I put so much pressure on myself to be perfect. Between homework and sports and drama and being social, I slept about four hours a night through high school and college.
My parents couldn't handle my energy so they enrolled me in every sport the school was offering. I didn't resent it because I loved sports and picked them up easily.
I started playing baseball and soccer. Those were my sports on the streets and in school when I was growing up. I didn't even start playing basketball until I was 14.
The public schools I attended were dominated by athletics and rarely inspiring intellectually, but I enjoyed a small circle of interesting friends despite my ineptitude at team sports and my preference for reading.
Playing athletics, playing a lot of different sports, going to drama school... I was one of those kids who wanted to do everything, so I ended up being pretty average at everything.
I was a pretty normal high school kid. I just loved to play sports and had opportunities, and the Lord blessed me with talent, and I just tried to take advantage of it.
I played a lot of other sports at school and just one day the golf bug bit me and I started playing serious golf from when I was ten years old.
I was sporty in high school. I played tennis and hockey, and was basketball captain. Then I went to university and stopped doing sport and started eating ice cream.
I also developed an interest in sports, and played in informal games at a nearby school yard where the neighborhood children met to play touch football, baseball, basketball and occasionally, ice hockey.
I played football. I wrestled. Those were team sports and I played for the school. When I was younger, I played kick the can and stuff like that. I loved that.
I'm a kid who grew up in an all African-American neighborhood and got into schools and aspired to just be me, and didn't worry about labels or anything. Just wanted to be a success at what I did.
After I won the Oscar, my salary doubled, my friends tripled, my children became more popular at school, my butcher made a pass at me, and my maid hit me up for a raise.
Schools serving disadvantaged students need more time to help these students catch up and gain the core academic skills they will need to succeed in our economy and society.
The conception that, instead of this, contemporary society is at or near a turning point is very prominent in the views of a school of social scientists who, though they are still comparatively few, are getting more and more of a hearing.
My first acting job happened by accident when I was really young. I was in fifth grade and my teacher saw an ad in the paper and took me to the audition after school and I got the part.
I have taught some master classes and things at my alma mater and sometimes at my kids' school. I will go in and talk to the theater students. I wouldn't really call myself a teacher.
When I was in junior high, a foreign-history teacher started a theater class. So I got my feet wet there and through high school, so I was very fascinated with acting as a means of expression.
There is a shortage of teachers but the January 2001 schools census showed that teacher numbers were at their highest level than at any time since 1984 - and 11,000 higher than 1997.
I remember in school once the teacher gave us a speech about anyone can make it if they try, and then she looked at me and said. 'I don't know what you are going to do, Georgie.'
As the daughter of a schoolteacher, I feel very strongly that the most important thing in school takes place right there in that classroom, and the interaction between the teacher and the child.
As a teacher I realize that what one learns in school doesn't serve for very much at all, that the only thing one can really learn is self-understanding, and this is something that can't be taught.
