School
(page 3)
My education was dismal. I went to a series of schools for mentally disturbed teachers.
Read something of interest every day — something of interest to you, not to your teacher or your best friend or your minister/rabbi/priest. Comics count. So does poetry. So do editorials in your school newspaper. Or a biography of a rock star. Or an instructional manual. Or the Bible.
One of my earliest memories is walking up a muddy road into the mountains. It was raining. Behind me, my village was burning. When there was school, it was under a tree. Then the United Nations came. They fed me, my family, my community.
Finish last in your league and they call you idiot. Finish last in medical school and they call you doctor.
Voting is how we participate in a civic society — be it for president, be it for a municipal election. It's the way we teach our children — in school elections — how to be citizens, and the importance of their voice.
When everyone at school is speaking one language, and a lot of your classmates' parents also speak it, and you go home and see that your community is different -there is a sense of shame attached to that. It really takes growing up to treasure the specialness of being different.
He who opens a school door, closes a prison.
One afternoon when I was 9, my dad told me I'd be skipping school the next day. Then we drove 12 hours from Melbourne to Sydney for the Centenary Test, a once-in-a-lifetime commemorative cricket match. It was great fun — especially for a kid who was a massive sports fan.
Music was a way of rebelling against the whole rah-rah high school thing.
I wasn't the brightest kid in school. I was a backbencher troubling the frontbencher, and eventually I failed in my 10th grade. But then in higher secondary, there were only three people who got first division in arts, and I was one of them. So this tells you, where you put your mind and heart into, that's where you go.
I worked in theater my whole life. My mom was a drama teacher at my middle school. In high school, I was Drama Club President every year, and then I auditioned for conservatory acting programs.
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.
We should remember that one man is much the same as another, and that he is best who is trained in the severest school.
I've been wearing lipstick since I was in 7th grade. That was our form of daring self-expression, because we had to wear uniforms in school. It made our teachers so angry.
I am pretty geeky, yes. I like odd sub-culture activities, I am often socially inept, I wore glasses in high school. But I am a modern geek.
In Kenya, I met wonderful girls; girls who wanted to help their communities. I was with them in their school, listening to their dreams. They still have hope. They want to be doctor and teachers and engineers.
It took me until my teenage years to realize that I was medicating with music. I was pushing back against my stupid school uniform, instructors who called me by my last name and my classmates, who, while friendly enough, were not at all inspiring.
I wish all high schools could offer students the outside activities that were available at the old Harrison High on Chicago's West Side in the late '20s. They enabled me to become part of a school newspaper, drama group, football team and student government.
Instead of isolating our school and our many subjects from the every day world, we intend to plant it not merely in the French capital, but in what for next summer at least will be the focal point, the capital of the entire civilized world.
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.
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