A Quote by Meghan Daum

I grew up in a town where there were no adults over forty who weren't somebody's parents. It was, unfortunately, the kind of town that's a "great places to raise kids" - that's basically code for "there are no adults here who are not parents." I had a few teachers who were kind of weirdo drama teachers and were hugely influential.
I was fortunate to be at that school in an era in which encounters between students and teachers were encouraged; there were a number of teachers who lived on campus, and they'd regularly invite students over for dinner on the weekends. I hope it's still like that: being treated seriously by an adult you admire is a great gift. Children, like adults, want respect - but it's only when you're older that you realize how few people actually extend it.
Almost 40% of all young adults are living with their parents. This is a 75-year high in America. Forty percent of young adults are living with their parents. I see stuff like this, and I think it's a good thing I didn't become a parent, because if that were happening to me, you wouldn't want to be my kid.
Sport was an integral part of school life. The most influential teachers were not necessarily the PE teachers, but the teachers who helped me in sport because they had an understanding of what you were going through.
Some parents were awful back then and are awful still. The process of raising you didn't turn them into grown-ups. Parents who were clearly imperfect can be helpful to you. As you were trying to grow up despite their fumbling efforts, you had to develop skills and tolerances other kids missed out on. Some of the strongest people I know grew up taking care of inept, invalid, or psychotic parents--but they know the parents weren't normal, healthy, or whole.
We're not trying to raise good kids. We're trying to raise kids who become great adults. That's a very different thing. We all know parents who had kids that when they turned 18 left the house and went nuts.
I think what shaped me was I had two parents who were scientists, and especially, they were great readers. They had both grown up in sort of rural parts of the South and were oddballs where they grew up. They were budding intellectuals.
We grew up as kids watching those movies and we were exposed to themes of civil rights, unfairness, bigotry and fathers struggling against the kind of mob of the town, so you remember how you felt as a kid being taken seriously, that you are part of the human drama.
My parents were language teachers. They talked about teaching all the time and all their friends were teachers. It was considered a pre-ordained thing that I would go into teaching.
Basically, I was pretty ostracized in my hometown. Me and a few other guys were the town freaks- and there were many occasions when we were dodging getting beaten up ourselves.
I'd listened to my colleagues in the teachers' lunchroom. I could tell they were passionate, fired-up people who had great ideas for strategies and projects to help kids learn better. They just didn't have the resources. I was frustrated, but I also knew it was a frustration felt by teachers all over the city.
Most of our physical education teachers were just teachers, and they had to do the extra stuff on their own. I remember very vividly that they would hold a cane pole between two of the students down low, and we would all jump over it. And they would raise it and raise it and raise it.
I would say basically the commonplace observation that kids aren't going to earn as much as their parents is now is a coin flip at this point. Are you going to do better than your parents? It's a 50-50 chance, whereas if you were born in the 1940s or 1950s, you had more than a 90 percent chance you were going to do better than your parents. So basically almost a guarantee for most kids that you were going to achieve the American Dream of doing better than your parents did. Today, that's certainly no longer the case.
Kids and adults have a difference of opinion when it comes to what constitutes legitimate reading. Adults often push books that they loved as children, which, ironically, were often books that their parents weren't particularly keen on.
I had been brought up in an elementary school where, my first few grades, I remember being specifically told that my teachers were gay. I was just that age and that was just how it was, and my parents were very... You know, that's how I was raised. Like super-progressive.
Some kids go walking in the mountains, but I just went to the cinema. So when I told my parents I wanted to be an actor, even though this wasn't normal for Arab kids or anyone in the town, they were sort of expecting it and were very supportive.
My parents, they were both Socialists; they were young - 30, 31. They were both successful career people. They had been teachers, and my dad spoke English.
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