America isn’t perfect but there’s not a better place in the world for people of any faith.
Some people have a heart to do evil and they don’t care if you’re Muslim or Christian.
The task of teaching has never been more complex and the expectations that burden teachers are carried out in antiquated systems that offer little support—and yet, teachers are finding success every day.
As long as you know ‘to let’ means to rent and not a place to pee, you’re all set to travel in the UK. The lifts and the boots and everything else don’t really matter.
The Delta agent saw my itinerary and said, ‘You’re flying to Jakarta via Atlanta, Frankfurt, Amsterdam, Bangkok and Kuala Lumpur? You must have really pissed off your travel agent.
I’d see the arrow. I’d think about attitude and perception. Maybe the green arrow on the ceiling is to Muslims as the KJV in the Motel 6 nightstand is to Christians.
God does not care where you pray. He only cares what is in your heart.
Educators are in the news, too. Usually that’s bad. I had a favorite college professor. He used to tell us, ‘If you make CNN as a teacher, you’re probably going to jail.
The only thing worse than losing hope is to be the reason someone else loses hope.
An individual school can handle a resident idiot from time to time, but an entire school system is only as good as its weakest leader.
Farid asked, ‘Do American teachers care about every student?’I thought about a humanities teacher I’d worked with in Korea and more recently a science teacher I’d worked with in Germany. I said, ‘I think most schools have a resident idiot.
It feels like last week, but in fact we’re now closing in on five thousand days at war. I always picture Sami as a nine-year-old soccer stud … and yet there are soldiers in Afghanistan today who were in fourth grade on 9/11.
I’m clinging to one last thought: pain is the harbinger of hope. You have to be alive to feel pain. If you are alive, then you have purpose. If you have purpose, then you have hope.
In total this journey will take five flights and fifty-five hours, but in reality it began four decades and two generations ago when my uncle died in Vietnam.
I felt so much pride, so much love. You get a handful of days like this in a lifetime. Take in every minute. They’ll be over soon enough, and you never know what tomorrow will bring.
I have this thought, it’s horrible, and it makes me sick, but it’s true: one day these students will grow up and have their own kids, and they’re going to name them for men and women who will die in this war.
The meeting began well, meaning it had the potential for being short.
The service members who defend our way of life ask very little in return, but they deserve teachers who will be as relentless in teaching their children as the military is in protecting our interests at home and abroad.
Military life is hard, even cruel—especially for the kids.
We all lose people. We all have to live in the aftermath. It’s how we move forward that counts, but sometimes we are tethered to something in our past that won’t let us move forward.
If I can be perfectly blunt, his humanities teacher was an ass.
This is who I was, before I was dead. When I cared, when I was relentless.
We could never go back to how things were on the day before 9/11, but maybe I could go back to who I was.
I stood with my mom in the cemetery. She felt terrible pain. My grandmother is with God. My mom has to continue living. It’s not so easy, moving forward.
There are more good people than bad people, and overall there’s more that’s good in the world than there is that’s bad. We just need to hear about it, we just need to see it.
For your own security it’s imperative you blend in with the native population.
It felt like we were reliving the first day of the school year, when students and teachers do the get-to-know-you dance—teachers tell students something about who they are, students pretend to care, and then vice-versa.
My dad once told me that his biggest challenge after returning from Vietnam had been coming to terms with his own callousness. He’d made a deal with the war and traded his humanity for a ticket home.