When I was a teacher teachers would come into my classroom and admire my desk on which lay nothing whatever whereas theirs were heaped with papers and books.

It's the teacher that makes the difference not the classroom.

I was attending the University of Alberta. I was going to be a high school teacher like my parents. I failed - no I didn't fail a class I just barely passed. I really didn't try. It was Canadian history through the plays of the time. My God those were boring plays.

I got picked on a lot even by teachers too. I liked to listen to musicals and bake and my homeroom teacher found out and mocked me in front of the whole class for baking.

I think it goes back to my high school days. In computer class the first assignment was to write a program to print the first 100 Fibonacci numbers. Instead I wrote a program that would steal passwords of students. My teacher gave me an A.

Discussion in class which means letting twenty young blockheads and two cocky neurotics discuss something that neither their teacher nor they know.

I feel sympathy for the working class lad. I've always championed about ticket prices and try to equate that to people's salaries.

For globalization to work for America it must work for working people. We should measure the success of our economy by the breadth of our middle class and the scope of opportunity offered to the poorest child to climb into that middle class.

I think the success of democracy is not really police security it's the presence of a broad middle class. The stronger the middle class of a people is the less you have to worry about one group coming in and exploiting the democratic process for its own ends.

The historical basis for the gap between the black middle class and underclass shows that ending discrimination by itself would not eradicate black poverty and dysfunction. We also need intervention to promulgate a middle-class ethic of success among the poor while expanding opportunities for economic betterment.