Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Like it or not, life is a series of competitions. You may be competing for a grade, a spot on a team, a job, or the largest account in town. The higher your self-esteem is, the better you get along with yourself, with others, and the more you'll accomplish.
One of the first serious attempts I made to write a novel was when I was in Grade 6 and I had read 'Matilda.' I wrote my own version and my teacher had it bound and permitted me to read it to the class - cementing my love of reading, writing and Roald Dahl!
When you're in a songwriting class, and you write a song, and you hand it in to a teacher to grade, I'm still going to say that it's a really awesome song whether I got an A or a D. I learned to stick to my guns and take the tools as tools and not as rules.
When I was in first grade, everyone made fun of my name, of course. I think it's kind of a big name to hold up when you're nine years old. It seemed goofy. I used to tell people I wanted to change the world and they used to think, 'This kid's really weird'.
I've been acting since second grade, and I just remember when I first moved to New York and I was living in Washington Heights with three other actors in this tiny apartment and busting my butt to get to the subway, walking to, like, five auditions in a day.
I know other people who have started their kids in tackle football for, like, four- and five-year-olds. So I think it's up to each individual's parents, but for me personally, no I wouldn't. But would I be OK with him playing in seventh or eighth grade? Yes.
In sixth grade, my basketball team made it to the league championships. In double overtime, with three seconds left, I rebounded the ball and passed it - to the wrong team! They scored at the buzzer and we lost the game. To this day, I still have nightmares!
During first grade, I spent nearly every afternoon for months in the school nurse's office, sick with psychosomatic headaches, begging to go home; by third grade, stomachaches had replaced the headaches, but my daily trudge to the infirmary remained the same.
One of the things that impacted me the most was in the 12th grade. I just assumed I would get the lead in the musical. Well, I didn't get it; I got the second lead, and I was devastated... my mom said something like, 'Often the supporting character is better.'
My earliest influence was Quincy Jones. I thought 'The Wiz' soundtrack was the most amazing thing I'd ever heard. It was my first record and you had Michael Jackson, Ted Ross, Nipsey Russell and Diana Ross on it. I even took it to show and tell in third grade!
Back in third grade, they used to say, 'Take whatever talent you have and think of something you can do with it.' I liked to draw, but what could I do with it? Maybe I could be an art dealer - nah, can't see myself doing that. Maybe I could do commercial arts?
I remember in second grade, everybody in the class had to come up with adjectives for each other, and I got shy. In a way, I force myself to perform, because if I didn't, I'd stay home rolled up in a ball watching 'The Real Housewives of Orange County' all day.
I spent my entire childhood in the same town, in Kent. I went to grade school there. There was a boarding school that my mother taught at, called - appropriately enough - Kent School, that I went to. Yeah, pretty much my entire childhood was spent in that town.
I created my MySpace page in eighth grade, because that's how all my friends talked to each other, so I made one, too. Then, all of a sudden, my friends started putting my songs on their profiles, and then their relatives, their friends in different states did.
When I was in grade school, I had a little duet act with a guy who was a beautiful singer, and somebody recorded it on a wire machine. They played it back for us, and I went, 'I hear Donald, but what is that other ugly voice?' It turned out to be me, of course.
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.
In the eighth grade I found I had a voice for opera, so I followed that path a little, but my impulse has always been an actor. I have always liked cinema, and let's face it, opera singers are just bad actors! I didn't want to translate myself in that direction.
When I was in sixth grade there was a talent show, and I wrote my first sketch, 'The Dentist.' I played the dentist, and I had my friend play a patient. It was sort of what can go wrong at the dentist, and I just remember I had lots of fake blood and everything.
I've always made weird sounds with my mouth. I've always been fascinated by the sound design, what you can do with your mouth. I was the kid dancing around in third grade on the basketball court. While everyone would be playing sports, I would be jumping around.
I did a number of local children's theater plays growing up, but in 5th grade, I had some good times on stage making people laugh as a troll in 'The Hobbit.' That solidified my dream to be on 'Saturday Night Live,' which was hugely influential for me growing up.
Each year, in my quaint efforts to send out paper holiday cards with personal messages, I probably discard one for every three I actually manage to put in the mail. The reason is that my handwriting is now less legible than it was when I was in the second grade.
I can't talk about the education of black children if I ignored two of my nieces who were a couple of grade levels behind. I believe that charity begins at home, and I take seriously the role of a godfather to fill the gap when the parents aren't doing their job.
I was fortunate to have many teachers who encouraged me - one of the first was Dianne Derrick, my 5th grade teacher at Woodbury Elementary. She challenged us to write creatively and praised my work, but most importantly, she treated writing like it was important.
I came of baseball age (isn't it always around first grade?) in the last sputtering years of the A's Philadelphia tenancy. I probably plighted my fated troth in 1949, when the A's fluked into a winning season and introduced a pintsize southpaw named Bobby Shantz.
I can't remember if it was in the third grade in school, I was being told that two amoeba happened to hit in a muddy puddle of water two billion years ago, and I was an accident. I was the result. I wasn't real smart, but I said, 'I don't like the sound of that.'
