Glass Half-Broken

 

PAVING THE WAY AND PAYING IT FORWARD

Michele Hooper

Michele Hooper grew up in a large family in small-town Pennsylvania, the studious child of a homemaker mother and a father who worked in the local coal mine. “I was the one with, as my dad would say, my face stuck in a book. I just loved reading and loved learning,” she recalls. “And I got that from my parents. My mother, while she was a housewife, was very creative—she cooked, she was a tailor, she painted. She was always very interested in education—in sixth grade I was selected to learn Russian. I recall going home each day teaching my mom the Russian-language lessons I had learned. And my Dad would quiz me about current events. He would come home from a swing shift and have me read ...