I learned to drop the mask. I went into the classroom as — my only models were Irish school masters and I thought I’d go in there and I’d roar at the kids in McKee Vocational High School the way the masters roared at us. It didn’t work. “Yo, teach, why you talking like that?” And they were talking to me. I’m the school master, “Yo, teach,” and I had to stop this. I had to find some other way of dealing with the kids, of running the classes, and I found eventually the only way to deal with them was to be honest, to just try to get to them. I didn’t know how. I found it very difficult to even deal with people on a one to one basis because we put up so many defenses when we were kids. And we were so angry all the time that even in the one-to-one situation in New York, if somebody disagreed with me, it got my Irish up so to speak, and I’d get angry. I couldn’t realize that this is a person who just wanted to discuss something. I thought they were opposing me and that would lead to fisticuffs. “Would you like to step outside?” So it took me a long, long time to get over that. And it was only through the teaching I learned to put this anger aside and not to take it personally when the kids would erupt. You know, when you have 150 or 170 high school kids every day there will be eruptions, and they get angry and they direct it at the teacher, but it’s not at the teacher. It’s something they brought from home. You know, you can get all psychological about this, but I learned not to take it personally. I learned not to be quite impassive over it, but to understand what was happening in the classroom. That was the beginning of my education.