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I am first and foremost a parent. I have six children, four children and two stepchildren
at various levels of the school system ranging in age from 7 to 30. They’ve all presented
different profiles of kinds of children and kinds of learners as they’ve moved through
the system. Their experience has always made me smarter and wiser and more understanding
as an educational policy maker following them. I have with all the children always gone into
their schools and read to the children because I think that it’s important that they see
parents and community leaders who think reading is important enough and more importantly think
engagement with the school is important enough and think the imagination is important enough
because I don’t just read when I go in. I typically read two or three of our favorite
stories and then I ask the students to work with me on constructing a story. How do you
make a story? I used to be an English teacher so we talk about, okay, let’s think of some
characters and let’s think of a setting and let’s think of a plot. Now, let’s
link these all together and how would we build a story if we were authors ourselves and use
imagination. I think challenging students to use their imagination in this way is an
important part of the work of teaching. Since my work has an impact on a lot of teachers,
it is really important for me to be in the schools and to be in the act of teaching as
frequently as possible just to keep me honest as a policy maker.