A Quote by Andrew Yang

I had very little going for me as a kid except for the fact that I had demanding parents and was very good at filling out bubbles on standardized tests. I went to the Center for Talented Youth at Johns Hopkins University because I did well on the SAT. I went to Exeter because I did well on the SAT.
I worked as a telemarketer for an SAT-prep company. That was the worst of it, because I had to call people in post-Katrina New Orleans and offer them this very, very expensive SAT class. And I'm not even a good salesman.
I just sat there looking at television, sort of dumb and thought how horrible it was. I had -- the grand aspects of it did not occur to me -- I had no notion of this terrorist network that existed. I knew the were a lot of people in the world who didn't like us, but I had no idea that it was as well organized as it apparently is. That's one of the amazing facets of this terrible event: how well they did it. Incredible. The competence of these evil people.
I was born to sell it as a kid. I think it's partially innate, and partly it's because my parents were always very clear: if I needed anything that wasn't a necessity, I was going to have to save my money and buy it myself. That meant not only did I have to buy basketball shoes, but I had to figure out how to pay for college as well.
I wasn't the kind of kid who would get A's without even trying. I had to work to get good grades, but I was very organised about it because I always wanted to do well at everything I did. I'm very competitive.
The SAT is not perfect. We all know smart, knowledgeable people who do badly on standardized tests. But neither is it useless. SAT scores do measure both specific knowledge and valuable thinking skills.
It was actually quite easy to work with Uggie, because he's a really well trained dog. Very talented. I just had to follow him a little bit, improvise a little bit. Sometimes he'd follow me. Especially because of the sausages I had in my pocket.
Richie' is so special to me. It's because this was the first Tamil film that I had auditioned for. I did not know the language well. I was an absolute newcomer. But I had the determination to speak in Tamil, as it was a very good role and I didn't want to let it go.
I did radio, I did television, I did opera, I did films in which I had very, very little to say. But I had a lot of experience in front of the camera, and that's what really counts.
I'm not saying standardized tests are the worst ever, but there's an in-between and I don't think we're there yet. That's what I mean when I say I have an issue with it. There's no way a kid can learn in a class with 40 to 45 people. I had the power to get out of that system and pursue things that I wanted to do and I did that.
I was taught very well. My mom raised me very well, and so did my dad. I've been very blessed to have great parents that cared about me.
I mean I was very shy but I was also very extroverted because I was doing plays. I'd been doing plays since I was a little kid. But, I did feel like an outsider because I went to like a 'college-prep' kind of high school that had a really big football team and was known for its program so I was like this weird boy that did plays.
A lot of the best acting training I had was in junior high and high school. We had very demanding directors and did real plays. You put our plays up against any theater troupe of any age, and they usually did pretty damn well.
The fact is that the College Board's products - the SAT, other standardized tests, the accompanying strategy guides - are sold at far higher than the cost to make them.
I'm very blessed, mainly because even though my family is mostly in show business, it's really centered around music. My parents were very successful in many ways, but they weren't necessarily top of the charts. We were never wealthy because of music. We always had to work and we always had to struggle a little bit, and I think at the end of the day that's been very good for me, because I have a sense of it being very ephemeral.
I wasn't good in school. I didn't do sports. I sat in the bedroom and listened to records. Because the Beatles did whatever they wanted to, I took that as a kid and said, 'That's what rock is.'
We would do improvisation together. And that in a way, had almost a "student-film side" where we'd be sitting there with Robert Downey and Jon Favreau and we're playing around, we're jamming around and we read those pages and in next couple of days that's what we do, so it was a good experience. Kind of frightening at first because you didn't quite know how it was going to work out, but they had some very talented people there so it worked out well.
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