I went to visit my Animo teamwork kids at their school for the first time this week and it was startling to see the differences between Animo Inglewood and the schools I went to growing up. Aside from Montessori, I attended public schools all the way through ninth grade. After that, my parents got fed up and went into debt sending me to a small private school that was geared towards artistically inclined kids.

I didn’t want to change schools, was horrified at the thought of having to start at the bottom of another social hierarchy when I had just made it through my first year of high school. I grew up in Atlanta, Georgia and the schools there were pretty much what you’d expect from any public school system in any major American city. They were massive, windowless and under-staffed institutions. If you wanted to get ahead or if you had a special talent, there was no one to help you blossom.

Therefore, most kids, myself included, just skated by, doing the least amount of work required in order to keep everyone happy. And even though it was the cool thing to do, I always found it frustrating that I had to do so little to maintain a decent GPA. I still remember the defining moment when I realized that something was amiss with my education.

I’d always been a voracious reader, driving my mother insane by finishing a stack of library books, meant to last a week, in only a couple of days. By the time I was in ninth grade, I had already progressed far outside my parents’ realm of reading, the two of them never really being book-loving people. I remember my mother seeming relieved when, the summer before 9th grade on trip to visit my grandmother, my cousin Jessica, who was majoring in Literature at Brown University, wrote out a list of poets I might like.

I had shown Jessica a bunch of poems I had been working on – you know the sort: I seem to live in a tortured hell / if I go on like this I will never be well. I’m still grateful (and amazed) that she sat through them so patiently and I still have the journal in which she scribbled the names Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. Even more, I still remember the day when I begged my mother to purchase the two slim volumes, Plath’s Ariel and Sexton’s Love Poems. I read these two books relentlessly, a whole new world of words opening up to me each time I turned the pages, and I carried them with me wherever I went.

I always had them in my backpack at school and when I’d read ahead of the teacher or if I’d finished an assignment early, I’d pull one out and read covertly under my desk. I’ll never forget the day when, in an English class, a loud-mouthed boy named Phil Larson, ratted me out to the teacher. He snatched the book away from me and held it up for all to see, the page randomly opened to Sexton’s The Ballad of the Lonely Masturbator. I was mortified and looked to Mrs. Hall to rectify the situation, expecting her to take my side. Well, she said instead, seemingly never having heard of Anne Sexton, that’s certainly not the kind of reading we do in this class. The kids around me exploded in laughter and Phil reigned supreme. I never brought those books to school with me again.

The next year I found myself in a new school where my kind of extra-curricular reading was highly encouraged, if not expected. I ended up under the tutelage of an amazing English teacher who did everything she could to push me towards the writing career I now have and I am still grateful to her. That said, I’m more than thrilled to be working with Animo Inglewood, a public school that so closely resembles the kind of school I had to pay to go to. The combination of 826LA and Animo, makes sure that kids aren’t just doing what they need to get by and I can’t think of anything better than that.