I had the fortune or misfortune to learn how to read fluently starting at the age of three. So I had read maybe 150 books by the time I hit 1st grade. And I already knew that the teachers were lying to me.
I think my masks reference artists who reference primitivism. They're not directly connected to tribal arts. I think they look more like third-grade art projects.
My mother was an artist, and I was fairly good at art as a child. I was always the best drawer in class, except in second grade when an artistic genius passed through our school!
There was a day when writers actually read," he grumbles. "They could quote Keats and Socrates. Now anyone with a keyboard and a fifth-grade education can call themselves a writer.
Although he didn't care much about any subject for its own sake, he cared a great deal about marks (grades or comparisons).
My best mentor is a mechanic - and he never left the sixth grade. By any competency measure, he doesn't have it. But the perspective he brings to me and my life is, bar none, the most helpful.
I was the kind of kid who couldn't really stop making up stories during class. I didn't do very well academically because I was always drawing these little doodles in the margins of my notebooks and I wasn't bringing home the best grades.
It's a form of bullying, in my opinion, to make sure that your kid gets the best grades, the best jobs and all that sort of stuff. I just want my child to be happy. I want him to do his best and trust God in the rest, but I'm not going to bully him.
I was really creative. I started to dance very young. I loved to dance. I begged my mother to put me into dance classes, and finally, in third grade, she did. Tap and jazz, but not ballet.
The very first proper play I did was 'Godspell,' and I played the guitar for it, and I had a small part in a high school play. And before that, in sixth grade, I wrote a musical about Noah's ark.
Of mediumship there are many grades, one of the simplest forms being the capacity to receive an impression or automatic writing, under peaceful conditions, in an ordinary state; but the whole subject is too large to be treated here.
It took me nine years to get through the fourth grade. When I got into television commercials, I had to take a crash course in reading. I was 32 years old, and I couldn't read the cue cards.
I realized early on that being an author is a hugely misunderstood job. Because there are no pay grades and very little structure, people make interesting assumptions about the profession.
Admittedly, it would take industrial-grade chutzpah and a massive dose of malevolence for anyone to bulldoze the spot where Neil Armstrong stepped off the Eagle lander. But even innocent visits could be damaging.
When you're a kid you're already trying to create your own world and organize the one in front of you, but then you get all insecure around 6th grade and don't think you have a right to share that.
When I was in the 9th grade I was flunking out of high school. And that's why I'm so encouraged by the fact that America is the place where opportunity and American exceptionalism is alive and well.
I used to not stutter any. Oh, I did when I was a kid, I stuttered, I had a bad stutter until I was probably between the second and third grade and a guy got rid of it for me.
I definitely would say, by sixth grade, I was a professional shoplifter - and not because I wanted to. I'm not going out to shoplift earrings or clothes or shoes like the average teenager. I was shoplifting frozen dinners at a grocery store.
OK, it was black, it was below grade, I was female, Asian American, young, too young to have served. Yet I think none of the opposition in that sense hurt me.
No one except Hollywood stars and very rich Texans wore Indian jewelry. And there was a plethora of dozens if not hundreds of athletic teams that in essence were insulting us, from grade schools to college. That's all changed.
I think anytime you're writing to the middle grades, you're writing to young readers who are trapped in a number of ways between two worlds: between childhood and adulthood, between their friends and their parents.
