Her eyes beginning to water, she went on, So I would like you all to make me a promise. From now on, on your way to school, or on your way home, find something beautiful to notice. It doesn't have to be something you see it could be a scent - perhaps of freshly baked bread wafting out of someone's house, or it could be the sound of the breeze slightly rustling the leaves in the trees, or the way the morning light catches the autumn leaf as it falls gently to the ground. Please look for these things, and cherish them. For, although it may sound trite to some, these things are the stuff of life. The little things we are put here on earth to enjoy. The things we often take for granted. We must make it important to notice them, for at any time...it can all be taken away. The class was completely quiet. We all picked up our books and filed out of the room silently. That afternoon, I noticed more things on my way home from school than I had that whole semester. Every once in a while, I think of that teacher and remember what an impression she made on all of us, and I try to appreciate all of those things that sometimes we all overlook. Take notice of something special you see on your lunch hour today. Go barefoot. Or walk on the beach at sunset. Stop off on the way home tonight to get a double-dip ice cream cone. For as we get older, it is not the things we did that we often regret, but the things we didn't do. Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away.
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Morning Is Yellow Like A Desk Is Square
He always wanted to explain things. But no one cared. So he drew. Sometimes he would draw and it wasn't anything. He wanted to carve it in stone or write it in the sky. He would lie out on the grass and look up in the sky. And it would be only him and the sky and the things inside him that needed saying. And it was after that he drew the picture. It was a beautiful picture. He kept it under his pillow and would let no one see it. And he would look at it every night and think about it. And when it was dark, and his eyes were closed, he could still see it. And it was all of him. And he loved it. When he started school he brought it with him. Not to show anyone, but just to have with him like a friend. It was funny about school. He sat in a square brown desk Like all the other square brown desks And he thought it should be red And his room was a square brown room. Like all the other rooms. And it was tight and close. And stiff. He hated to hold the pencil and chalk, With his arm stiff and his feet flat on the floor. Stiff. With the teacher watching and watching. The teacher came and spoke to him. She told him to wear a tie like all the other boys. He said he didn't like them. And she said it didn't matter. After that they drew. And he drew all yellow and it was the way he felt about morning. And it was beautiful. The teacher came and smiled at him. 'What's this?' she said. 'Why don't you draw something like Ken's drawing? Isn't it beatiful?' After that his mother bought him a tie. And he always drew airplanes and rocket ships like everyone else. And he threw the old picture away. And when he lay alone looking at the sky, It was big and blue and all of everything, But he wasn't anymore. He was square inside. And brown. And his hands were stiff. And he was like everyone else. And the things inside him that needed saying didn't need it anymore. It had stopped pushing. It was crushed. Stiff. Like everything else.
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Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul
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I always tell people that I became a writer not because I went to school but because my mother took me to the library. I wanted to become a writer so I could see my name in the card catalog.
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Don't let them fool ya, Or even try to school ya! Oh, no! We've got a mind of our own, So go to hell if what you're thinking is not right! Love would never leave us alone, A-yin the darkness there must come out to light.
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Toward education marriage nervous breakdown, operation, teaching school, and learning to be mad, in a dream—what is this life?
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Friendship is the hardest thing in the world to explain. It's not something you learn in school. But if you haven't learned the meaning of friendship, you really haven't learned anything.
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The true beloveds of this world are in their lover's eyes lilacs opening, ship lights, school bells, a landscape, remembered conversations, friends, a child's Sunday, lost voices, one's favorite suit, autumn and all seasons, memory, yes, it being the earth and water of existence, memory.
