We didn't have money all the time to do laundry. A lot of the time, we didn't have soap or hot water. We were smart kids academically, but we'd go to school smelling.

People can do more than they ever believe they can do. Physically, mentally, academically. You have to be pushed. It hurts. But it's worth it, and it's a great thing.

I treaded water academically and spent much of my summertime as a camp counselor. It seemed a fun thing to do for a person in no way prepared to commit to a career path.

I wasn't very academically inclined, growing up as a child, and the only subject I was good at was English. I had a flair for it, since I came from a literary background.

Legacies, athletes, and favored racial minorities all receive preferential treatment from admissions committees to the exclusion of academically better-qualified students.

I thought I was gonna be an attorney, so I went to Dartmouth and I was a government major and I minored in environmental policy, and I didn't do anything academically around the arts.

I know that instructional time is a zero-sum game, but if we want kids to do well academically, it's hard to imagine that happening if they don't have some control over their attention.

There was a time in the mid-1950s when the Philippines was in the same league as Japan economically and academically. Fifty years down the road, and we are almost dead last in the ASEAN region.

Kids who don't play are not just at greater risk of falling behind academically, but also of becoming overweight or obese, failing to integrate socially, and even engaging in criminal activity.

I was pretty anti-academic, and I wasn't much of a student. I had a really short attention span and did not get a lot out of high school academically. I think college was a little the same way.

As a kid, I was overly studious, overly serious, very academically driven. It was important to me on a cellular level to do well. And then I went to college at Harvard, and I relaxed a little bit.

I started assisting music composers at 15 in an attempt to run away from studies. But my mom, hailing from a traditional, academically inclined south Indian family influence, made me complete my degree.

My father was a truck driver. That's where it all started, and academically I was a disaster at school. My cousin got his name on the honour board; I, at Melbourne High School, I carved mine on the desk.

The big shock of my life was Abstract Expressionism - Pollock, de Kooning, those guys. It changed my work. I was an academically trained student, and suddenly you could pour paint, smear it on, broom it on!

My sisters are very academically inclined so whenever they would fix me up, it would always be from someone in their world, people they would find attractive. When they came to the door in suits, it was over.

I found that, academically, it really didn't matter whether I had received a certain grade in a class; it didn't matter too much what schools I wanted to attend... What matters is one's drive, one's intelligence.

I had a quite unconventional childhood, in the sense that I traveled a lot and I went to 10 or 11 schools. I was completely confused academically, but wherever I went, I could paint. I painted an inordinate amount.

Sometimes you have to take a thing when it comes and be glad. I first began to feel this way in '57, when I started to get myself together musically, although at the time I was working academically and technically.

There was quite a lot of lying around in fields at Stonar, a small independent girls' school in the country near Bath. It was a non-selective school and the right environment for me: academically not particularly pushy.

When I was young, I was an academically oriented guy like most academically oriented guys. I graduated in science, did an MBA. My dreams as a young boy were I wanted to be an industrialist, or I wanted to be a scientist.

Singing is actually my favourite thing to do in the world - so when you don't consider yourself as talented at anything academically, and there is one thing you're good at, I think it's best to follow what you're good at.

I never felt I was quite the ticket academically. I always felt I had to put in an enormous amount of effort not to be disappointing. So I worked really hard, but at the time it suited me, because I didn't do very much else.

I was the kind of kid who couldn't really stop making up stories during class. I didn't do very well academically because I was always drawing these little doodles in the margins of my notebooks and I wasn't bringing home the best grades.

I wanted to play football all my life, and when I got accepted to Florida State, it was academically - it wasn't for any kind of scholarship. I kind of sat down and said, 'I'm not going to make it to the NFL. I'm not the size nor the skill.'

In the black sororities, they celebrate achievement academically, and they really do work toward community service. As much as the white sororities claim that's the case in their groups, it's not really so. White sororities focus on relationships.

There was a point when I was very young where I remember talking with my mom about going to drama school and this was maybe when I was 8, 9, 10 years old - and she knew that I was also academically very capable, and she steered me in another direction.

I'm worried about the future of America insofar as our academically most promising students are being funneled through the cookie-cutter Ivy League and other elite schools and emerging with this callow anti-American, anti-military cast to their thinking.

My brother was older, very bright. He went to university. I wasn't academically bright - maybe at first, when I was little, but it was lost. I started doing a drama workshop and got really into it, then I did a BTec in performing arts and started to work.

When you home study, you get a better education. I basically got to teach myself. Being naturally able to make my own opinions about the schoolwork I had to deal with, instead of being instructed under the tutelage of the teacher, was really nice academically.

Academically, I think things kicked off pretty late for me. I was kind of one of those kids who was in half honors, half regular. I was like a history/science kid, which was always weird. Around tenth grade or eleventh grade, everything started coming together.

I was always very academically focused when I was growing up, and music was something for which I really had no preconceptions or expectations for myself or really any rules. It kind of represented, at least for me, a divergent path of creativity and self-discovery.

I was never academically driven in English, but, again, Tom Waits is a perfect example of an influence. He writes so immaculately and paints so perfectly a world and the characters within it. There are writers like that who are my influences: vivid and gifted storytellers.

I also take pleasure in the so-called negative power in Grotjahn's work. That is, I love his paintings for what they are not. Unlike much art of the past decade, Grotjahn isn't simply working from a prescribed checklist of academically acceptable, curator-approved 'isms' and twists.

I was very academically inclined. But my inner life was in such turmoil. I'd go home and my home life was so miserable that it just felt like I was doing everything that I was supposed to do. I did all my chores, made really good grades, and I was excelling at school, but I wasn't happy.

In my early teens, I was working in a Wimpy Bar and delivering cab company cards to make cash. I also ran a tuck shop at school. I struggled academically because of being dyslexic. When I saw other families and what they had, it inspired me. I thought, 'I can get that, too, if I work hard.'

When I was at university in England, I went through a difficult phase. Outwardly everything seemed fine, and I was doing really well academically, but I was suffering from anxiety and frequent panic attacks and found it so difficult to reach out for help without people undermining my abilities.

I tell my kids all the time, 'I want you to be a great athlete, I want you to be great academically, I want you to achieve a lot of things, but mostly I want you to be a great person. If none of the other stuff happens and you're a great person, then I'm okay with anything else that happens in your life - that's the highest standard.'

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