School
(page 5)
Finish last in your league and they call you idiot. Finish last in medical school and they call you doctor.
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.
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.
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'.
The philosophy of the school room in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next.
At school I pretended I had a normal life, but I felt lonely all the time and different from everyone else. I never felt like I fit in, and I wasn't allowed to participate in after-school activities, go to sports events or parties or date boys. Many times I had to make up stories about why I couldn't do anything with my classmates.
I remember from my school days Archimedes jumping into his bath and displacing water and coming up with his famous principle, and of course Isaac Newton being hit on the head with an apple. In other words, this realm of human knowledge — which is mathematical, essentially — can have a playful visual element to it.
My family moved to Aspen, Colorado, where we had 'Avalanche Danger' days that kept us from going to school, climbed 14,000-foot peaks as part of my education, and I learned to snowboard.