I went to public school my whole life. It was a performing arts school, so I can't say if it was a typical experience or not, because it's all I know.
When I was in middle school and even high school, I wasn't comfortable with my body. I look back, and it makes me sad, but I've grown into my body and really embrace it. I don't have the typical girl body; I'm kind of built like a boy.
I am both a public and a private school boy myself, having always changed schools just as the class in English in the new school was taking up Silas Marner, with the result that it was the only book in the English language that I knew until I was eighteen--but, boy, did I know Silas Marner!
I went to a local high school in Lancaster. Not much I can say about it; it was pretty much your typical public high school back in Pennsylvania.
I was a scholarship minor public school day boy at Ardingly College and later Whitgift School. Then, straight into work as a journalist - a wonderful thing for a writer.
All through college, I was searching for characters that would make me unique and set me apart from the typical ventriloquist with the typical dummy that was the little boy, cheeky hard figure like Charlie McCarthy.
I was a diligent little boy at my primary school and then I went to public school and became mediocre at most things and pretty rubbish at others. I had a really tough time. I didn't enjoy it at all. But it made me the man I am today.
If you film a little boy going to school, the big event in that boy's day and all the classmates' and teachers' day is you being there filming, not the school.
I think my formative experiences were really in junior high, where at a typical public school we were doing little genetic experiments, very classic experiments.
My first school play was 'Perkin and the Pastry Cook' that my primary school put on, and I played a boy, and it was so much fun, and I'd love to play a boy again. I think that would be great.
I think young people ought to seek that differential experience that is going to knock them off dead center. I was a typical American school boy. I happened to get straight A's and be pretty good in sports. But I had no great vision of what I could be. And I never had any yearning.
I'm a typical California boy.
It took me a long time to square with the fact that none of my experiences are typical - I'm not a typical American, but I'm also not a typical Muslim.
I grew up in England, went to a nice public school, then didn't want to go to university, so I thought I would wander around. I did a season skiing, a bit of sailing, typical spoilt brat stuff. I ended up in the Caribbean. I was having a blast.
My wife has a public charter school for children with dyslexia. Almost every one of them has failed in a public school.
I miss my friends in public school, but it's kind of a part of something that you have to give up. I'd rather perform than go to public school.