Dan Buller

“To an ESL student, every class is an English class.”
― Fei-Fei Li, The Worlds I See: Curiosity, Exploration, and Discovery at the Dawn of AI

“I was in a hurry to regain even a fraction of the scholastic footing I enjoyed in China, but language was a barrier that obstructed me at every turn. Frustration rose as I trudged through each assignment at an excruciating pace, rarely making it to the end of a sentence without having to appeal to a dictionary.”
― Fei-Fei Li, The Worlds I See: Curiosity, Exploration, and Discovery at the Dawn of AI

“For a Chinese student raised in the schools of Chengdu, my first days at Parsippany High School were an assault on the senses. The mood was manic and unsteady, and everything around me was brighter, faster, heavier, and noisier than the world I left behind. Nothing quite registered, no matter where I looked, as if the very nature of light and sound were somehow different here.”
― Fei-Fei Li, The Worlds I See: Curiosity, Exploration, and Discovery at the Dawn of AI

“Ironically, being an ESL student made it easy for me to speak up. I continued to need so many words and English-language concepts explained that isolated questions became an ongoing dialogue. The more we spoke, the more I realized that he wasn’t anything like the teacher I’d overheard dismissing the intellectual capabilities of girls back in China, or the discouraging restaurant boss who’d all but mocked my love for reading. He could be terse and abrasive, but he never wrote me off the way others had. He was challenging me, and it was working.”
― Fei-Fei Li, The Worlds I See: Curiosity, Exploration, and Discovery at the Dawn of AI