In fourth grade, I missed 82 days of school. Out of 160.
I started programming Apples in seventh grade.
Repeating a grade needs to be the last resort, not an automatic response to a child who is struggling to learn.
My only foray into anything stock-market-related was in my eighth grade social studies class. I have steered clear ever since.
I'd go to the library so I could sit in a big, quiet room and listen to pages being turned. There was a boring librarian who everyone in fifth grade hated. But I loved her because when she would read us stories in her soft voice, she'd turn my head into a snow globe.
I want to make sure kids read by the third grade and are prepared for the fourth grade. As school gets harder and kids get older, the words get bigger... If they don't understand what they are reading, they start to fall back, and their interest in school falls off.
In about 9th grade, an English teacher told me I had a talent to act. He said I should audition for a performing arts high school, so I did on a whim. I got accepted. Then I got accepted at the Julliard School, and by then, I was serious about it.
I played violin and got into that Suzuki program in the second grade.
I have never been jealous. Not even when my dad finished fifth grade a year before I did.
By the fourth grade, I graduated to an erector set and spent many happy hours constructing devices of unknown purpose where the main design criterion was to maximize the number of moving parts and overall size.
I started playing violin in the 5th grade. They had a program in school where you could get out of class to go play instruments. So I raised my hand, left out of class, me and a bunch of my homeboys, just to get out of class for that day. They asked what instrument you wanted to play and I picked the violin.
If you had asked me back in grade school what I wanted to be when I grew up, I would have said my first choice was an actor, but if I couldn't be that, I'd want to be a superhero.
I was born in Patterson, New Jersey, and raised pretty much all around the country. My family tended to move from place to place following economic prospects and jobs and looking for new opportunities, so we changed schools, colleges, grade schools, high schools every 6 months to a year - depending on the breaks.
I didn't only have a perceptual problem, I was also so nervous and so upset. The process just didn't work. I lost enthusiasm for school and I flunked second grade. The teachers said I was lazy.
I started writing stories in sixth grade. But writing wasn't cool, like being good at sports, or being part of the in crowd, or winning fights on the playground.
I wasn't the brightest kid in school. I was a backbencher troubling the frontbencher, and eventually I failed in my 10th grade. But then in higher secondary, there were only three people who got first division in arts, and I was one of them. So this tells you, where you put your mind and heart into, that's where you go.
By the time I had reached the age of 16, in the 10th grade, my parents, after 22 years of marriage, one day decided to get a divorce.
Back in third grade, they used to say, 'Take whatever talent you have and think of something you can do with it.' I liked to draw, but what could I do with it? Maybe I could be an art dealer - nah, can't see myself doing that. Maybe I could do commercial arts?
In fifth grade, we did 10 minutes on slavery and 40 minutes on Abraham Lincoln, and in 10th grade you might do 10 minutes on the civil rights era and 40 minutes on Martin Luther King, and that's it.
I was raised a Catholic on both sides of the family. I went to a Catholic grade school and thought everybody in the country was Catholic, because that's all I ever was associated with.
I finished all the math books by third grade and most of the reading books. So I was considered disruptive.
Educating girls just one year beyond the average fourth grade education increases their eventual earnings by 10 to 20 percent. Every additional year of secondary education can increase future wages by 15 to 25 percent.
I do recall loving 'All Quiet on the Western Front,' and I know I read it in a schoolroom, but I think I was in the sixth grade at the time, so it probably wasn't assigned reading.
At 49, I find it a little bit difficult to run these days. I've got grade four tears in both Achilles, shin splints, I got no cartilage the toes in my right foot, I've got bone marrow edemas under both knees, I've got one degenerating hip - that's the problem you get.
Kids from financially distressed households are twice as likely to have to repeat a grade and more than two-and-a-half more times to struggle with poor health later in life.
In the end, I did end up repeating seventh grade.
In the fourth grade, I learned how to fake walking into a door. You know, you hit it with your hand and snap your head back. The girls loved it.
I had a bad time in school in the first grade. Because I had been a rather lonely child on a farm, but I was free and wild and to be shut up in a classroom - there were 40 children on those days in the classroom, and it was quite a shock.
Let's put in place programs to ensure that all of our children are reading by third grade.
My father gave me an old Olympia portable when I was in fourth grade. Our ancestors came from Ireland. Our family stories of immigration helped me understand more about my characters in 'The Lemon Orchard.'
In retrospect, I think I had some kind of learning disorder. I could kind of charm my way through grade school, but in high school... I could never seem to grasp things.
I think every parent knows that, like, boys and girls are different. And we just don't take that into account in schools on those things like required reading lists. 'Cause that was my experience, say, with my son, who had to read 'Little House on the Prairie' when he was in third grade.
Every year, I speak to our new associates and give them this advice, although in my own words. 'This isn't like school,' I tell them, 'where you want to get your hand in the air and give an answer quickly. The only grade here is 100. Deadlines are important, but at Blackstone you can always get help in meeting them.'
I quit school in the sixth grade because of pneumonia. Not because I had it, but because I couldn't spell it.
I was bullied in first grade, and it's definitely not fun. But always tell somebody instead of holding it in. Communicate with people and just say, 'Hey, I'm being bullied. I need help.'
I was one of those weird kids who didn't really speak or smile. I remember my teachers would call home and ask if everything was fine at home because I would never smile. Then I got into this phase, from maybe fourth to eighth grade, where my personality just did a 180.
