In many ways, 'What Teachers Make: In Praise of the Greatest Job in the World' is just one big thank-you note to my teachers. The book is dedicated to my fifth and sixth grade English teacher, Dr. Joseph D'Angelo, a massive force of erudition, martia...
I grew up listening to the Beatles and being an ardent Beatles fan when I was in third grade all the way to adulthood, and listening to all kinds of music that came to us either at the flea market or in our living rooms or on the 'Ed Sullivan' show -...
In third grade, I was taking tap-dance lessons, and about six weeks before the recital I wanted to quit. My mom said, 'No, you're going to stay with it.' Well, I did it, and I was bad, too! But my parents never let their kids walk away from something...
Kit Kat: Maybe, just maybe, I'm the faller. every family has someone who falls, who doesn't make the grade, who stumbles, who life trips up. Maybe I'm our faller.
I've been acting since second grade, and I just remember when I first moved to New York and I was living in Washington Heights with three other actors in this tiny apartment and busting my butt to get to the subway, walking to, like, five auditions i...
It's like first grade where you make all your mistakes and people see it and yet some people see that there's something there that's really valuable. That's the way it went for more than 2 years almost 3 years of playing.
To confuse compulsory schooling with equal educational opportunity is like confusing organized religion with spirituality. One does not necessarily lead to the other. Schooling confuses teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a dipl...
My school friends are really understanding and still want to hang out with me. Ever since I was in sixth grade, I was at the gym every day to work out while my friends were getting their nails done or going to the mall. I used to feel left out, but I...
I have always wanted to work in the theater. I've always felt the glamour of being backstage and that excitement, but I've never actually done it - not since I was in 5th grade, really. But I've had many plays in my films. I feel like maybe theater i...
I'd always assumed Beth and I would be friends forever. But then in middle of the eighth grade, the Goldbergs went through the World's Nastiest Divorce. Beth went a little nuts. I don't blame her. When her dad got involved with this twenty-one year o...
I’m completely library educated. I’ve never been to college. I went down to the library when I was in grade school in Waukegan, and in high school in Los Angeles, and spent long days every summer in the library. I used to steal magazines from a s...
I got interested in astronomy at the age of 8 because I was looking at an atlas of the planets in my parents' apartment in Arlington, where I grew up. I got a telescope at age 10, which is pretty normal, and by the time I was in eighth grade, I had a...
When I was 7 and went to the zoo with my second-grade class, I saw chimpanzee eyes for the first time - the eyes of an unhappy animal, all alone, locked in a bare, concrete-floored, iron-barred cage in one of the nastier, old-fashioned zoos. I rememb...
But I didn't. I didn't say anything, if only because I had no idea how to respond to such an overture. If my experience with friends was sparse, what I knew about boys- other than a competitors for grades or class rank- was nonexistent
This was shaping up to be the worst conference call of my life, even worse than that time I accidentally clogged the school toilet back in the first grade with my Boba Fett figure (I was pretending it was the Sarlaac pit).
It feels like last week, but in fact we’re now closing in on five thousand days at war. I always picture Sami as a nine-year-old soccer stud ... and yet there are soldiers in Afghanistan today who were in fourth grade on 9/11.
By first grade, my sense of worth was in direct proportion to what I learned and what I contributed back to the class. I had already become a human doing instead of a human being.
History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government. This marks the lowest grade of ignorance of which their civil as well as religious leaders will always avail themselves for their own purposes. { ...
[My mom's] funny that way, celebrating special occasions with blue food. I think it's her way of saying anything is possible. Percy can pass seventh grade. Waffles can be blue. Little miracles like that.
I really couldn't see what the Socs would have to sweat about - good grades, good cars, good girls, madras and Mustangs and Corvairs - Man, I thought, if I had worries like that I'd consider myself lucky. I know better now.
Aeschylus writes, "In our sleep, pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grade of God.
