Kids still like to laugh, kids still like the joy of learning. When you have a cool science experiment, I don't care where you're from. When you have that aha moment, whether you're in China or Kenya, that kid's eyes are gonna open up. So I really try to focus more on what we have in common than what differs us.

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

When the kids see the poverty in their neighborhood, but they see these successful kids who come from the countries they come from, come from Mexico, come from Korea, come from the Philippines, come from Salvador, and were doing really well, it motivates them to do better. The former students give them a vision of what's possible.

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.

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

Kids still like to laugh, kids still like the joy of learning. When you have a cool science experiment, I don't care where you're from. When you have that aha moment, whether you're in China or Kenya, that kid's eyes are gonna open up. So I really try to focus more on what we have in common than what differs us.

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."