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I was accorded the opportunity to learn by failing - albeit at the cost of a few honourable teachers' sanity - and now I realise what a rare and incredible luxury that is.

I think in every lesson there's a blessing, and there's so many blessings from all the lessons I've had to go through in life.

I learned compassion from being discriminated against. Everything bad that's ever happened to me has taught me compassion.

I learned early about the misery and dangers of life, and about the afterlife, about the external punishment which awaited the children of sin in Hell.

The most valuable aid I have found in teaching is to remember my own experiences as a student.

One of the reasons I wanted to teach deaf children was because it made me very sad that they spoke so clumsily and that they moved with less grace that I knew was possible of deaf people.

As a medical doctor, I have known the face of adversity. I have seen much of death and dying, suffering and sorrow. I also remember the plight of students overwhelmed by their studies and of those striving to learn a foreign language. And I recall the fatigue and frustration felt by young parents with children in need.

Talking through troubles, staying calm in the face of adversity, that's what my father taught me. It's an invaluable lesson because there's no shortage of adversity and mistakes to be dealt with.

My old man taught me a lot of stuff in his death that I don't even know if he would have been able to teach me had he been alive. And that was to never do stuff that can jeopardize the people you love and hurt them.

The biggest lessons I've learned in life have probably come from a bad situation, from an angry situation, even if I wasn't the one who was angry.