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

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.

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.

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.

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."

Teach like your hair's on fire!