdust, and we have to make boards out of it.

When our students fail, we, as teachers, too, have failed.

I was very, very unhappy with even the so-called very elite schools. The one thing I've always done every day with my children is to watch what they do at school, and I was always a bit unhappy with the academic program. It was a kind of hit and miss.

There is a lot of money to be made from miseducation, from the easy to read easy to learn textbooks, workbooks, teacher manuals, educational games and visual aids. The textbook business is more than a billion-dollar-a-year industry and some of its biggest profits come from 'audio-visual aids' - flash cards, tape cassettes, and filmstrips. No wonder the education industry encourages schools to focus on surface education.

What all good teachers have in common, however, is that they set high standards for their students and do not settle for anything less.