Voices that Inspire

What inspires you from WFSU Public Media? Here's this week's Voices That Inspire. My name is Jean Peppie. I am the coordinator for K-12 reading for curriculum and instruction here in Leon County Schools. My grandmother was an educator and she was one of my early teachers. She taught me that these weird symbols that we created were called letters and they had sounds associated with them and you can put those sounds and letters together to make words and then sentences and you can communicate in written text that way and you can get into these wonderful worlds by reading and some of my great memories I have are about sitting on the floor of our little kitchen area that we had reading books while my mother was cooking and she would ask me questions every now and then about what I was reading. And so reading for me was not just about the act itself but was also about making connections and community with others. And that's what we do when we are working with our students. We know that listening, speaking, reading and writing is not just about the acts themselves. It's about how we start building community with each other, understanding that I can see myself in other places beyond my own space but then I can also build empathy and understand that there's other people out there that have very different perspectives than I do. And when we as young people and the adults who are teaching them this, they learn perspective and they learn empathy and they learn those critical thinking skills, all of that builds through into their adulthood. My name is Jean Pepe and the coordinator for reading curriculum and instruction here in Leon County Schools. You're listening to voices that inspire.