My mom was always my biggest teacher, my inspiration, my role model. My mom was just the most amazing person. She was like a bon vivant in that she just lived each day to the fullest. As soon as I became a vegetarian, she became a vegetarian.
My name is James Edward Franco. Ted is a nickname for Edward. That’s what my parents called me. I also got ‘Teddy Ruxpin’ a lot. It just got to a point where I got sick of it, so when a teacher called out ‘James Franco’ my junior year of high school, I didn’t correct her.
A father is a person who’s around, participating in a child’s life. He’s a teacher who helps to guide and shape and mold that young person, someone for that young person to talk to, to share with, their ups and their downs, their fears and their concerns.
Art owes its origin to Nature herself… this beautiful creation, the world, supplied the first model, while the original teacher was that divine intelligence which has not only made us superior to the other animals, but like God Himself, if I may venture to say it.
I think if I hadn’t been a writer, I’d have been a teacher like my dad. He was a college professor, and one of my greatest regrets is that he passed away before I was able to prove to him that I wasn’t going to be stuck working at Rax Roast Beef for the rest of my life!
I made video art for quite a long time, and I made this video covering myself in burgers and dancing to Major Lazer and doing covers of Britney Spears songs… I can’t remember how I got there, but my teacher said he’d have to fail me because it had mild nudity.
When people say, you know, ‘Good teacher,’ ‘Prophet,’ ‘Really nice guy’… this is not how Jesus thought of Himself. So you’re left with a challenge in that, which is either Jesus was who he said he was or a complete and utter nut case. You have to make a choice on that.
I remember when I was in third grade, I was in a classroom, and the teacher said, ‘What do you want to do when you get older?’ We were going around the room. I said, ‘I want to be a professional basketball player.’ She’s like, ‘That’s not realistic.’ I thought to myself, ‘OK, watch.’
I always was a weird child. My mother told me the story that, in kindergarten, I would come home and tell her about this weird kid in my class who drew only with black crayons and didn’t speak to other kids. I talked about it so much that my mother brought it up with the teacher, who said, ‘What? That’s your son.’
To learn to ride a bicycle, as with the other great noble human inventions, is a hugely complex activity. Generally, it requires three things: the learner, the teacher and the bicycle, all in the same place at the same time, most often outside someplace.
Travel stories teach geography; insect stories lead the child into natural science; and so on. The teacher, in short, can use reading to introduce her pupils to the most varied subjects; and the moment they have been thus started, they can go on to any limit guided by the single passion for reading.
I’ve always been surrounded by many great people and professors, but my family, especially my mom who was a teacher, was the person who encouraged me to study and pushed me to continue. When we’re young, we don’t understand why our parents bug us so much with school and doing homework, but it’s a blessing to have that support at home.
I was the first one in my family to go away to college. I came from a small town where there was no guidance in the high school at all. It was a mill town, and I never knew anyone who made their living from the arts. When you did go away to college, you went away to be something – an engineer, or a teacher, or a chemist.
Trump gives progressives a way to channel whatever guilt they might have – whether from preventing homebuilding, benefitting from unfair taxes and pensions, or depriving black and Latino students the teacher quality and school funding they need – into a sanctimonious tribal rage against Republican racism.
I’ve always remembered something Sanford Meisner, my acting teacher, told us. When you create a character, it’s like making a chair, except instead of making someting out of wood, you make it out of yourself. That’s the actor’s craft – using yourself to create a character.
I would say that my role model, as far as just somebody leading by example, which to me is what a great youth counselor does – they are there to talk to and lead by example – would be my mom, but she wasn’t a youth counselor. She was a teacher, and she is a good person and definitely one of the biggest influences in my life.
I’m sure any vocal teacher that listens to me would rather cut my throat than do anything – I do everything all wrong – but I think for me that’s the best – because I don’t think I have a voice so I think what I project would be style – if I learned to sing I’d lose my style.
My first mentor and inspiration was my Irish Dancing teacher Patricia Mulholland. She created her own form of dance known as Irish ballet and created stage productions of old Irish myths and legends. They were my first experiences on stage. She told my mum I was destined for the stage, and I took that as my cue.
My teacher told my mum, ‘I think William has dyspraxia,’ and Mum asked what that meant. She said, ‘Well, if I put a chair in the middle of the room and asked every child in the class to walk around it, William would be the only child in the class to walk into it.’ Mum was like, ‘Yeah, that’s my boy’.
I worked as a teacher in the public school system in New York City for several years, and I was a victim of the layoffs, you know, in the mid-’70s. And then I worked as a sales engineer for a company in New Jersey that was selling industrial filtration equipment.
In this outward and physical ceremony we attest once again to the inner and spiritual strength of our Nation. As my high school teacher, Miss Julia Coleman, used to say: ‘We must adjust to changing times and still hold to unchanging principles.’
I first started actually playing guitar when I was eleven years old. I had some neighborhood friends who told me they were starting a band and needed a guitarist. I told my folks, and by the next day I had a guitar lesson set up with a local teacher.
It was a weird stage of my life, to leave Simon & Garfunkel at the height of our success and become a math teacher. I would talk them through a math problem and ask if anyone had any questions, and they would say, ‘What were the Beatles like?’
I never wore a tie voluntarily, even though I was forced to wear one for photos when I was young and for official events at school. I used to wrap my tie in a newspaper, and whenever the teacher checked I would quickly put it on again. I’m not used to it. Most Bolivians don’t wear ties.
In Philly, there are a lot of social programs. If you have a degree, you can go and apply. I was basically a social worker, but I became sort of a sub teacher in a special program, helping kids with reading or math. But we would also do plays, learn about music… We were doing lots of fun stuff, but that was such hard work.
