I'm 67 years old now. I've had a lot of good teachers over the years; and they have been very, very different from one another. They all had passion for what they were doing, but their styles were unique to them as individuals.

Truth-telling by a leader can legitimate truth-telling at every level.

Mentoring is a mutuality that requires more than meeting the right teacher: the teacher must meet the right student.

We continually make decisions in private which affect the commonweal, as the ecologists (to take but one example) have shown us. When I keep my house warmer than it needs to be, I consume fuel which might help someone else keep warm, or keep a job. When the food I eat is high on the protein chain I contribute to a maldistribution of protein around the world. When I teach my children to be primarily concerned with private gain, I diminish the ranks of public leadership in the rising generation.

We listen for guidance everywhere except from within.

I want my inner truth to be the plumb line for the choices I make about my life - about the work that I do and how I do it, about the relationships I enter into and how I conduct them.

I now understand what Nelle Morton meant when she said that one of the great tasks in our time is to "hear people to speech." Behind their fearful silence, our students want to find their voices, speak their voices, have their voices heard. A good teacher is one who can listen to those voices even before they are spoken-so that someday they can speak with truth and confidence.