Let a man live with God, not afraid to talk with him. Let him study God's plans and methods, as one of Michelangelo's pupils might study his.
The stories my pupils told me were astonishing. One told how he had witnessed his cousin being shot in the back five times; another how his parents had died of AIDS. Another said that he'd probably been to more funerals than parties in his young life. For me - someone who had had an idyllic, happy childhood - this was staggering.
We do recognise the need to move towards the publication of information showing the progress made by pupils from one stage of their education to another.
We need quantitative assessments of the success of education. We need certification and qualifications both for teachers and for pupils. It is not a choice between quantity and quality, between access and excellence. Both of these will happen together if people really do believe in the importance of education to change lives.
Don't say I was an inspirational teacher - my former pupils would laugh their heads off. I was grossly incompetent, but I hope I didn't do the children a disservice.
I was a drama teacher, so I had the opportunity to show off in front of a captive audience. I essentially did 13 years of stand-up. Whether my pupils would agree that I was remotely interesting or not is another question.
I don't know a single conservative donor who is not fervently trying to improve urban schools or provide scholarships in order to liberate pupils from that educational wasteland.
I have played a mentally challenged person, a quadriplegic - but blind, I realised, is the most difficult because eyes are the most involuntary muscles in our body. Like, our pupils and their dilations are involuntary.
One school invited me down, as two pupils had come out, and the headmaster didn't know what to do about it. I said, 'How many students here are gay?' and he said, 'Just these two.' Clearly not. 'How many gay members of staff have you got?' He had no idea. And this was a concerned man.
I get an awful lot of people coming up and saying they went to school with me. There must have been 80,000 pupils at that school!
