I was the youngest of my entire family so you are tap-dancing to try to get the attention of your older cousins. I really hit my social stride in 6th grade but before that I was a pretty big dork. You learn how to be amusing and how to work for it.

I'm still very connected to my family to the world I grew up in. I understand what it means to be afraid that you can't pay a doctor's bill. Or to have to make the choice between buying a band uniform for a seventh-grader and making the insurance payment on time. That will never leave me. It was how I lived until I was well into my adult years.

The mysteries of faith are degraded if they are made into an object of affirmation and negation when in reality they should be an object of contemplation.

I failed first grade which is my biggest problem. You always feel like a failure like you're stupid.

Screaming at children over their grades especially to the point of the child's tears is child abuse pure and simple. It's not funny and it's not good parenting. It is a crushing scarring disastrous experience for the child. It isn't the least bit funny.

In the state of Wisconsin it's mandated that teachers in the social sciences and hard sciences have to start giving environmental education by the first grade through high school.

I feel that education needs an overhaul - courses are obsolete and grades are on the way out.

Many seventh graders I know in Illinois as well as around the Nation are studying the Constitution. I was pretty impressed with the quality of education our children are receiving because they had not expected me to ask them about it.

I'm sure everything has a bearing on what I'm doing. My family is a lower-middle-class family there's lots of children seven brothers two sisters grew up together fighting with each other went to school. My mother went to school up to 4th grade. My father went to school up to 8th grade. So that's about the education level we had in the family.

Whatever education I got was from experience and reading. But I also realize I wouldn't pass my friend's sixth-grade class.