I was always drawn to teachers who made class interesting. In high school, I enjoyed my American and English literature classes because my teachers, Jeanne Dorsey and Dani Barton, created an environment where interaction was important.
The claim that SpongeBob makes your child dumber is a causal claim. If you do X, Y will happen. To prove that, you'd have to show that if you forced the children in the no-TV households to watch SpongeBob and changed nothing else about their lives, t...
I don't know if I have a memory of not thinking I was a writer - it goes that far back. I went to law school because I didn't know how to earn a living otherwise. I tried to ignore the pull, but it wouldn't let me.
One of the reasons the doctors gave for hospitalizing me against my will was that I was 'gravely disabled.' To support this view, they wrote in my chart that I was unable to do my Yale Law School homework. I wondered what that meant about much of the...
Born Berlin 1931, Germany, father a British diplomat, mother an American artist. Educated at various schools all over the world. 1958 Settled down to live in London. 1966 Became interested in photography through photographing my young children. No fo...
'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.
In high school, during lunchtime I would go in the room where the wrestling mats were and try different flips and different moves. Like windmills. I just started mixing martial arts with jazz and contemporary stuff and it would get mashed together an...
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.
I wasn't really geeky. In terms of the high school hierarchy, I was very much in the middle ground. You have the really popular guys, you have the nerdy guys, and then you have the people who really don't care - and that was me. I wasn't really picke...
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...
When I graduated from high school, I made the decision to pursue my dance training in London, England. I was so scared at first, not knowing if this little girl from small town Canada could possibly make it with these highly trained London dancers.
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...
Mark Wahlberg, when I was in high school, people were like, 'You look like Marky Mark!' Then as I got older, they were like, 'You look like Donnie Wahlberg.' Now they're like, 'You look like Donnie Wahlberg's cousin from Massachusetts.'
I've been caught in parachute pants. And on my high school yearbook, they used the wrong picture. They were supposed to use the picture of me with a nice suit on. They used me with my collar flipped up, in a fuchsia and white striped shirt. I blame P...
