 Lily Eskelson-Garcia is president of the National Education Association. She sits on the board of the NEA Foundation and says one of her goals is to protect every student's civil rights against discrimination. In addition to her executive roles, she is a sixth grade teacher from Utah and is often known simply as Miss Lily. My kids couldn't say Eskelson, so I was Miss Lily and that made a lot of sense. She's also held the honored title of Lunch Lady, her first job out of high school. I liked working with kids just babysitting and so I thought I'll get a job at a daycare center and there were no openings. At a Head Start program they said, you know, we really only have one opening and it's in the kitchen. So for eight months I was Miss Lily the Lunch Lady and then they had an opening as a kindergarten aide and I got a job as a paraprofessional kindergarten aide and that kindergarten teacher when I was about 20 years old said, you're really good with kids. Have you ever thought about going to college? That was the first time in my life anyone had said the word college to me. I got married right out of high school, neither of my parents had gone to college. They were so excited that all their kids were going to graduate from high school that it was a very big deal to them when I said I'm going to go to college. When you went to college, did you know you wanted to be a teacher? There was no doubt in my mind I wanted to be a teacher. I wanted to be an elementary teacher. I had loved teaching the kids at the Head Start program and when I started teaching I was in a fourth grade class. I was there for ten years and then went to fifth grade, went to sixth grade. I have loved every school I've ever taught in. I've loved every grade level. When I became a full-time officer of the NEA, I had just come from the most amazing teaching experience I think it's possible to have. I taught in a one-room school. It was a public school in Utah located inside the family homeless shelter. There I met the angriest human being I have ever met in my life. Leo was eight years old in third grade and he hated everything. He hated living in the shelter. He hated his parents for embarrassing him for living in the shelter. He hated the teachers for making him pretend this was a real school. He hated the other kids and it was an insult to him to be in that classroom. That was the same year that my mother who's from Panama decided to nag all of her children to take Spanish lessons. She did not teach us Spanish but she said all teachers can learn. You can fix my mistake. I want you to take classes and I was taking classes at the night school because I love my mother. I'm sitting there at recess and I'm conjugating verbs and I hear Julio yell across the playground something in Spanish and I got the best teacher idea of my entire life and I said Julio, ven aquí te necesito ayudarme which I really hope means come over here and help me. In any case, he comes over and is like what? I said my mom's going to kill me. If I don't pass this class, you've got to help me do my homework. He sat next to me on the bench and he's listening to me pronounce words and he's going no, no and then he's looking at what I'm doing and that's not right. The other kids started saying what's going on and I said don't bother Julio. He's doing my homework and they were intrigued and they started going Julio, how do you say this? Julio, how do you say that? And he started teaching them. So I started calling him maestro teacher and I said maestro it's time to get in. Get the kids lined up. So he got the kids lined up. We get inside and I said maestro, I'm going to get the second graders on the computers. Can you read Hop on Pop to the kindergarteners? And he read Hop on Pop to the kindergarteners and by the end of the week he'd come in and he'd say okay I'm here and I'd say oh Buenos dias maestro. Can you do the flashcards with Chelsea? And he took the flashcards and he said man she can't do nothing without me. And he did the flashcards with Chelsea and I'm really, really a sneaky teacher. I said maestro you are such a good teacher. You need to go to college and you need to come back here and teach with me. And he just laughed and he said I ain't going to be no teacher. He said when I go to college I'm going to be a wrestler with the World Wrestling Federation. And it occurred to me, he said when? Hearing that word when I go to college was everything. He needed to believe in himself. It was my job to have him understand his skills, his gifts that were already in him. I don't ever get to know if any of those kids from the homeless shelter made it. I don't know if he went to college. And I get to know that I helped him take a little bit of a step into his future.