I never really considered myself attractive. I was always kind of gangly in school.
I had one date in high school - that was it, and he didn't ask me out again, because I was taller than everybody. I was very gangly and awkward, and I wore weird clothes that I made.
I was born tall. I was awkward and gangly. Before that, I was a really chubby elementary school kid. I've always been sort of a physical abnormality.
If a student has access to a great school, Khan Academy can supercharge it. It should help a well-resourced school, and if you don't have that, then Khan Academy can have even a bigger impact. But I don't see it as replacing the actual schools... we want to empower teachers and fill in the gaps.
At 20, I realized that I could not possibly adjust to a feminine role as conceived by my father and asked him permission to engage in a professional career. In eight months I filled my gaps in Latin, Greek and mathematics, graduated from high school, and entered medical school in Turin.
Growing up, at high school, we all used to wear Champion garments, which, in America, are standard-issue gym uniforms.
If I wasn't serving in Congress, I've always wanted to be a high school teacher. Specifically, I want to teach a course on modern American history and use Garry Trudeau's Doonesbury as a primary text.
Part of the great thing of looking back on how I went from the cattle ranch to the White House was, I was a country music DJ. I saw Garth Brooks perform for free in 1992 at the Colorado State Fair where I met this person who knew about this graduate school program.
I come from the school who thought the Internet could be the great democratising force, that getting rid of the gatekeepers was a positive move.
I worked privately, and sometimes I feel that might be better for poets than the kind of social workshop gathering. My school was the great poets: I read, and I read, and I read.
I think by the time I was born, my parents had pretty well run the gauntlet with their kids. The novelty had kind of worn off by the time the twelfth child was born. I was lucky to get fed and changed, picked up and taken to school.
Here's why I cannot vote for Rudy Giuliani. He's pro-abortion. He's never repudiated gay marriage in New York City or at least the civil unions in New York City. He's called a champion of gay rights. Rudy is opposed to school choice. He's in favor of open borders.
I was a total education geek. I loved school. I loved learning. I loved doing homework. All of my books and notebooks from high school are underlined and highlighted and there are notes all over the margins. And you know, I was a theater kid too. I was all over the place.
School was horrific for me, constantly an outcast for being a geek.
I didn't make a lot of friends in high school. It's a cruel time, and I was very geeky.
I loved school, I loved putting on my uniform and doing homework every day. I was one of those good students that the teachers liked. I guess that's got to be a pretty nerdy, geeky part of me.
My sister, when we were in Elementary school, had one particular lime green fuzzy troll doll sweater with a gem sticking out of the belly and actual hair that stuck to it, and I just remember, even though I was very young, being like 'This is unusual. It is weird that she is wearing this in public.'
When general relativity was first put forward in 1915, the math was very unfamiliar to most physicists. Now we teach general relativity to advanced high school students.
In my early days in school, I had no shoes, no school bags. There were days I had only one meal... I walked miles and crossed rivers to school every day. Didn't have power, didn't have generators, studied with lanterns, but I never despaired.
If someone's liver doesn't work, we blame it on the genes; if someone's brain doesn't work properly, we blame the school. It's actually more humane to think of the condition as genetic. For instance, you don't want to say that someone is born unpleasant, but sometimes that might be true.
