I'd like to give every young teacher some good news. Teaching is a very easy job. Administrators will tell you what to do. You'll be given books and told chapters to assign the children. Veteran teachers will show you the correct way to fill out forms and have your classes line up.And here's some more good news. If you do all of these things badly, they let you keep doing it. You can go home at three o'clock every day. You get about three months off a year. Teaching is a great gig.However, if you care about what you're doing, it's one of the toughest jobs around.

Teach like your hair's on fire!

When I have children that go home and mom and dad are not home because they're working, they're trying to get food on the table, and they come home to an empty house and they go to sleep in an empty house, there is no way that child can compete against a child from the west side of Los Angeles who both parents went to Stanford. Well, good for them, God love them. That's not an equal playing field.

I try to show the children how every lesson I teach them is going to be something they use in their real life. That's why my kids work so hard, not because I'm so cool. They're working for themselves.

I love Shakespeare. In Shakespeare, tragedy is not just something that's bad. It's something that could be good and is bad.

I always tell the kids that excellence is like pregnancy. You can't be a little bit pregnant. You either are or you're not.

I am asking teachers to understand that we must make the education relevant for the children. If they're only working for the tests or they're only working to please us, they're not going to be interested in school.