I didn't know exactly what I wanted to do in school, but I definitely didn't have adequate time to reach my full potential as a student.
I think about the milestones from my childhood and what it will be like to watch our kids go through them. Taking Riley to her first day of school was a whirlwind. I can't imagine what middle school is going to be like, and high school, and graduation.
It's always so nerve-wracking being up there on stage. It's even harder playing in your hometown - and I have a couple of home towns - but, you're playing for all the people you knew in high school, so it causes no small degree of panic in my mind.
Maybe not many women are going to film school.
I'm simply the mom who makes the lunch, drives to school, finds where the toys are, washes the clothes, and I'm here to play. And that's all I should be.
I first got into acting when I was 14, coming back from a junior high school basketball game. My mom picked me up and she had been mentioning, prior to that, this community production of 'Godspell', a couple towns over. I was reluctant, at first, and she bribed me with some great dinner that was in that town, neighboring the theater.
I definitely want to make it very clear to everybody that the educational institution that we have, the school that Will and I have, is not a Scientology school. And that, you know, I know there's been, you know, a lot of buzz around that idea and that it is not my desire to, you know, teach Scientology at all.
People I knew in high school have gone in many directions, as I have gone in my particular direction. They now have different and absorbing interests of their own, just as I have mine.
I went out with the same girl throughout all four years of high school.
I was a pretty delinquent little kid. My folks and I didn't get along, so I basically moved out... put myself through high school and then college by working. I'm only a half-year short of a degree in history.
In high school, my mom's friend was a location scout, and there was a shoot at our house. I came home from school, and the photographer said, 'You should call my friend at this agency.'
I went to a dentist for a toothache, and it turned out his kids were in an acting school. We talked about it, and I decided to enroll at the same school. I was 14. I guess you could say I just got lucky.
The biggest barrier we've seen to student progress is this: School policies and practices often prevent good teachers from doing great work and even dissuade some talented Americans from entering the profession. This needs to change.
I went to film school, trained as a director, have made a lot of movies, and taken a lot of photographs, so I tend to envision things spatially. As I'm working, I need to have a map of the space. I need to know what's happening in all corners simultaneously.
I started training with school friends and, one by one, they all dropped out. When we became teenagers, it seemed more exciting to go shopping at weekends. My mum told me not to worry about what my friends were doing and to stick at it.
It's been a twisty-turny path for me. I was studying to be a history professor, and then I left that, went to film school, and tried to be like my heroes, like, Spike Lee and Hal Hartly.
Read something of interest every day - something of interest to you, not to your teacher or your best friend or your minister/rabbi/priest. Comics count. So does poetry. So do editorials in your school newspaper. Or a biography of a rock star. Or an instructional manual. Or the Bible.
Since my high school years, I have been interested in history, especially in Roman history, a topic on which I have read rather extensively. The Latin that goes with this kind of interest proved useful when I had to generate a few terms and names for cell biology.
After school, I'd wait for someone to pick me up and no one would, so I'd be like, 'I guess I'll walk home.' I had to be a hustler, because nobody did anything for me.
I wanted to be an animator originally. I went to art school; I went to art college and everything. But that screen was just calling me.
I grew up in Indiana. My first four years of elementary were in the gym where Coach Wooden went to high school.
I've been fortunate to be working mostly right out of school. Every year, there was a little something, and it kept the confidence going. It's about confidence and the belief.
I went to law school after college.
Capitalism would have never let me be a filmmaker, living in Flint, Michigan with a high school education. I was going to have to make that happen myself.
I've always been able to be firm, to talk my way out of sticky situations. Bullies at school. Attempted muggings.
I hated school, didn't like the discipline.
I was pretty strict in high school about who I would listen to. Musicians like Neil Young, Cat Stevens, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell... who were, in my opinion, great writers. The music mattered, but it held hands with the lyrics, and the personality was, overall, unsullied.
I struggled in school. Math and science were difficult for me. But I can watch 10 guys play, and I can tell you what everybody did. It might be a curse because when you see everything, sometimes you don't let your kids play.
I've never done fashion school or anything like that. But I have good instincts.
What SAT tutoring does is it invisibly alters the admissions pool so a school could try to be as egalitarian as they can, but if a student is SAT-tutored, and their score goes up 200 points in a year, and the college admissions committee has no idea that the student got tutored, all of a sudden it's shifting the pool back toward old money.
I left the North when I was 21 to go to drama school in London, and I stayed there 12 years.
I was born in Mexico because my father was teaching at a school in Mexico City. I was born during the third year he was there. And when I was 16, I returned to Mexico to learn Spanish.
My family moved a lot as a kid. We started in Colorado, where I lived for five years. We moved to Chicago for two years, to San Francisco for one year, Connecticut for seven, Oregon for a couple years, and then I went to school.
I'm one of those people who really liked high school. I know that might not be a popular thing to say, but it was fun, and I enjoyed my friends.
I was far too embarrassed to share the experience of Indian food at school. As a kid, you're desperate to fit in, to assimilate in some way, and everything about me stood out.
In high school, my two older brothers ran track. They'd come home sweaty and mud-covered, and I could tell they enjoyed it. So I started running - I ran a mile down the road and back again - and I haven't stopped since.
