I played football first. I love football. I'm a die-hard Broncos fan. I loved football, but in the offseason, I started playing basketball, and I just fell in love with the game. I've been playing basketball ever since 5th grade.

It wasn't really until the 10th or 11th grade when I started to play well, and football took the place of baseball, which was my love when I was five years old. I don't know what happened; baseball just got boring to me, I guess.

I really wanted to be a cartoonist, and I was in 4th or 5th grade and I would bring my drawings in, and I'd look around, and everyone could draw better than me. Everyone. My drawings were just awful. So that's why I had to write.

Accolades and lists may tell us about accomplishments, but life is meant to be experienced, not just accomplished. It's like the difference between reading books for the sake of reading and reading books just to get a good grade.

My first performance was in second grade with my friend Rodney Fisher, and we worked up versions of 'Long Tall Texan' and 'I Want to Hold Your Hand.' It gave me a little early confidence that I could actually do this music thing.

As we all know, when you're an athlete things are a little bit easier for you. It didn't mean that what was going on inside my heart wasn't a bit of a thunderstorm, but outwardly I got along ok. I was really shy in seventh grade.

I used to be the class clown. I was the funny kid. That's why it was so hard for people to understand that I rap, because for a long time, they didn't take me seriously for who I was. By, like, eighth grade, I was really rapping.

I grew up singing and dancing, so people have been calling me gay since fifth grade. I've heard everything you could possibly hear about it. But I do love gay people, so I'm not going to act like I was insulted or angry about it.

I was a Russian dancer in my elementary school production of 'Fiddler on the Roof' when I was in third grade or fourth grade. I was one of the younger kids accepted into the play, and the plays were pretty impressive, let me say.

The first music I ever got into was the '80s alternative bands that my brother listened to, like The Cure and The Smiths and R.E.M. and Fugazi. I can remember specifically saying The Cure was my favorite band back in second grade.

I constantly peed in my pants up until the 8th grade and wore an extra-large sailor uniform from kindergarten to 8th grade because my mom was scared I'd grow out of it. So I learned to make fun of myself at school and summer camp.

We tried our best to work with the school and with the other families in the school system, and we did a gradual transition. I started transitioning when I was in first grade, and every year we kind of tacked a new thing on to it.

I skipped ninth grade. I went from eighth to tenth, and then I graduated a year early to start working, and it was a big blessing for me because I was not a school person, although I really do miss having that kind of environment.

I've actually become much, much dumber through being married and having these children. I find that I'm not half as sharp that I once was. I can't even help them with their 4th and 5th grade vocabulary and math work at this point.

My father was Catholic, and my mother wanted me to go to Catholic school. That's what I did in first grade. But she couldn't afford the payments. I think it must have hurt her a lot, not to be able to give me a Catholic education.

Of every movie that I've seen multiple times, of every TV show that I was obsessed with, I don't think I was ever obsessed with anything more than 'Flowers in the Attic,' which I read 13 times between fourth grade and senior year.

I was always falling in love at a very young age - kindergarten is when I can remember. There was always a crush. And when I was in sixth grade, I started picking up guitar, so I started wanting to write about it and sing about it.

Most people give Kennedy a passing grade, a good grade on the Cuban Missile Crisis handling, but what they don't realize, if he had had strength, if he had showed strength before, there would never have been a Cuban Missile Crisis.

Honestly, I never really thought I'd be a comedian. But I did take an aptitude test in seventh grade - and this is 100 percent true - I took an aptitude test in seventh grade, and it said in my best profession was a clown or a mime.

When I was little, my older brother, Gary, was forced to read a book a week in fourth grade. The books he liked he threw on my bed when he was finished with them. This continued throughout my childhood and made me a reader for life.

I started writing in fourth grade and never stopped. I faked my way through high school and nearly was flushed from college - I still can't pay attention - and then had a series of day jobs. But always, continuously, I have written.

Growing up, my two favorite books were Woody Allen's 'Side Effects' and Phyllis Diller's 'Housekeeping Hints.' I carried that Phyllis Diller book with me everywhere when I was in fifth or sixth grade. Eventually, it just fell apart.

When I was in grade school in L.A., I really loved Cyndi Lauper. I did everything I could to look like her. I had wild outfits and always wore different coloured socks. I wore loads of ribbons in my hair and let them fall in my eyes.

There was a long stint during my childhood after I gave up on being a pro football player - we're talking sixth grade here - that I strongly considered a future writing and drawing comic books. I have been making stuff up ever since.

When I was little, we moved around a lot, actually. In second grade, I think I went to three different schools. We were in Nevada and Oregon and as well as a few different places in Nebraska. I did go to high school in the same town.

In the immediate aftermath of the hurricane, I sent a letter to EPA Administrator Stephen L Johnson urging him to waive regulations to allow for the early sale of winter grade fuel to help with gasoline shortages and gasoline prices.

