One night my son was downstairs studying, and he had been up so late all that week, and my husband said, "I feel so sorry for him." I said, "Look, if he's going to become a surgeon" - he is studying to be a doctor - "he's going to have his hard times. I feel sorry for him too, but if he lives in this world he's going to have more hard times. He's going to stay up some more nights." I think we can't shield them from the hard times, even though we'd like to. I say to the children that I teach and to my own - I can't test the ground for you and tell you that's a safe step there.

[Kid] never learned to read in kindergarten, first, and second, so in third grade he begins to be placed in the EMH or the learning-disabled rooms.

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

If you can't make a mistake, you can't make anything.

Don't try to fix the students, fix ourselves first. The good teacher makes the poor student good and the good student superior. When our students fail, we, as teachers, too, have failed.

You can pay people to teach, But you can't pay them to care.

Education is the thing. This black-white bit - I don't deal with people that way. I deal with it as if you are another individual. If you do something that perturbs me or aggravates me, I do not think you've done it because I'm black.