When I was a teenager, I remember the extraordinary feeling of accomplishment for completing 'Vanity Fair.' I don't think it was even for school.
After completing a Delaware State education, they were afforded opportunities beyond anything they might have imagined - and they opened doors for themselves that surely would have remained closed if they only had a high school education.
One has complexes. One has the art complex. One goes to the School of Fine Arts and catches the complexes.
As far as skincare goes, I'm from the school of 'you are what you eat.' I always promote a vegan lifestyle, not just because it's great for our environment and for humanity, but because if you cut out dairy, for example, there's scientific proof that it can actually help your complexion.
Before my father would open up a karate school in a particular neighborhood, he'd clean up the block - kick all the drug dealers and gang bangers off the block. My father was very clear: 'I've got guns too, and I'll kill you just as much as a rival gang would.' And he meant it. He was a man of many facets and complexities.
I have a Web site that parents and girls can use to learn about Title IX and take action if they find their school is not in compliance. Thirty years after Title IX passed, 80 percent of schools are not in compliance.
My dad was a composer and a musician, but he never finished high school. His formal education was rather minimal from the standards of today's college graduates and Ph.D.'s, but he had a deep interest in questions of science and questions of the universe.
I've been composing music all my life and if I'd been clever enough at school I would like to have gone to music college.
I'm older than my sister so I started writing first. I started writing at school. I was always top of my class in composition, essays, English Lit and all of that.
I'm an actor. Since I was a teenager, I have had to play different characters, negotiating the cultural expectations of a Pakistani family, Brit-Asian rudeboy culture, and a scholarship to private school. The fluidity of my own personal identity on any given day was further compounded by the changing labels assigned to Asians in general.
My calling was first of all to ensure there was peace in the country, because we could easily have gone back to war. In the midst of the country, there were still warlords; there were many child soldiers who had never gone to school - they were part of the social setting - compromises had to be made.
My maternal grandmother - she was a compulsive reader. She had only been through five grades of elementary school, but she was a member of the municipal library, and she brought home two or three books a week for me. They could be dime novels or Balzac.
It's my goal to make martial arts compulsory for girls in school. In China, you have to do two years of martial arts' training without which you cannot get a graduation degree.
My work was fairly theoretical. It was in recursive function theory. And in particular, hierarchies of functions in terms of computational complexity. I got involved in real computers and programming mainly by being - well, I was interested even as I came to graduate school.
My father taught me Basic and rudimentary C, I learned everything else on my own, including studying computational complexity on my own. That's more a function of my age than anything else though - back when I was in school there were hardly any programming classes.
Just as computer science is missing from our school system, so is science fiction.
If everybody has to take biology and chemistry, they can take computer science. Computer science is a more useful skill right now than a lot of other things that people are learning at school.
Besides, I think that when one has been through a boarding school, especially then, you have some resistance, because it was both fine comradeship and a fairly hard training.
As conservatives, we cannot just concede education over to the Democrats. We really need to be actively involved. And that's why I've been such a proponent of school choice and the other options that are out there, because the Left is clearly out there driving the agenda, trying to shape the minds of the next generation.
I've come up through art school, through painting, through graphic design, through advertising, through TV commercials and music video. I've designed books, built billboards, matchbooks, corporate identities. I continuously paint, I've done conceptual art pictures.
