Just like every other kid in my grade school, I was listening to my little radio plug in my ear when Mickey Mantle hit 18 post-season homers and won series after series for the Yankees. I listened and I learned from that. I think he was the original 'Mr. October,' but thank god it didn't stick.

It doesn't look nearly as big as it did the first time I saw one. Mickey McGuire and I used to sit hour after hour in the cockpit of the one that American used for training, at the company school in Chicago, saying to each other, 'My God, do you think we'll ever learn to fly anything this big?'

In order for the State in the person of school officials to justify prohibition of a particular expression of opinion, it must be able to show that its action was caused by something more than a mere desire to avoid the discomfort and unpleasantness that always accompany an unpopular viewpoint.

I went to elementary school in Goodeve, Saskatchewan, a small Ukrainian town. I played a lot of hockey, a lot of ball. Because of that I fit in - everyone wanted me on their team. The guys knew I was a hunter, and they were farmers. They just accepted that. I have lifelong friends from Goodeve.

With the first kid, you micromanage it, making sure there's no hair out of place when it goes off to school. But by the third kid, it's more like, "Oh, you want to wear a splatter-painted, Hard Rock Café T-shirt for seven days in a row and not brush your hair? Go for it. Be who you want to be."

Frankly, I'm not sure how far I would get if I attended public school today. It's not just that public schools aren't producing the results we want - it's that we're not giving them what they need to help students achieve at high levels. K-12 education in the United States is deeply antiquated.

When I went to Los Angeles right after high school, I got some acting jobs, and I never, ever wanted to be an actress! Public speaking and acting make me want to vomit. But I have never been nervous singing. When it comes to public speaking, I stumble on my words, sweat, and pull at my clothes.

The art schools seem to be trying to turn people out as "professional." But I don't know what the word "professional" means any longer. "Professional" would be somebody who was trying to push painting to a point that nobody else could do as well as he could. That would be my ideal professional.

I've just been very excited that over the years I've constantly had those types of different experiences. I like staying a little bit like acting school, not experimental, necessarily, but just fun. I have the best job in the world: I pretend for a living. You can't get too precious about that.

We have always believed that our people can stand on no higher ground than the school ground, or can enter any more hopeful room than the classroom. We blend time and faith and knowledge in our schools - not only to create educated citizens, but also to shape the destiny of this great Republic.

The shocking possibility that dumb people don't exist in sufficient numbers to warrant the millions of careers devoted to tending them will seem incredible to you. Yet that is my central proposition: the mass dumbness which justifies official schooling first had to be dreamed of; it isn't real.

I hadn't learned to read by third grade, which wasn't unusual for some kids. I knew something was wrong because I couldn't see or understand the words the way the other kids did. I wasn't the least bit bothered - until I was sent back to the second-grade classroom for reading help after school.

It was only when I got to high school and was in the art program that my artistic talent was recognized. The art program was directed by a wonderful and a very important person in my life - Charlotte Ranger, who was referred to as Mrs. Ranger. She had been teaching in the school for many years.

It was in Shizuoka, where my home was. I first attended this school when I was five years old. I also attended a regular elementary school, and I was taking piano lessons with a local teacher. I began to study composition at the Yamaha school. And I continued to study there until the age of 15.

Tuesday—we had school for the first time. Madame O’Malley had a moment of silence at the beginning of French class, a class that was always punctuated with long moments of silence, and then asked us how we were feeling. “Awful,” a girl said. “En français,” Madame O’Malley replied. “En français.

My school reports always used to point out that my concentration levels were appalling. I never listened in class because I was always daydreaming about racing. I never thought for a moment about doing anything else. There was no guarantee that I'd make a career in it but I never had any plan B.

Most poor people in America are white. The family breakdown issue is an issue that crosses all sorts of racial lines. High school dropout issues. But because of the flow of events which involve the racial component, we've sometimes confused racial issues with other issues which are trans-racial.

Research shows that there is only half as much variation in student achievement between schools as there is among classrooms in the same school. If you want your child to get the best education possible, it is actually more important to get him assigned to a great teacher than to a great school.

St. Louis has a lot of weird food customs that you don't see other places - and a lot of great ethnic neighborhoods. There's a German neighborhood. A great old school Italian neighborhood, with toasted ravioli, which seems to be a St. Louis tradition. And they love provolone cheese in St. Louis.

I was a very interested arts student, I was always into that part of school and when I got into high school I went into architectural drafting. It gave me an understanding of how to build things and it’s really helped me put things in perspective. With my music and my movies, to me it’s all art.

Lately even the harshest critics of President Bush have been forced to admit maybe he's right about freedom's march around the globe. What if we are watching an example of presidential leadership that will be taught in American schools for generations to come? It's an idea gaining more currency.

The school was nothing but reminiscence - of an Italian hill town, a French abbey, an English academy, the different sources improbably but convincingly melded into a fantasy about the classic sites of Europe as imagined by exiles from cold peripheral lands, nostalgia about somebody else's past.

Mechanical Notation ... I look upon it as one of the most important additions I have made to human knowledge. It has placed the construction of machinery in the rank of a demonstrative science. The day will arrive when no school of mechanical drawing will be thought complete without teaching it.

We come then to the question presented: Does segregation of children in public schools solely on the basis of race, even though the physical facilities and other "tangible" factors may be equal, deprive the children of the minority group of equal education opportunities? We believe that it does.

Texas is a national leader in education reform and student achievement. Through our college- and career-ready standards and assessments, strong school accountability, and a focus on educator development, we have created an education system that prepares our students for success after graduation.