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Let me tell you a story. The day after Columbine, I was interviewed for the Tom Brokaw news program. The reporter had been assigned a theory and was seeking sound bites to support it. Wouldn't you say, she asked, that killings like this are influenced by violent movies? No, I said, I wouldn't say that. But what about 'Basketball Diaries'? She asked. Doesn't that have a scene of a boy walking into a school with a machine gun? The obscure 1995 Leonardo Di Caprio movie did indeed have a brief fantasy scene of that nature, I said, but the movie failed at the box office, and it's unlikely the Columbine killers saw it. The reporter looked disappointed, so I offered her my theory. Events like this, I said, if they are influenced by anything, are influenced by news programs like your own. When an unbalanced kid walks into a school and starts shooting, it becomes a major media event. Cable news drops ordinary programming and goes around the clock with it. The story is assigned a logo and a theme song; These two kids were packaged as the Trench Coat Mafia. The message is clear to other disturbed kids around the country: If I shoot up my school, I can be famous. The TV will talk about nothing else but me. Experts will try to figure out what I was thinking. The kids and teachers at school will see they shouldn't have messed with me. I'll go out in a blaze of glory.
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The most unfair thing about life is the way it ends. I mean, life is tough. It takes up a lot of your time. And then you die. What's that? A bonus? I think the life-cycle is all backwards. You should die first and get it all over with. Then you live in an old age home. You get kicked out when you're too young. You get a gold watch. You go to work. You work forty years until you're young enough to enjoy your retirement. You do drugs, alcohol and party. You get ready for high school. You go to grade school and become a kid. You play. You have no responsibilities. You become a little baby & go back into the womb. You spend your last nine months floating... Then, you finish off as an orgasm. I like it.
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What I want to fix your attention on is the vast overall movement towards the discrediting, and finally the elimination, of every kind of human excellence -- moral, cultural, social or intellectual. And is it not pretty to notice how 'democracy' (in the incantatory sense) is now doing for us the work that was once done by the most ancient dictatorships, and by the same methods The basic proposal of the new education is to be that dunces and idlers must not be made to feel inferior to intelligent and industrious pupils. That would be 'undemocratic.' Children who are fit to proceed may be artificially kept back, because the others would get a trauma by being left behind. The bright pupil thus remains democratically fettered to his own age group throughout his school career, and a boy who would be capable of tackling Aeschylus or Dante sits listening to his coeval's attempts to spell out A CAT SAT ON A MAT. We may reasonably hope for the virtual abolition of education when 'I'm as good as you' has fully had its way. All incentives to learn and all penalties for not learning will vanish. The few who might want to learn will be prevented who are they to overtop their fellows And anyway, the teachers -- or should I say nurses -- will be far too busy reassuring the dunces and patting them on the back to waste any time on real teaching. We shall no longer have to plan and toil to spread imperturbable conceit and incurable ignorance among men.
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He who opens a school door, closes a prison.
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Where, after all, do universal human rights begin? In small places, close to home—so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any map of the world. Yet they are the world of the individual person: The neighbourhood he lives in; the school or college he attends; the factory, farm or office where he works. Such are the places where every man, woman and child seeks equal justice, equal opportunity, equal dignity without discrimination. Unless these rights have meaning there, they have little meaning anywhere. Without concerted citizen action to uphold them close to home, we shall look in vain for progress in the larger world.
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But there are advantages to being elected President. The day after I was elected, I had my high school grades classified Top Secret.
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A Christian is nothing but a sinful man who has put himself to school for Christ for the honest purpose of becoming better.
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If you promise not to believe everything your child says happens at school, I'll promise not to believe everything he says happens at home.
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The need is increasing because standards are trickling down, and school is becoming more demanding. Graduation requirements have been increasing. Kindergarten is now what first grade used to be. It's the nature of the technological society in which we live.
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Frank Well, uh I guess I, deep down, am feeling a little confused. I mean, suddenly, you get married, and you're supposed to be this entirely different guy. I don't feel different. I mean, take yesterday for example. We were out at the Olive Garden for dinner, which was lovely. And uh, I happen to look over at a certain point during the meal and see a waitress taking an order, and I found myself wondering what color her underpants might be. Her panties. Uh, odds are they are probably basic white, cotton, underpants. But I sort of think well maybe they're silk panties, maybe it's a thong. Maybe it's something really cool that I don't even know about. You know, and uh, and I started feeling... what what I thought we were in the trust tree in the nest, were we not
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The school is the last expenditure upon which America should be willing to economize.
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This man used to go to school with his dog. Then they were separated. His dog graduated!
