Paying to teach in the trenches was like putting my face through a cutout hole at a carnival while a quarterback threw pies at me. At least with a carnival, I'd see it coming.

I am a teacher born and bred, and I believe in the advocacy of teachers. It's a calling. We want our students to feel impassioned and empowered.

I grew up in a very progressive family and with a great educational system, and I asked myself, 'Why doesn't everybody have these opportunities for a good education? So why not give back to these kids who didn't grow up with the same privileges I had?'

I was going to show my kids that no matter what happened with their parents, parole officers and other teachers, I wouldn't give up on them. I let them know it matters to me that you come to class, it matters to me that you try, it matters to me when you succeed.

Business students are very oriented to playing a role in the real world and accomplishing something, not training themselves to be scholars and contribute to the literature. Teaching in that kind of environment has focused me much more on the real world, how pieces of the theory I know can be applied to real-world situations.

This is a universal human dream - that brains, not brawn, will rule - and the fact that America has the world's finest institutions of higher education may be our greatest single national asset.

I knew that life itself was this journey, and I've always seen it as a kind of school in that we're meant to have fun, and we're meant to grow, and we're meant to evolve and learn to be better humans and how to love each other better and how to love ourselves and become a part of a community of love on this planet.

Education is important. And the difference of the zip code you grow up in or the zip code you are born in and how you turn out really isn't fair to the kids of our world.