“If you are giving a graduate course you don't try to impress the stude...” — Noam Chomsky Quote

“If you are giving a graduate course you don't try to impress the students with oratory, you try to challenge them, get them to question you.”

“There are still thousands of people dying every year in Laos, mostly children and farmers, from unexploded anti-personnel ordnance that the U.S. simply saturated much of the land with, especially in the Plain of Jars. There actually is a British engineering team trying to remove some of these things, which are much worse than land mines.”

“Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.”

“Everyone knows that when you look at a television ad, you do not expect to get information. You expect to see delusion and imagery.”

“In 1961, the United States began chemical warfare in Vietnam, South Vietnam, chemical warfare to destroy crops and livestock. That went on for seven years. The level of poison - they used the most extreme carcinogen known: dioxin. And this went on for years.”

“No matter what engineering field you're in, you learn the same basic science and mathematics. And then maybe you learn a little bit about how to apply it.”

“Usually, girls weren't encouraged to go to college and major in math and science. My high school calculus teacher, Ms. Paz Jensen, made math appealing and motivated me to continue studying it in college.”

“In high school, a teacher once suggested that I be a math major in college. I thought, 'Me? You've got to be joking!' I mean, in junior high, I used to come home and cry because I was so afraid of my math homework. Seriously, I was terrified of math.”

“I'd have to say I'm most proud of my mentoring camp that I do in Dallas every year for one hundred boys from single-parent homes. I was raised by a mother who was a Sunday school teacher and a father who worked hard. Together they taught me to give back.”

“Data adds concrete information to a teacher's observations and intuition, but it will never replace experience, personal relationships, and cultural understanding.”

“If you lock me in the room with a piano teacher for a year I might be able to knock out a rendition of 'Roll Out The Barrel,' but will I ever be a concert pianist? No.”