Basically, when I went to school in Sri Lanka from age five onward, the classes there were sometimes sorted into a hierarchy of your skin tone. So the fairer-skinned kids sat at the front row, and the darker-skinned kids sat at the back by the poor ones who played out in the street all day long.

What has brought unique, irreplaceable me - out of all the possibilities of life-here, now, to this? Was all my youth-the paper route after school, the stolen moments in the back seats of borrowed cars, the football workouts, the cramming for finals-meant to end this way, dying in a muddy paddy?

Those of us who believe in the right of any human being to belong to whatever church he sees fit, and to worship God in his own way, cannot be accused of prejudice when we do not want to see public education connected with religious control of the schools, which are paid for by taxpayers' money.

I think the impacts of 9/11 on academic freedom vary greatly depending on locale and time (softening with the passage of time), and even within the same community, and likely within the same schools. This variability makes it difficult to offer generalized responses without accompanying caveats.

I am a part of the old school where I feel that purity of the language should be retained. But English is a constantly evolving language where new words are being added to the dictionary, so I don't see any harm in experimenting with the language. Only poor editing standards need to be improved.

Women tend to break the network of friends they make, but it is a habit that men have learned. It is an approach to life that involves planning almost without thinking about it. And men sustain this. I came from a northern grammar school. I had a good education, but I didn't have a good network.

The truth is that schools don't really teach anything except how to obey orders. This is a great mystery to me because thousands of humane, caring people work in schools as teachers and aides and administrators, but the abstract logic of the institution overwhelms their individual contributions.

In a world where people are hungry for quick fixes and sound bites, for instant gratification, there is not patience for the long. Slow rebuilding process: implementing after school programs, hiring more community workers to act as mentors, adding more job training programs in marginalized areas

I'm a third-culture child. It's an interesting concept. Having an American father, a South American mother, born in England, grew up in Hong Kong, went to school in Europe - it makes me a third-culture child, which means you take on the culture of the place where you live. So I'm very adaptable.

I felt excited to go to school, and that scared me. I knew it wasn't the simulating learning environment I was anticipating, or seeing my new set of friends. If I was being honest with myself, I knew I was eager to get to school because I would see Edward Culllen. And that was very, very stupid.

I guess I have sort of an atypical relationship with my mom for someone my age, because I think I started so young with the music thing and I had my parents always on the road with me. So at a time when I think I should have been rebelling like in high school, they were actually my best friends.

The keys are, or were, the training methods used by the ancient mystery schools. We've got hints and tips, we've got little bits on the papyri, but we don't have, in our hands, a complete curriculum of the ways in which they induced altered states of consciousness and the projection of the mind.

I was mid-sentence when the casting director said, "Listen, kid. You should not be an actress. You are not pretty enough. You should go back to wherever you came from and you should go to school. You don't have it." She was very blunt - I honestly think that she thought she was doing me a favor.

When I taught school, we just had the school cafeteria; we didn't have machines or things for children to buy food from. But parents can try to educate their children about choices. A lot of everything we're talking about that has to do with heart disease has to do with the choices that we make.

As I inched sluggishly along the treadmill of the Maycomb County school system, I could not help receiving the impression that I was being cheated out of something. Out of what I knew not, yet I did not believe that twelve years of unrelieved boredom was exactly what the state had in mind for me.

Not just for the U.S. Senate but it also means for school board and city council. We need to revitalize American democracy. We need to have people at all - all over this country, having the courage to take on big money and demand a set of policies that work for all of us and not just for the few.

It helps immerse yourself in what you potentially want to do. Being involved, learning firsthand and observing the craft and absorbing all you can, makes it easier to define what you want. It will also ultimately make you a better Chef. Culinary school, or even a single class, is a great bet too.

I know what it's like to have a dream. I know what it's like to roll the dice and say, 'I'm going to go after this thing,' and nothing turns my stomach quicker than acting teachers or acting schools that look at a bunch of dreamers and say, 'We can help,' when they know full well that they can't.

Growing up knowing that I wanted to be a sportscaster and knowing that the best school in the country was right in my back yard, I certainly knew all there was to know about Marty Glickman and about people like Bob Costas and Marv Albert and all of the other greats that have passed through there.

When I was 4 years old my mother put me into an early music education school. That's where they taught you perfect pitch and harmony and how to write music and all that. At that time, one of the homeworks was to listen to all the sounds and the noise of a day and transfer that into musical notes.

If you really believe that you're making a difference and that you can leave a legacy of better schools and jobs and safer streets, why would you not spend the money? The objective is to improve the schools, bring down crime, build affordable housing, clean the streets - not to have a fair fight.

Whatever I was able to do with those experiences certainly contribute to whatever I'm able to do as a director. The corruption in that is that most of what I acted in the last 10 years was to steal film school time from these guys. Those were the people I thought I could learn from as a director.

When I decided to go to university I didn't know what I wanted to do. When I had an opportunity to take an elective I took Drama by chance, even though I'd never taken a Drama course or even been in a play in high school. Two years later I was majoring in Drama and I knew I wanted to be an actor.

It's like I've experienced quite a weird and unusual life, you know, being with a mom who's a single parent and struggling with money and things like that. It's really hard. And it brings a lot of other insecurities in life and a lot of other issues in life, in school and a bunch of other things.

You see it in schools all over... the concept that 'I'll be somewhat less than my best in order to make those around me feel more comfortable' is alive and well... I'm very keen that they understand that if they make themselves a little less than they can be, it is a one-way street to mediocrity.

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