Thanks for your recent article on Paula Fraser. She was truly an inspiration to me.

When I came to Paula’s class in fifth grade from another school, I came from regular-level courses, having never been in a gifted program before. I was used to easy answers, and when something didn’t come to me right away, I wanted to give up. Paula held all her students to a very high standard, though, so giving up was not an option.

It was just one stage in the learning process. Before I knew it, I was, for the first time, engaged in in-depth, long-term projects on issues like global warming (and this in 1992), where I was charged with not only looking at what others had to say on the issue, but also generating my own innovative solutions. There’s no doubt in my mind that Paula’s classroom leadership in asking us to engage constructively as citizens has led me to become a social entrepreneur – engaged in solving educational inequities – today. But Paula’s classroom was not just a laboratory to think about how society could be different and how students could act as change agents, it was also a place where she helped us to acquire a variety of tools that would help us along the one.

To this day, when I come across a word I don’t know, I often think back to Paula’s etymology lessons. Paula laid the groundwork for all the math skills I learned in subsequent grades – skills which helped me earn a grade of summa cum laude on my analytical college thesis called “Our Latest Generation: The Civic Greatness of Young Americans.” I’ve been working for the past several years on ensuring equal opportunities for students to learn at high levels (the type of learning we did in Paula’s class), regardless of race and income. The quantitative skills, the innovative thinking, the sense of social justice, and the follow-through on big projects that were all important parts of Paula’s class still drive me forward today. Even now, I often reference the copy of To Kill a Mockingbird that she gave me when she came to my high school graduation celebration. Atticus Finch – and the teacher who brought him and so much more into my life – are heroes in a world where heroes are sometimes hard to find.

Reid Saaris, Bellevue