I lost relatives to AIDS. A couple of my closest cousins, favorite cousins. I lost friends to AIDS, high school friends who never even made it to their 21st birthdays in the '80s. When it's that close to you, you can't - you know, you can't really de...
We go to school so that when we grow up we can make lots of money, and we make lots of money so we can provide for our children, and we have children to provide for our retirement (because we don’t have any money left).
Voters inclined to loathe and fear elite Ivy League schools rarely make fine distinctions between Yale and Harvard. All they know is that both are full of rich, fancy, stuck-up and possibly dangerous intellectuals who never sit down to supper in thei...
I confess myself utterly at a loss in suggesting particular reforms in our ways of teaching. No discretion that can be lodged with a school-committee, with the overseers or visitors of an academy, of a college, can at all avail to reach these difficu...
Clearing your head of everything you thought you knew, even your most cherished ideas, will give you the mental space to be educated by your present experience--the best school of all. You will develop your own strategic muscles instead of depending ...
When I was younger, I did a TV show in the U.K. for a couple years, and I learned a lot from that. It taught me a lot about being known amongst your peers and having to deal with a lot of derision from them. It's not easy being known as 'the kid from...
I like to imagine that library school was started because of some sort of silly bar bet where a guy got really plastered and told his buddy that he could convince people that librarians needed to be trained in the art of librarianship. Sadly, this is...
I went to law school. And I became a prosecutor. I took on a specialty that very few choose to pursue. I prosecuted child abuse and child homicide cases. Cases that were truly gut-wrenching. But standing up for those kids, being their voice for justi...
There are something like 300 anti-genocide chapters on college campuses around the country. It's bigger than the anti-apartheid movement. There are something like 500 high school chapters devoted to stopping the genocide in Darfur. Evangelicals have ...
Every maker of video games knows something that the makers of curriculum don't seem to understand. You'll never see a video game being advertised as being easy. Kids who do not like school will tell you it's not because it's too hard. It's because it...
I know these are going to sound like school reading-list suggestions, but if you like dystopian fiction, you should check out some of the originals: 'Anthem,' by Ayn Rand; '1984,' by George Orwell; or 'Brave New World,' by Aldous Huxley.
Like many a Yank before me, I have tried to explain to European friends that Americans actually know soccer quite well, that many of us played it in school and college, but that, well, we just don't find it quite as exciting as, say, what we call foo...
When I graduated high school, nearly a half-million people subscribed to 'Popular Electronics' magazine. Soldering up some radio or hi-fi amplifier on the basement workbench was not just a personal passion - a lot of young people were doing the same....
I've only auditioned for one non-culturally specific role. I went through drama school and studied classic texts and played lead roles in 'Measure for Measure' and 'The Importance of Being Earnest' alongside a very culturally diverse group of acting ...
Schools across India do not have teachers, libraries, playing grounds and even toilets. I do not want to see empty classrooms, empty libraries. I do not want to see cattle grazing on fields meant to be cricket or football grounds.
Rhode Island works hard to reduce air pollution in our communities. We passed laws to prohibit cars and buses from idling their engines and to retrofit school buses with diesel pollution controls. But there is only so much a single state can do, part...
My father died during open-heart surgery on March 29 of my senior year in college. I was getting set to go to law school. I remember sitting in the waiting room when the doctor walked in. I said to myself, The worst possible thing just happened. What...
It's not like Alaska isn't wilderness - it mostly is. But most Alaskans don't live in the wild. They live on the edge of the wild in towns with schools and cable TV and stores and dentists and roller rinks sometimes. It's just like anyplace else, onl...
I feel lucky in that I don't really have to go to college to study something job-specific. I just want to go to learn about what is interesting to me and learn about the classes that you don't really get to take in high school because you have to tak...
I'm Asian-American, and I was the only Chinese girl growing up in a white school in San Diego. So I understood what it was like to be different, to always want to fit in and never feel like you ever could.
You only have to look at London, where almost half of all primary school children speak English as a second language, to see the challenges we now face as a country. This isn't fair to anyone: how can people build relationships with their neighbours ...