When I was in seventh grade, I was bored out of my mind. We seemed to be learning the same things over and over in science and math, and two of the boys in my class were allowed to move ahead into these advanced classes, but I wasn't allowed because I was a girl.
I came out of the private sector, a life that I enjoyed. I sleep in a bed every night with a woman I went to first grade with. I wasn't running for a job. I was running - and I think you will find this to be the case with many of the freshmen - to produce results.
When I went into the seminary, I was one of those victims of New Math and had not had Algebra I and had no idea what we were doing in New Math in the ninth grade. But when I went into the seminary, they had gone the traditional route and taught first-year algebra.
I moved from Kentucky to Miramar, Florida, at about 8. I think I was in second grade. I still had my Southern accent, and down there, you got to experience a melting pot in full fury. All the kids I hung out with were, like, Sicilian kids from Jersey and New York.
I have been an Avengers fan since the middle 1960s. I grew up with them, and I've imagined a hundred different versions of an Avengers movie. I think I even have a script I wrote back in eighth grade, 'Avengers vs. the Mole Man.' Truly dreadful, but a work of love.
My school friends are really understanding and still want to hang out with me. Ever since I was in sixth grade, I was at the gym every day to work out while my friends were getting their nails done or going to the mall. I used to feel left out, but I don't anymore.
In terms of moments that pushed me toward becoming a writer... My parents, my wife, and my English teacher in the 8th grade were all hugely supportive at moments during my development as a writer that were critical, where I might have quit when things got too hard.
I didn't do any football stuff when I was a kid... Mostly baseball and basketball the whole time. That's all I did. I played football starting in seventh grade. As I got older, I started playing a little bit more. Then in high school, I really fell in love with it.
I started acting in second grade - my first role was in the Thanksgiving play. I was the Indian chasing the turkey. All the other mom's encouraged my mom to get me into acting after that. Also, when I saw 'The Sound of Music' at Music Circus, I knew I wanted to act.
I want to make sure kids read by the third grade and are prepared for the fourth grade. As school gets harder and kids get older, the words get bigger... If they don't understand what they are reading, they start to fall back, and their interest in school falls off.
Grades can matter, especially for those students and parents who live for the next round of applications to graduate or professional schools. But there's a problem with the grade emphasis. Math or science graduates earn more than students majoring in the humanities.
When I was a kid, I used to cry every time I lost a game, up until, like, the 8th grade. I used to go ballistic. I used to go crazy. If I cried, it'd be like, 'Ah, Chris is crying again... damn it... come on, get in the car.' All that over one game. I hated to lose.
My mother taught public school, went to Harvard and then got her master's there and taught fifth and sixth grade in a public school. My dad had a more working-class lifestyle. He didn't go to college. He was an auto mechanic and a bartender and a janitor at Harvard.
When you're 11 or 12 years old, you can get so swept up in a book that you start to believe that the fantasy is reality. I think when you have a giant crush when you're in fifth grade, it becomes your whole world. It's like being underwater; everything is different.
I was always a clown. In the eighth grade I won a city speech contest by doing an Eddie Murphy routine. I'm no good at public speaking, but if I can assume a role and speak as that person, then I'm fine. When I had to give a book report, I always did it in character.
I'd go to the library so I could sit in a big, quiet room and listen to pages being turned. There was a boring librarian who everyone in fifth grade hated. But I loved her because when she would read us stories in her soft voice, she'd turn my head into a snow globe.
When I was able to go to school in my early years, my third grade teacher, Ms. Harris, convinced me that one day I would be a writer. I heard her, but I knew that I had to leave Georgia, and unlike my friend Ray Charles, I did not go around with 'Georgia on My Mind.'
In terms of age, I think I've covered about as wide a range as is possible, having written everything from picture books to early chapter books to middle grade novels to YA to one adult novel - and having been editor and lead writer for a magazine for retired people!
I suggest that the introductory courses in science, at all levels from grade school through college, be radically revised. Leave the fundamentals, the so-called basics, aside for a while, and concentrate the attention of all students on the things that are not known.
When I made 'Who Needs Pictures,' my first album, I had been west of the Mississippi River one time in my life, and that was in fourth grade. We traveled to California for vacation and stayed with some friends of my parents. It was culture shock, and it was different.
At 49, I find it a little bit difficult to run these days. I've got grade four tears in both Achilles, shin splints, I got no cartilage the toes in my right foot, I've got bone marrow edemas under both knees, I've got one degenerating hip - that's the problem you get.
My mom is a woman who grew up in a small farming village in the West Bank called Beit Ur El Foka. She only went to school up to 8th grade and then dropped out to go work in a tailor shop that made dresses and different embroidered designs to make money for her family.
I remember one time when all the nuns in my Catholic grade school got around in a semicircle, me and Mom in the middle, and they said, 'Mrs. Farley, the children at school are laughing at Christopher, not with him.' I thought, 'Who cares? As long as they're laughing.'
In the writing of poetry we never know anything for sure. We will never know if we have 'trained' or 'practised' enough. We will never be able to say that we have reached grade eight, or that we have left the grades behind and are now embarked on an advanced training.
I went to the States with that amount of prejudice which seems the birthright of every English person, but I found that, under the knowledge of the Americans which can be attained by a traveller mixing in society in every grade, these prejudices gradually melted away.