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Growing up as a young black girl in Potomac, Maryland was easy. I had a Rainbow Coalition of friends of all ethnicities, and we would carelessly skip around our elementary school like the powerless version of Captain Planet's Planeteers.

A good school teaches you resilience - that ability to bounce back.

That difficult start drove me on to inspire children and let them know that it is never to late to repair a bad experience at school, and once you get your head down and start to read books, you can really achieve.

Hoping to instill my love of learning in other children, I taught my first class at a local elementary school the year my first book, 'Flying Fingers,' debuted; since then, I have spoken at hundreds of schools, classrooms and conferences around the world.

I went to elementary school in Ottawa, and then to a private secondary school.

I grew up a middle class, colonized child of teachers and librarians and people, women especially, who treasured education.

I went to big, broken, under-resourced public schools, but we had a real sense of community, because those were days in the '50s and the '60s when every child was under the jurisdiction of every single adult on the block.

I went to 11 different schools. It was a fantastic adventure, but I was incredibly sensitive and needed a bit more stability.

When I was six or seven, we went to the nearest English primary school, St Weonards, about seven miles away. The teaching was good, and this was the start of my beginning to shine as a student.