Growing up, I heard a lot about strength. My dad - a Holocaust survivor - embodied it, though he would never say that about himself. Not only did he survive one of the most horrific events in history, but he never lost hope along the way, crediting acts of kindness with keeping him alive.

KIND had grown from a team of dedicated, overworked generalists to a large, professional organization with specialists who had either come in from outside or had been groomed internally to grow in a focused area about which they're passionate.

Big failures hold better lessons than any success - as long as you are in tune with yourself and are open to learning from them. I can trace every one of my accomplishments to earlier failures that I learned from.

Emotional intelligence is a very important skill set, not just to be happier but also to succeed professionally.

When I was first elected to the Colorado State Board of Education in 2000, we had to carry a big binder filled with hundreds of pages to every meeting. By 2004, the State Board had gone paperless. We even persuaded the less-tech-savvy members to use laptops to pull up their information during meetings.

As a master of graphic creation, as teacher, historian, and roving ambassador of comics, Jerry Robinson has ensured that future generations of talented kids will continue to imagine and then put marks on paper.

We binge on instant knowledge, but we are learning the hazards, and readers are warier than they used to be of nanosecond-interpretations of Supreme Court decisions.

The teacher crisis is something we are really worried about during the byelection in Mount Albert. I counted, across a month, seven teachers I identified just in my area who were all leaving - not the profession but Auckland.