Because most of the girls were still in mourning and all of them had lost their textbooks, even pencils and pens, Shaukat Ali began the first classes by reading to them from poetry and religious texts. "Reading, literature, and spirituality are good ...
If I had been armed with a feminist understanding that no girl deserves to be called a slut, perhaps I would have fought back by reporting the harassment to my school's headmistress or another school authority, or at least I might have had the streng...
Many suburban legislators representing affluent school districts use terms such as "sinkhole" when opposing funding for Chicago's children. "We can't keep throwing money," said Governor Thompson in 1988, "into a black hole." The Chicago Tribune notes...
The first time you share tea with a Balti, you are a stranger. The second time you take tea, you are an honored guest. The third time you share a cup of tea, you become family, and for our family, we are prepared to do anything, even die.
If we try to resolve terrorism with military might and nothing else, then we will be no safer than we were before 9/11. If we truly want a legacy of peace for our children, we need to understand that this is a war that will ultimately be won with boo...
Profound silence would brood over the valley, even weighing down our spirits with indefinable heaviness. There can be no other place in the world where man feels himself so alone, so isolated, so completely ignored by nature, so incapable of entering...
At most schools, the social, intellectual, and spiritual components are confined to separate experiential spheres. We party, we learn, and we contemplate the metaphysical, but we rarely do all three simultaneously and en masse. Maybe most college stu...
Aesthetic value emanates from the struggle between texts: in the reader, in language, in the classroom, in arguments within a society. Aesthetic value rises out of memory, and so (as Nietzsche saw) out of pain, the pain of surrendering easier pleasur...
Schooling that children are forced to endure—in which the subject matter is imposed by others and the “learning” is motivated by extrinsic rewards and punishments rather than by the children’s true interests—turns learning from a joyful act...
In middle school I played against you once. And lost. I was so frustrated that I continued practicing even after I retired... And then when I entered high school, hell yeah, I laughed. The guy I vowed to defeat no matter what was standing right in fr...
I finished my first novel - it was around 300 pages long - when I was 16. Wrote one more before I got out of high school, then wrote the first Lincoln Perry novel when I was 19. It didn't sell, but I liked the character and I knew the world so I trie...
I ended up dropping out of high school. I'm a high school dropout, which I'm not proud to say, ... I had some teachers that I still think of fondly and were amazing to me. But I had other teachers who said, 'You know what? This dream of yours is a ho...
Michael: Did you explain school to him? Elliot: How do you explain school to higher intelligence? Michael: Maybe he's not that smart. Maybe he's like a worker bee who only knows how to push buttons or something. Elliot: [knowingly] He is too smart. M...
Divya Narendra: You invented something in high school too, right? Mark Zuckerberg: An app for an MP3 player that recognizes your taste in music. Divya Narendra: Anybody try to buy it? Mark Zuckerberg: Microsoft. Divya Narendra: Wow. How much? Mark Zu...
Come with me if you want to live.” Neva stared at the enormous hand the stranger extended her. Her gaze followed the black leather-clad arm up to the massive shoulders, the strong jaw, and the thick lock of wavy blonde hair hanging over his dark gl...
Nobody feels ashamed of going to the dentist; it’s socially appropriate to take care of your teeth, even preventively. In short, it’s more normal to take care of our dental health than our mental health . . . it’s more acceptable to care for ou...
The Lord teaches us of His grace and the Gospel through difficult children. We learn what it's like to love like He loved. It is there, in our personal upper room, where we learn to wash the feet of those that are betraying us. It is there, kneeling ...
People always complain that they can't do this and they can't do that." "If we look at our lives and concentrate on things that we don't have or wish to have, that doesn't change the circumstances. The truth is that we have to focus on what we have a...
I held out a lead figurine of Hades—the little Mythomagic statue Nico had abandoned when he fled camp last winter. Nico hesitated. "I don’t play that game anymore. It’s for kids." "It’s got four thousand attack power," I coaxed. "Five thousan...
No matter what I see, I always think, “They just don’t make them like they used to.” Well, except for kids. People still make children the way they always have, though I am working on a product that’ll make the process 100% more efficient. It...
I’m pretty sure all the individuals trying to control other people’s happiness have none in their own lives.
