'One Hundred Years of Solitude' convinced me to drop out of Harvard graduate school. The novel reminded me of everything my Ph.D. program was trying to make me forget. Thank you, Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
Drop out of school before your mind rots from exposure to our mediocre educational system. Forget about the Senior Prom and go to the library and educate yourself if you've got any guts. Some of you like Pep rallies and plastic robots who tell you wh...
At a school in Massachusetts where I once worked, we managed early on through consensus. Which sounds wonderful, but it was just a very, very difficult way to sort of manage anything, because convincing everybody to do one particular thing, especiall...
When I first started cooking, I was very much an intuitive cook when it came to taste, but that didn't mean I didn't want to know why some things worked and why others did not. My interest took me to culinary school.
Once your kid reaches middle school, parents are really supposed to fade out of the social picture. Kids are supposed to make their own plans, keep up with sophisticatedly crude discussions, and be able to go out on their own without supervision.
In theory, I always think I should totally go back to school, because I don't want to start sinking slowly... I want to learn, blah blah blah. Then I think about actually going and sitting in classes and, man, it sounds terrible.
Too often we act - ask our schools to be truant officers, our teachers to be truant officers, because we're giving them children who have, you know, they're not ready to learn. And if they're not ready to learn by the third grade, they know they're b...
My mother would organize huge parties for my elementary school classmates. To prepare, she would go back to the bakery in her old neighborhood of Inwood and get special shamrock cookies. Hawaiian Punch was served and we had shamrock napkins. It was a...
Where I went to school, Eton College, we had to wear dark trousers, a tailcoat, and a stiff, starched collar every day, and that was fine with me: Part of the reason I wanted to go there was because I've always loved dressing up.
I was a girly-girl until I moved to New York. Then I got really into the androgynous look of the early-'90s club scene. I had really short hair and started blurring the line a bit. But for me, grade school was about Benetton, Esprit, and Guess jeans.
I took the obligatory economics classes in school, but I've long been a fan of the Milton Friedman philosophy and its libertarian bent: One must be free to do what one wants to do, as long as you don't harm another. This is the seminal treatise on fr...
I grew up on a farm and my grandfather quit school when he was 12, but when it came to common sense and animals, he was the smartest person I've ever met, before or since. He taught me that to touch an animal is an earned privilege. It's not a right.
Today, I marvel at the vegan foods in the supermarket, at the cruelty-free clothing choices in stores, and at the fantastic alternatives to dissection in schools, the modern ways to test medicines without killing rabbits and beagles, the many forms o...
Growing up as a young black girl in Potomac, Maryland was easy. I had a Rainbow Coalition of friends of all ethnicities, and we would carelessly skip around our elementary school like the powerless version of Captain Planet's Planeteers.
I had an instinctive feeling that the people who have little or no school training should have something coming into their homes weekly which dealt with their problems in a simple, helpful way... so I wrote in a plain, common-sense way on the things ...
I got picked on a lot. I was a complete geek in school. I had braces. I didn't have the hot girlfriend. I wasn't ever sought after. I was a stocky, awkward kid who got laughed off the tennis court when I tried that.
When I was at drama school in the U.K., I was there for two and a half years, and we did one week of television and film. It's right before you leave. It's like, 'We've taught you Chekhov and Shakespeare; you are likely to be in a washing-up soap-liq...
For more than 40 years, I have advocated the creation of a 'round the clock' community. This would mean, at the least, housing, schools and shops of various kinds alongside the commercial buildings. That kind of community had appeared in lower Manhat...
I started writing this feature comedy in New York - a Chris Farley vehicle. The script was decent. When I got to LA, I met some new friends in film school and had them read my script and give me notes.
I did dancing and singing when I was little, and then when I was 12 years old my friends were taking speech and drama at school. They were private lessons, and I started doing that. Over the years everyone else dropped out and I just kept going. I lo...
I once gave a talk at a girls' school and, once I'd finished, 29 out of the 30 girls wanted to be film directors. I think that's where we need to get girls interested in making films. We need to give them the idea that they can, that it's one of the ...