When I was 14 or 15, a camp counselor told me I was smart. I had never been very good in school, but he told me once that I was smart but my mind operated a little differently.
I wanted to get out of Ashland, and I thought it would be pretty cool to go to school in the East. So I asked my guidance counselor what Ivy League schools were. And I applied to Harvard, Yale and Dartmouth - that was it. My guidance counselor told me I wouldn't get into an Ivy League school. So as my act of resistance, that's all I applied to.
I had been tracked from grades 1 through 12 in an accelerated program in the public school system in Memphis and had done well in math and science classes. When I was getting ready for college, my guidance counselors suggested I look into engineering.
Usually, when a young girl is pregnant, she drops out of school and concentrates on being a mother. I thought that's what I had to do, but my counselors told me there was no way they would let me drop out. I had too much promise.
We need mental health counselors in every school that needs one.
I went to my school careers counselors and said I wanted to be an actor, and they didn't know what to do. They showed me catalogues with pretty campuses and said, 'Oh, look, there's a theater building. Why don't you go there?'
In many countries, they do not even keep track of how girls are doing in school, or if they are there at all. If we say, 'Girls count,' then we must count girls, so we can see if we are really making progress in educating every girl.
Remember a few years ago when Congress declared that the sauce on a slice of pizza should count as a vegetable in school lunches? You don't have to be a nutritionist to know that this doesn't make much sense.
Children with obesity and diabetes live harder poorer lives, they often don't finish school and earn much less than their healthy counterparts.
I lived in Meadowbrook. I went to church at Meadowbrook United Methodist Church. I went to school at Meadowbrook Elementary School and then Meadowbrook Middle School. I learned to dance at Meadowbrook Country Club. All those things grounded me in one place and I think most of Fort Worth is just like the area I grew up in.
As a young prosecutor right out of law school at the Alameda County DA's office that Earl Warren once led, I started my work.
I don't type on the computer or edit. Law students who went to law school really just a couple years after I did were brought up all on the computers and that's how they do it, but I was still part of the older school.
Of course, in our grade school, in those days, there were no organized sports at all. We just went out and ran around the school yard for recess.
Bullying wasn't okay in elementary school and it isn't okay now, especially when it comes in the form of a U.S. Supreme Court decision.
I was a ball boy for the Atlanta Falcons; I was a tax assessor - this was all in high school - I was an account assistant at the courthouse, and then I was a real estate assistant.
When I got into all the grunge stuff, I really liked Hole. I actually saw them in concert when I was a sophomore in high school. It was kind of rare to see a successful female rocker get down and dirty with the guys. And Courtney Love did. It was fun to be a fan of something different.
I went to public high school in Scottsdale, Arizona, and I certainly wore a lot of makeup in high school. I experimented with a cat eye for a semester, and then, you know, a strong red lip because Courtney Love in Hole was all the rage.
I remember in high school thinking that I wanted to be a lawyer, and now I realize I saw that movie 'And Justice for All' when I was a kid and thought, 'That's what lawyers do, and I want to get up and yell and scream in the middle of a courtroom.'
I didn't realize until high school that the man wearing a cowboy hat on the poster in our garage was actually Ronald Reagan, so my parents just - it was how we were, I grew up on five acres of land in Flagstaff, Arizona and we really just lived a conservative lifestyle.
So I would always try and be the lightest I could. In high school, I really wouldn't eat. I would only have lunch and I would only have salads. And then it got so crazy as to just eating like a cracker or a cucumber a day and I would feel full.
