I am one of the facilitators, helping to make the voice of Hongkongers heard in the international community. I also organize student class boycotts and provide assistance for high school students.
One can make a case that says that since 85% of children being brought up in single family homes are being brought up by women that about 85% of elementary school teachers should be males to balance out the feminization that the boys and girls receive.
I played trumpet in middle school, and then I had to get braces, so I had to stop playing trumpet and start playing drums.
In third grade, I played basketball with the boys every day at lunch. I had braces that were yellow and purple, and I wore full Laker uniforms to school.
When I was 13, I started working in a nightclub with Ray Charles. That's the greatest school in the world, the school of the streets. Ray taught me how to read in Braille. He was only two years older than me, but it was like he was 100 years older.
Beauty school gave me brain damage.
Dr. Einstein was not successful in school, but he found something in the air from his own imagination and his own brain power, and look what he did.
Brain power improves by brain use, just as our bodily strength grows with exercise. And there is no doubt that a large proportion of the female population, from school days to late middle age, now have very complicated lives indeed.
For some reason, we're brainwashed to think if you're not a thug or an idiot, you're not black enough. If you go to school, make good grades, speak intelligent, and don't break the law, you're not a good black person.
Even if we give parents all the information they need and we improve school meals and build brand new supermarkets on every corner, none of that matters if when families step into a restaurant, they can't make a healthy choice.
Growing up in the suburbs, I used to listen to punk rock, Brand New, Taking Back Sunday. And no one from my high school listened to it.
When I was a youth, to be called 'African' was a diss. At school, the African kids used to lie and say they were Jamaican. So when I first came in the game, and I'm saying lyrics like, 'I make Nigerians proud of their tribal scars/ My bars make you push up your chest like bras,' that was a big deal for me.
Back before I entered primary school, I liked to draw, even though I was a brat. I especially liked animals and vehicles, and I drew that sort of thing constantly.
I grew up with this crazy upbringing of living many places and always being the new kid in town, not like a service brat where you're always going to school with other new kids in town. I was constantly arriving in small towns and going to school with kids who'd been together since they were in kindergarten.
If you are at a boys' school, especially, there is a level of bravado that you have to keep up otherwise you'll get picked on.
It's a brave new world. I'm 42 years old. I certainly wasn't out in high school.
I know these are going to sound like school reading-list suggestions, but if you like dystopian fiction, you should check out some of the originals: 'Anthem,' by Ayn Rand; '1984,' by George Orwell; or 'Brave New World,' by Aldous Huxley.
I had great relationship with the Hispanic - we had a lot of Hispanics in the school actually from different countries, Venezuela, from Brazil, and they all played soccer, and I was on the soccer team, and I developed great relationships with them.
Like a lot of inwardly drawn young people, I spent a lot of time in libraries. At my high school, I often spent my lunch breaks there.
I grew up in the Methodist church and taught Sunday school, and one of my favorite passages of scripture is, 'in as much as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.' Matthew 25:40.
