As someone who works with children in a very poor environment, you know, John Steinbeck used to write about the fact that his stories are about the gap between what the American dream is and where we're really at, and that gap.

My job is to open doors and close the gap.

There is no way a child growing up in poverty has the same opportunity as a child who has two wealthy parents who went to Stanford.

It's not equal, and America is supposed to be the land of equal opportunity. The role I have as a teacher is to level the playing field.

I don't begrudge the children who are born with good fortune - that's great, but I want my students to have the same opportunity.

And by understanding language well, it levels the playing field.

That's the key reason.

It's one of many reasons, but the real reason that my students get to the top schools - they are fabulous readers and they read all the time.

For them, reading is not a subject, it's something we do. One more thing about the way I teach reading, I don't give homework, we don't have projects.

When we read To Kill a Mockingbird, you don't have to go home and make a diorama of Boo Radley's house or do 50 pages of worksheets, which bore the kids to death.

That has nothing to do with reading.

Our reading is just reading - hours and hours and hours - and having a lot of fun. The role of a teacher is to make learning fun and to show the children the relevance of the reading to their own life.

That a great book, as I always tell the children, is not about the characters in the book, it's about you.

When Huck Finn goes down the river, it's not Huck's trip down the and the moral decisions you will have to make in figuring out who you are.

That's the teacher's role - connecting the work and making it relevant to the children's lives.