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I had to get good grades and do well in school - my mother was an assistant principal and my father was a teacher - and they took this very seriously.

I was a good student. My mom is a teacher, and her side of the family is all teachers. She put a big emphasis on getting good grades.

In high school I was president of the Student Council, and I ended up doing a lot of speeches. After you do a few in front of different schools, you get really comfortable talking in front of an audience.

At 16, when I was at Henry M. Gunn High School, I had a crush on the English teacher, and my grades improved dramatically. This great school had only 400 students, mostly children of Stanford professors, and it was more usual to have classes under one of the oak trees dotted around the campus than in the classroom.

Lately I've been going to all these high schools talking to the students, answering their questions, listening to what they have to say. It has been an incredible journey to be around them and try to give them what my mother gave me.

I attended a very small junior high and specially in the end that became a disaster. The principal was pretty senile and a drunk, so the children more or less runned the school.

I obtained eight years of elementary education in a two-room school, where I encountered a stern but engaging teacher who awakened my intellect with instruction that would seem rigorous today in many colleges. History figured large in the curriculum, exciting for me what was to become an enduring interest.

Grades were important in our house. I was reading by two. My mom would sit there and read with me, read with me, read with me. It was wonderful.