Quotations

«We will have a plan as to what we will do differently. We're changing the culture of school,»

«It was horribly frustrating.»

«Dying To Tell The Story»

«My job is the perfect excuse for watching action films, soaps, quiz programmes -- where the language is busy right now.»

«a scene from hell.»

«There are vehicles lying around, bodies lying around, and there are bits of bodies around me,»

«I was very pleased with it, ... There are always little glitches, but I thought it all went smoothly, for the most part.»

«[N orfolk, VA.--It's hard to tell exactly when the Norfolk Public Schools hit rock bottom, but 1998 was particularly dismal across the board: Just 38 percent of third graders passed the state's Standards of Learning, or SOL, test in English; 26 percent of eighth graders were proficient in mathematics; and a mere 18 percent of high schoolers passed Virginia and U.S. history. For John Simpson, who took over as superintendent that same year with a mandate to boost achievement for all of the district's 37,000 students, the only solution was to completely shake things up.] When I arrived, people were unhappy, but many of them had the attitude that given a fairly poor and high-minority population, that might be all that they could do, ... There was no room for excuses anymore.»

«When people blame words they are actually blaming the society that uses them. Dictionaries just reflect the words that society uses.»

«You've discriminated, in effect, against political speech, which is the speech most protected in our (First) Amendment.»