When I was in the first grade I was afraid of the teacher and had a miserable time in the reading circle, a difficulty that was overcome by the loving patience of my second grade teacher. Even though I could read, I refused to do so.

For kids in 2nd or 3rd grade, I would recommend the 'Dear America' series. Most of the stories in the 'Dear America' series, if they have black girls, are about them being enslaved, but they escape or do something really adventurous.

Now my son Travis wants to finish all of his schooling online and be a full-time actor. I said, 'Hey, it's not all riding bicycles and egging cars and houses. Why don't you go finish the seventh grade, and we'll talk about it later.'

My 10th grade year I was 6-foot-4 and I grew to like 6-foot-7, but I still had my guard skills. I was playing point guard, I was a big guard. People started calling me 'Penny Hardaway' - comparing me to him because I was a big guard.

One of my first interviews was Keira Knightley, Orlando Bloom, and Johnny Depp for 'Pirates of the Caribbean.' I was in eighth grade at the time, little teenybopper. I was so, so nervous. I just remember Johnny had an aura around him.

I didn't really start going to see a lot of musicals and live theater probably until I was in seventh or eighth grade, maybe my first year of high school, and by that time I'd probably seen 'Grease' twice a year every year of my life.

When I was in third grade, I would run home - literally run home from school - and if I could make it in time, I could get home and the put the TV on in time to catch the answering machine message at the start of 'The Rockford Files.'

I was in the seventh grade when I first began to identify as trans and express my gender identity as a girl. My social transition began with growing my hair and wearing clothes and makeup that made me feel like Destiny's Fourth Child.

I had just started ninth grade when I got my acne. And I had braces. I wouldn't look people in the eye. It was not a good time for me - it just killed my self-esteem. I thought when I didn't look at someone, they couldn't see my face.

I distinctly remember being very young, sixth grade maybe, and being at a party and hearing the mothers discuss the children. And the mothers said, 'Well, it's very clear who's the leader in the group.' And they were talking about me!

I think the first Broadway show that I saw was 'Beauty and the Beast,' and that was in 5th or 6th grade. Our school would take bus trips up to see shows, and so it was on one of their bus trips that I got to see 'Beauty and the Beast.'

My grade 3 teacher put on a kids' Christmas concert, and I played the kazoo, so my mother bought me a trumpet. I took lessons for eight years, was in the Kitsilano Boys Band, and I played in the Vancouver Junior Symphony for two years.

Growing up, of course I was the coolest girl in the 3rd grade because I told everyone that my dad was a wrestler, and I would bring in these wrestling magazines of him, and every Saturday morning, he would be body slamming me on my bed.

The OBE, CBE and MBE are among the ways Britain honours its citizens for their contribution to national life. I wish we had agreed on a different form of words, but we haven't and the decision to change the system is above my pay grade.

I stopped going to school in the middle of fourth grade. Everyone grows up with the peer pressure, and kids being mean to each other in school. I think that's such a horrible thing, but I never really dealt with it in a high school way.

In sixth grade I had a band called The Blueberry Waterfall. I had borrowed a guy's Fender Jaguar and Boss Tone Fuzz, which you plugged straight into a Blackface Twin. It was a little power trio - we were actually pretty good for our age.

I'm a great believer that the most important years are the sort of early years but the preschool years and then into the first and second grades. If you get a good base in the first and second grade and you can read, you can do anything.

I think that being read to every night is the reason why I was plowing through volume after volume of 'Nancy Drew' books all by myself by the time I reached the first grade. I loved stories. I loved the escape. I had a vivid imagination.

I grew up in Europe, and soccer was the first organized game I played. When we moved back to the U.S. in the middle of 4th grade, I switched to American football and stopped playing competitively until college, when I played intramurals.

I studied physics 12 in summer school after I completed grade 12. Did I enjoy it initially? No, I had found physics difficult since grade 11, and I struggled a lot. Did I learn from it? Yes, and as I improved, I started enjoying it more.

When I was in seventh grade, I asked my parents for a mobile recording system for Christmas, and I got it. I didn't come out of my room for years after that. I'd get invited to the movies and I'd say, 'I'm gonna finish a couple of demos.'

The move to creating stories was a natural progression for me, but the most pivotal time was probably in 6th grade: That year, a friend introduced me to the stories of Ray Bradbury, and a student teacher introduced me to creative writing.

I had a bad time in school in the first grade. Because I had been a rather lonely child on a farm, but I was free and wild and to be shut up in a classroom - there were 40 children on those days in the classroom, and it was quite a shock.

I got my first computer in the 6th grade or so. As soon as I got it, I was interested in finding out how it worked and how the programs worked and then figuring out how to write programs at just deeper and deeper levels within the system.

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