I got this letter asking me if I wanted to or if I would consider going to experimental test pilot school and becoming the first Negro astronaut and I thought it was crazy.
Second, when comparing private school and public school test scores, it's like apples and oranges. Public schools have to take everyone, but private schools can be selective. It's not accurate or fair to compare the job they do.
I'm a Texan. Some of me is still nestled up there in the Catskill Mountains: the summers I spent with my grandfather on the farm and the guys I played basketball with in high school. But then that was it.
I like to say that journalism is the graduate school from which you never graduate.
Probably the first time I was a boss was when I was associate dean of the graduate school at the University of Southern California. I was in my early 30s.
When I first started out in the industry, I was 12 or whatever, and I wanted to be on something so bad, and I didn't know what I was going to be on. At the time, I was in school, and I was working on drama and theatrical stuff, so I never thought that I'd end up going to comedy.
In 1858 I received the degree of D. S. from the Lawrence Scientific School, and thereafter remained on the rolls of the university as a resident graduate.
I know from my own personal experience. I was bullied in middle school and high school and went through my fair share of hard times thereafter. Also, one of my really good friends committed suicide when I was in high school.
I had accidentally gotten a laugh on a line in a play I was in during high school. I got hooked, but I had no idea I would ever be able to support myself by acting. I knew no one in the business. I was from the Midwest. No one within a radius of a thousand miles was doing anything like that.
It's, like, your classic journey from a drama school. I went straight to the three-year acting degree, and I waitressed throughout that to support myself and for the first six months after I graduated. Then I started to get commercials here and there, and then I got a couple of roles in Australia and then a more regular role on a TV series.
I asked him if he ever hung out with black guys in high school and he said, 'Well, no. They always had these angry looks on their faces. Who wouldn't look ticked off having to deal with nitwits like him?
There were days I forgot my school clothes, and I would actually go to school with skating tights and a little skirt. It's very embarrassing... I definitely had to be comfortable in my own skin, and my mom taught me that.
But I have to say, in my 12 years as the dean of admissions at Yale Law School, there was a lot of legal behaviour that I saw that worried me and that clearly was allowing wealthier and privileged students to tilt the balance in their favour.
I was very lucky because Tim Burton really gave me a career. I don't think Hollywood would've known what to do with me. If I hadn't done 'Beetlejuice,' I think I would've just gone back to my school.
I love biographies. I read Patti Smith's 'Just Kids.' I'm into that time frame in New York, the '70s and '80s. In art school, I read 'Close to the Knives,' the autobiography of the artist and AIDS activist David Wojnarowicz.
Technologically we can deliver the ability of parents to be able to log into a school intranet, be able to see what homework has been set or look at lesson planning, whether the child is attending, see what the timetable is like, all of that is possible and there are some schools that are doing it already.
Pushing Tin,' I went to air traffic control school in Toronto for that. Passed with flying colors, by the way. If I ever become an air traffic controller and I'm the guy in charge of your plane, you're in good hands.
Building and tinkering were such a huge part of our childhood, whether we were trying to entertain ourselves as kids, helping our parents out on the ranch, or getting creative with school projects.
I'm a contract computer scientist by trade, but I'm the founder of something called the Tinkering School. It's a summer program which aims to help kids to learn how to build the things that they think of.
I'm not studious at all. I'm really far from that. I have been better at everything else. I find school terribly tiresome and boring.
