When you're teaching kids to write, you're teaching them to think. Writing is the window through which all thinking starts.

It was wonderful. The kids were a little bit shier than they are normally. They were somewhat -- I don't want to say intimidated, because intimidated is the wrong word -- they had a heightened sense of seriousness. Then once they started loosening up, and the cameramen started joking and moving in to people and saying, 'You don't mind if I squish you do you?' then everything kind of lightened up.