I would miss months of school and then return with bright blond hair. Needless to say, there was bullying. I wasn’t beaten up daily, but there was name-calling and jealousy. You have to bear in mind that ‘Harry Potter’ wasn’t cool. I wasn’t part of the ‘Terminator’ franchise.
When I was in primary school I was in a special needs group, which is the polite way of saying the dopey kids.
Some parents do not send their children to school because they don’t know its importance at all.
I have to say I’ve worked very few days of my life. I used to have to cut the lawn, and when I was in junior high school, I worked at a concession stand at a stadium.
I did grow up in Los Angeles. I actually didn’t start acting until I was sixteen, so I was very removed from the Hollywood scene. I had always been in my school plays, but my mom and dad wanted to keep me out of the business until I was old enough to know who I was and not let anyone change me.
Once I took a bus from my home in Maryland to Philadelphia to live on the streets with some musicians for a few weeks, and then my parents sent me to boarding school at Andover to shape me up.
I just hate sitting and writing – I had to do that in school. Plus, I have terrible handwriting.
I never learned hate at home, or shame. I had to go to school for that.
I did movie star impressions as a kid in high school. Somehow they just got out of hand.
What do lawyers learn in law school? They learn to win… What we’ve got to start thinking about is how do we solve problems.
Getting through high school and college was one of my greatest achievements.
I did it all, singing, the harp, piano. But I was so shy, I’d wake up at six to practice piano because I didn’t want anyone to hear me play. But then I’d do a big show in school where everyone would see me, and that was actually alright.
There was this hip-hop collective called People Crew. And at the time in Korea, there was no real place to access rap music. So People Crew used to host this summer school program, which taught rapping and dancing. I begged my mom to attend that school to learn how to rap.
They don’t like thinking in medical school. They memorize – that’s all they want you to do. You must not think.
I’ve always had strong ties with Delhi, and I do stay in touch with my friends and periodically visit the capital. I started my schooling at St. Columbus High School before I went to Mayo College. Delhi, for me, is a historical city with all its beautiful monuments.
When I see people with an interesting gap year, if they can explain it, if they can justify it, if they can show what they’ve learnt from it, it’s sometimes more profitable or more intelligent than having been through a traditional, continuous race from high school to the end of university.
When nearly a third of our high school students do not graduate on time with their peers, we have work to do. We must design our middle and high schools so that no student gets lost in the crowd and disconnected from his or her own potential.
I went to school, I went to college. I know how to read. Even though I lack common sense sometimes, I am book smart.
Our bombs are smarter than the average high school student. At least they can find Kuwait.
I loved Catholic school. I didn’t like being beeped at by old pervs at the gas station because I was wearing a plaid skirt, though. It’s like, do you think I’m going to stop and give you my phone number?
My mom told us never to reveal that we were Shia in school. You would find out that some other kid was Shiite, and you would whisper, ‘Hey,’ or you would see someone at the mosque, and you’d be like, ‘Hey, that kid’s Shiite!’ There was a lot of tension, a lot of violence in Karachi between Shiites and Sunnis.
I miss high school football.
When I was a teenager, I began to settle into school because I’d discovered the extracurricular activities that interested me: music and theater.
I wanted to be a doctor. I was pre-med at school, and I actually even took the MCAT. My ultimate decision was that I didn’t love the work environment in a hospital.
At 9, I started taking classes at Sylvia Young Theatre School. One day, they asked if I wanted to join their agency. You get in if you’re cute, I guess.
The fact is, I was never too bright in school. I ain’t ashamed of it, though. I mean, how much do school principals make a month?
I’m a black Catholic raised in Decatur, Georgia, which was very gang-infested. Then, I went to an all-white private high school and excelled in sports and wrote poetry, then played football at the University of Georgia, minoring in drama.
I grew up in a very nice house in Houston, went to private school all my life and I’ve never even been to the ‘hood. Not that there’s anything wrong with the ‘hood.
I got introduced to yoga in drama school. It’s now a mainstay in my life, ever since I got instructor certification at a teacher-training intensive. I even occasionally guide an intimate class of friends and family, but mostly the training was to serve and deepen my own practice.
Alexander at the head of the world never tasted the true pleasure that boys of his own age have enjoyed at the head of a school.
The book is called ‘Most Talkative,’ because I was voted most talkative in high school. And I’ve never stopped talking. My mouth has been my greatest asset and my biggest Achilles’ heel.
I’m not trying to be new school and I’m not old school – I’m classic. There’s a lot of new cars and there’s a lot of old cars, but I’m just classic in doing what I do.
It’s very hard to be a kid, especially in a predominantly white school or white town where other people want to police your body and hair.
I did ‘Spanglish’ and went back home, and the next thing I did was my high school play. My agents at the time were like, ‘Uh. What?’
I played soccer for nine years, so I took that route instead of singing. I played on the outside team as well as in school, so I was always playing soccer. It wasn’t until I moved back to London that I really, like, started investing in music again and realized, OK, yeah, this is definitely what I want to do.
As early as I can remember, I would put on plays with my cousin and make my dad record them. In kindergarten, I started doing the school plays, and it just continued.
I had a jazz trio, a rock n’ roll band, and I played drums in junior high, high school, college, big bands, and I played timpani in the symphony. I am a drummer. It’s the one instrument I actually play pretty well. It’s just hard to carry on your back.
In high school, I worked at Abercrombie & Fitch, and once I graduated from business school at USC, I started a company with my partner and had a nine-to-seven job.
I had been taught that if I cried, to be quiet about it, so whereas I never howled, the least thing made me cry both at school and at home. Crying tends to separate a child from other children, for even children dislike a cry baby, and I had no friends in the world.
My older brother was the person who got me interested in science in general. He used to tell me what he learned in school. My first memory of mathematics is probably the time that he told me about the problem of adding numbers from 1 to 100.
While I was trying to save money to go to the National Institute of Dramatic Art in Australia I ended up getting all of this experience which meant that by the time I had enough money in the bank to go to school I didn’t really need to go to school anymore.
My parents have always been very supportive. I didn’t go to school because my home was my school.
I went to NYU undergrad, then went to AFI for grad school.
I think what pushes me every day is that I’m so afraid to fail. I think it comes from what I went through in school growing up and not being great in the classroom and having to work harder than everybody else.
I was taught that to create anything you had to believe in failure, simply because you had to be prepared to go through an idea without any fear. Failure, you learned, as I did in art school, to be a wonderful thing. It allowed you to get up in the morning and take the pillow off your head.
Mark Wahlberg, when I was in high school, people were like, ‘You look like Marky Mark!’ Then as I got older, they were like, ‘You look like Donnie Wahlberg.’ Now they’re like, ‘You look like Donnie Wahlberg’s cousin from Massachusetts.’
Learning to cook at school gave me the confidence to experiment in the kitchen when I left home in my late teens – I wasn’t intimidated by it.
My father’s really fluent in French, but I can’t speak at all. I actually took it twice in school already and failed both times!
All I could do at school was paint and draw and that was the only time I ever passed any exam. It was the only thing I ever got right at school.
I was bused to a school in Gerritsen Beach in Brooklyn in 1972. I was one of the first black kids in the history of the school.
Transportation is responsible for half of our state’s air pollution, and many suffer as a result. Children are more likely to develop respiratory illnesses and struggle in school when they breathe smoggy air.
For me, I was somebody who was a smart young guy who didn’t do very well in school. The basic system of education, I didn’t fit in; my intelligence was elsewhere.
If you film a little boy going to school, the big event in that boy’s day and all the classmates’ and teachers’ day is you being there filming, not the school.
