There are a lot of polls that show that actually Americans have a pretty high opinion of teachers, that Americans think teachers are just about as prestigious as doctors. And yet there's this political conversation - this reform conversation - that paints a very negative picture of the effectiveness of the teaching population. So there's definitely a tension between the way teaching is talked about and understood at the political level and how everyday average Americans think about teachers.
It's was all the internet. I started writing songs in high school, right about the time of the onset of Napster. I went to college in Dallas, and when I'd get back from class I'd have fans emailing me from different areas of the country asking when the album was going to be out and when I was going on tour. It was crazy, because I didn't even consider myself a professional musician.