As a teenager and a student, I totally cast away the Christian faith. I just believed it was stupid, and only stupid people could believe it. I actually became an anti-Christian, and very antagonistic.
Since I was an atheist for many years and came to believe in God through my studies in science, it frustrated me to see students and parents who viewed faith and science as enemies.
Common Core, the initiative that claims to more accurately measure K-12 student knowledge in English and math, also encourages children to step up their 'critical thinking.'
Here, class attendance is expected and students are required to take notes, which they are tested on. What is missing, it seems to me, is the use of knowledge, the practical training.
I was a student at Peking University for close to a decade, while a so-called 'knowledge explosion' was rapidly expanding. I was searching for not just knowledge, but also to mold a temperament, to cultivate a scholarly outlook.
I became an atheist because, as a graduate student studying quantum physics, life seemed to be reducible to second-order differential equations. Mathematics, chemistry and physics had it all. And I didn't see any need to go beyond that.
The student body was huge at UT and you had to mature pretty quick, very quick actually. I enjoyed it and it helped me a lot in my life in general - not only in the classroom but on the baseball field as well.
A surprising number of people - including many students of literature - will tell you they haven't really lived in a book since they were children. Sadly, being taught literature often destroys the life of the books.
The novel is about five students of classics who are studying with a classics professor, and they take the ideas of the things that they're learning from him a bit too seriously, with terrible consequences.
When you're too robotic and scripted, the students tune you out. So I always tried to use different learning modalities - kinesthetic, auditory, visual, whatever might bring learning to life.
I tell students, 'If you are learning from YouTube I almost don't want to teach you because what you learn from YouTube it takes 10 times as long to unlearn.' They do an approximation of the centre of the note, an approximation of the interpretation,...
As for the symphonic activities... when I was a student at the Eastman School of Music, I became exposed to a lot more musical forms, elements, opportunities, and I fell in love with strings and their uses.
When I was in college, I was the editor of the literary magazine and insisted neither the editors nor the writers be specifically identified-only our student numbers appeared on the title page. I love that idea and still do.
My students frequently ask what their next project should be. My advice: immerse yourself in the music you love and you will find what you want to do; you will discover your next project.
Today's tax cuts provide yet another illustration of the Republicans' fiscally irresponsible economic policies that ignore the needs of America's middle class, students, and working families.
Being a former theater student, of course, there is a part of me that is fascinated with stage crafts and what you can do with illusions and working within the confines of the studio.
There is a vast difference - a constitutional difference-between restrictions imposed by the state which prohibit the intellectual commingling of students, and the refusal of individuals to commingle where the state presents no such bar.
To those of you who received honours, awards and distinctions, I say well done. And to the C students, I say you, too, can be president of the United States.
I no longer teach law. But when I did I advised my students that they should never accept a case if it meant that by doing so you couldn't sleep at night.
When West End Girls came out on import, I was a student at Liverpool University. I'd go to a club in Liverpool and it would come on, and I'd be really embarrassed.
Perhaps I occasionally sought to give, or inadvertently gave, to the student a sense of battle on the intellectual battlefield. If all you do is to give them a faultless and complete and uninhabited architectural masterpiece, then you do not help the...