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When I Grow Up When I grow up, I wonder if people will be more afraid to cry than they are to die. Will I be able to see a rainbow in a small-filled sky. Will there be any trees left, if not how will the planet survive. Will there be a website at www.lifeairsupply.com. When I grow up, if I got bored and had nothing to do and me and my son built a canoe and water that was once blue would be so poluted it would give us the flu. Will a thousand dollars be enough for a shoe. Will I have to be like you, letting money make the decision for everything that I do. When I grow up, will the existance of dolphins and whales just be a story I tell, starting with Once upon a time and ending with where did we fail. Will adults be the hammer and nail. Will schools be next door to jails. Will the truth be illegal for sale. When I grow up, will people be on the news for anything besides killing. Will those drug dealers still be outside of my building. Will they ever learn how to love or are they still afraid of the feeling. Will tv and music videos still raise America's children. Will students go home from school in a bullet proof bus. What if children had no one to trust, that would hurt me so much and i just want to be happy, when i grow up.
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Where, after all, do universal human rights begin? In small places, close to home - so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any maps of the world. Yet they are the world of the individual person; the neighborhood he lives in; the school or college he attends; the factory, farm, or office where he works. Such are the places where every man, woman, and child seeks equal justice, equal opportunity, equal dignity without discrimination. Unless these rights have meaning there, they have little meaning anywhere. Without concerted citizen action to uphold them close to home, we shall look in vain for progress in the larger world.
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I was at my nephews graduation from Harvard Business School,
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I can tell you this for sure, it was when I played baseball in high school and I was in the outfield and I would literally pray to God - I'm not joking, I'd pray to God not to let the ball come to me. I was so bad, I was just terrible. I played soccer - I was the goalie. I would pray to God it didn't get kicked anywhere near me. I was an awful athlete.
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The poor and the affluent are not communicating because they do not have the same words. When we talk of the millions who are culturally deprived, we refer not to those who do not have access to good libraries and bookstores, or to museums and centers for the performing arts, but those deprived of the words with which everything else is built, the words that opens doors. Children without words are licked before they start. The legion of the young wordless in urban and rural slums, eight to ten years old, do not know the meaning of hundreds of words which most middle-class people assume to be familiar to much younger children. Most of them have never seen their parents read a book or a magazine, or heard words used in other than rudimentary ways related to physical needs and functions. Thus is cultural fallout caused, the vicious circle of ignorance and poverty reinforced and perpetuated. Children deprived of words become school dropouts; dropouts deprived of hope behave delinquently. Amateur censors blame delinquency on reading immoral books and magazines, when in fact, the inability to read anything is the basic trouble.
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In bombers named for girls, we burned The cities we had learned about in school—...
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The family is the school of duties... founded on love.
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My dad taught me to switch-hit. He and my grandfather, who was left-handed, pitched to me everyday after school in the back yard. I batted lefty against my dad and righty against my granddad.
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Children look for grown-ups to show them how to live; When we try to fool them, they see through us like a sieve. We recognize the problem now; that's wonderful to see; The answer may well plague us 'til new values come to be. Volunteers are wonderful and will help to meet the need, But we must change the literature on which our children feed. We must teach and model absolutes of love, and justice, too; Prove to them that what we say, is just what we will do. There is one book, and it alone, will help attain success. It is the book, our fathers brought, to tame this wilderness. They used the Bible as their guide, the written Word of God; And found the wisdom written there, the greatest on this sod. Whether it was in the home, in public, or in school, The bible was the blueprint that became their greatest tool. Let's trash the recent literature before it is too late; Teach again, the basic values, that made our nation great. Surely it is evident, without a single doubt, That truth and right mus be invoked to help our children out. So, let's scour all the nation, and get folks to volunteer That believe the principles our precious kids should hear. If they are dependable, and use the proper tact, Volunteers can help to get our children back on track.
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There were plenty of role models for us. My mother believed in education and she put all three of us through college at Grambling. She did not have a high school education, but it was something she impressed upon us. After I graduated, I left Texarkana for California, because I knew I could not get a job here. I was in business with certification and accounting, so I figured it was best to go out West. So I went there. It was still tough to get in that field, but things opened up for me.
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