Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I want to talk about my very first play, when I was in eighth grade. One day, my English teacher, Mrs. Baker, announced that we were going to read 'On Borrowed Time' out loud in class. I was a mediocre student; I was terrified that she was going to call on me, so I hid my head.
In many ways, 'What Teachers Make: In Praise of the Greatest Job in the World' is just one big thank-you note to my teachers. The book is dedicated to my fifth and sixth grade English teacher, Dr. Joseph D'Angelo, a massive force of erudition, martial artistry, culture, and love.
When I was 16, I played Macbeth at school and my English teacher said, 'I think you may have acting talent. Try to get into the National Youth Theatre of Great Britain and see where you get.' I wouldn't have thought of that at all. I wanted to be a surgeon, but I wasn't a clever man.
I wanted to be an English teacher. I wanted to do it for the corduroy jackets with patches on the side. When I got to college, as I was walking across campus one day, I ripped off a little flyer for this sketch-comedy group. It ended up being one of the greatest things I've ever done.
One of the things I've always liked about my husband is he's very good at lots of stuff. He was an English teacher when I met him. He wrote poetry and played the guitar. As time went on, he decided to go into economics, so he's very analytical and mathematical in addition to his artsy side.
My mother had been an English teacher in India before she came to the U.K., and she taught me to read early on - not only in English, but in Hindi, too. My teachers didn't like the fact that I was reading more quickly than they were teaching, and as a consequence, I would sometimes get bored in class.
When I was a child I used to read books by Gerald Durrell, who founded Jersey Zoo. He had a job collecting animals for zoos and for a long time that is what I wanted to do. Later when I was a teenager I had a fantastic English teacher called Mrs. Stafford. Her enthusiasm made me decide to be a writer.
My high school English teacher in junior year, Dr. Robert Parsons, assigned us some Poe stories, including 'The Black Cat' and 'The Purloined Letter.' Being an animal person, I had trouble with 'The Black Cat!' I got hooked instead by 'The Purloined Letter,' a Poe story with detective C. Auguste Dupin.
I flunked my exam for university two times before I was accepted by what was considered my city's worst university, Hangzhou Teachers University. I was studying to be a high school English teacher. In my university, I was elected student chairman and later became chairman of the city's Students Federation.
By junior high, I was a horrible student. But during my sophomore year of high school, I did have a fabulous English teacher, and I would go to school just for her class and then skip out afterwards. That's actually when I started writing, although I didn't think of it then as something I might someday do.
I was writing full time after quitting a job as a high school English teacher, and I hadn't been able to sell anything, and my bank account was down to zero, and all of my friends were like 'What are you doing in the basement, when are you going to get a real job?', and my parents thought I'd completely lost it.
At 16, when I was at Henry M. Gunn High School, I had a crush on the English teacher, and my grades improved dramatically. This great school had only 400 students, mostly children of Stanford professors, and it was more usual to have classes under one of the oak trees dotted around the campus than in the classroom.
I became a poet in Pittsburgh. When I lived in the South, I was a basketball player and primarily a jock. An English teacher essentially suggested that I send the poems that I'd been writing - really just for him - to a few programs, so that when I wound up in Pittsburgh, it's where I figured out that I could actually be a poet.
When I was 12 I worked with someone - it was actually an English teacher at my school, John Woodward. He was the only teacher in the school to have a top-of-the-range Porsche and all the trappings of success, so it was very interesting for me to find out how he did it. He was probably the wealthiest English teacher in the community.
Quite honestly I never had a desire to be an actor. I tell people, I did not choose acting; acting chose me. I never grew up wanting to be an actor. I wanted to play football. In about 9th grade an English teacher told me I had a talent to act. He said I should audition for a performing arts high school so I did on a whim. I got accepted.
I didn't want to be the archetypal sponging brother-in-law, so I didn't go into acting when I got to the States. I thought, 'No, I'll go to school and then I'll be an English teacher; that'll be fun.' But I was horrible as a teacher. As hard as I tried, I just couldn't inspire those kids to take an interest in Milton and Shakespeare and Donne.