When I originally entered UCLA, I had planned to go for a film major, but I kept finding myself taking math classes for fun, 'cause I missed them from high school!
I needed an outlet in high school and came across painting. I've actually been painting longer than I've been acting. A movie is a collaborative effort, and with painting you just have yourself.
When I went to film school about three years ago, the first two years you're required to make a series of short films. I started making films based on short poems.
School allowed me to have outlets so that some of the pressure was taken off the acting. Every role in every movie, I used to live or die by. Once I had these new outlets, I relaxed a lot more.
In high school I became a vegetarian more times than I can now remember, most often as an effort to claim some identity in a world of people whose identities seemed to come effortlessly.
I've always been a sci-fi/fantasy guy. My book reports in school, whenever you didn't have to do it on Shakespeare, I did it on, like, Piers Anthony and Raymond Feist.
It's not that I feel that school is a good idea gone wrong, but a wrong idea from the word go. It's a nutty notion that we can have a place where nothing but learning happens, cut off from the rest of life.
When Christopher and Charles passed away, I was completely depressed, I felt rejected and real down, and so Roscoe invited me because he had this spirit of compassion, and we had gone to school together, were friends and everything.
There has been so much recent talk of progress in the areas of curriculum innovation and textbook revision that few people outside the field of teaching understand how bad most of our elementary school materials still are.
Our political establishment refuses to use the word 'segregated.' They call the schools diverse, which means half black, half Hispanic, and maybe two white kids and three Asians. 'Diverse' has become a synonym for 'segregated.'
Hypersegregated inner-city schools - in which one finds no more than five or ten white children, at the very most, within a student population of as many as 3,000 - are the norm, not the exception, in most northern urban areas today.
Why do men outperform women on the SAT? The SAT's supposed to predict college grades. Women do better in high school and they do better in college. What's the problem here? Ah, the more you use, the more you start accepting that the SAT's coachable, ...
From the early 1960s to the mid-1980s - the era of military dictatorship when South Korea was rebuilding itself from a postwar economic basket case to a humming, modern nation - military schools were the track of choice for ambitious young men.
I actually happened to be in Haiti right before the earthquake in 2010. I was there already with the organization I work with now, Artists for Peace and Justice, visiting the primary school that I had adopted, the Academy for Peace and Justice in Por...
I had a bad time in school in the first grade. Because I had been a rather lonely child on a farm, but I was free and wild and to be shut up in a classroom - there were 40 children on those days in the classroom, and it was quite a shock.
I had never, ever drunk beer in high school, and by the time I got to Tech we were having these parties out in the cotton fields and getting so drunk. I was the champion beer drinker; suddenly I was pouring it down my throat... Insane! Insane!
I read every book there was on jazz, about the original players - King Oliver, Buddy Bolden and all those groups. At one time I was fairly well schooled in that... I could tell you who played where and when, historically, way before my time.
By the time I started high school, I knew I wanted to be a writer. After graduating from Smith College in Massachusetts, I moved to New York City and worked for the advertising agency J. Walter Thompson.
I started singing in coffeehouses when I was still in high school, in Santa Barbara. I took a job washing dishes and busing tables in the coffeehouse, so I could be there, and would beg permission to sing harmony with the guy who was singing onstage....
I wanted to write plays. I was at Yale graduate school at the time for English literature, not for acting... I liked the idea of collaboration, and I thought if I'm gonna write plays, I should learn something about speaking the lines that I might try...
I have never had so much fun as in Montreal. I taught the kids French, I baby-sat, I went to school, I was a receptionist at a hairdresser's, I danced and drank all night. I found that the more you do, the more you have time to do... it's weird, non?
