I went to a Catholic school but did not really fit in.
I was raised in a Catholic school, and I would always go to church on Sunday, and I would hear the same music over and over and over and over again, same gospels, hymns, everything.
When I left my Catholic school, I was around 10 or 11 years old, and it started to unravel for me there. Kids pick up on things if you're interested and inquisitive. I was seeing things that were not in line with what I'd been taught about Jesus. It didn't jive with me.
My family is Catholic. I went to a Catholic school, that kind of thing, so that was my childhood for sure.
I attended private Catholic schools in Paris and Los Angeles through high school.
Catholic schools in Indonesia routinely accept non-Catholic students, but exempt them from studying religion. Obama's school documents, though, wrongly list him as being Indonesian.
My biggest problem in middle school was catty girls, cliques, and trying to figure out if I wanted to be a part of one of those, just figuring out who I was and all that.
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, they would do worse in school.
I began to write poetry in high school, and would ride miles over sandy roads in the fine hills around Cedar Rapids, repeating the lines over and over until I had them right, making some of the rhythm of the horse help.
I knew what I wanted to do when I was 13 and I had to go through four years of high school to get out. That's a blessing, because I never had to lay on my bed staring up at the ceiling going, 'What am I going to do with my life?'
As a family, we didn't get into the celebrity thing. That's not what we wanted for the boys. We wanted them to play everything they could, be involved in as many school events as they could.
My parents were vegetarians. I'd show up at school, this giant black kid, with none of the cool clothes and a tofu sandwich and celery sticks.
Pizza certainly has its place in school meals, but equating it with broccoli, carrots and celery seriously undermines this nation's efforts to support children's health and their ability to learn because of better school nutrition.
Living on $6 a day means you have a refrigerator, a TV, a cell phone, your children can go to school. That's not possible on $1 a day.
I was a good novice teacher, but I did the things that were obvious. I stayed for lunch for extra tutoring, gave kids my cell phone, and was available. In my first year of teaching, I ended up doubling the math time that a conventional school would have. But I don't think any of these things were path-breaking or unusual.
When I was going to school in, like, '84 to '88, you didn't have cell phones. There was no e-mail, if you can wrap your brain around that.
When I was four, we had to choose a musical instrument to play at school, and I chose the cello. I played until I was 18, and although I found it nerve-racking to play solo, I loved playing in an orchestra. When I left school I didn't carry on with it, which I regret.
When I was going through school, I joined the Lyceum Youth Theatre, and that kind of cemented it. Through being in and around the building and watching shows, I realised that there was something I really loved about it, so I went into the stage management side.
When we learned about Salem at school, the whole thing was confusing. Because the idea of the witch hunt is used as a symbol to describe people searching for something that's basically untrue, it cemented in my mind as a kid that witches weren't real.
I'm from the old school - you go where the power is, and you try to make fun of it. When it becomes off limits to say or do certain things without being brutalized or censored or whatever, it's unfortunate.
