“I've never stopped wanting to make sure that my students graduated college (….) It helped me, as an immigrant—I wasn't born in this country (…)—to tell that to another immigrant kid. ‘Listen, this is not my first language, but here I am teaching an English Composition class. It just shows the power of education.’ I used to be, ‘I'm going to be a journalist and I'm going to win a Pulitzer Prize and I'm going to change the world.’ You change the world one person at a time, one action at a time, one mind at a time. And that revolutionary thing that I had about changing the world—I understood that within each of my students there's this little revolution. There's this little opportunity—that is a huge opportunity, really—to just shift their lives in a certain way. And that I could do that through giving them the power of writing and reading. Because that's what happened to me. All the doors that have opened to me have been because of my ability to write and my ability to think critically.”
“And so my practices all hinge on me looking at my students and figuring out, ‘Okay—What can I give you or teach you to make you a successful individual in this world, in this society?’ And it's not just being able to read and write. (…) I was doing SEL back in 2016, when no one was really paying attention to it, because I realized, ‘I can't just teach you how to write a really good research paper—I need to teach you how to navigate this world as a person of color in other discourses that are not your home discourse. I can get down with you with that, but I need to empower you in that way.’”