Well, the teacher I studied with for nineteen and a half years was a man named Paul Gavert. He was a great lieder singer, so basically I’m a trained lieder singer because of that teacher. The teacher I currently study with – since 1995 – is Joan Lader, who also studied with Gavert.
My dad, who was a teacher, used to tell me that a teacher’s goal should be for every one of their students to get an A. If that’s your goal every day – to make every student or player learn – then it doesn’t matter if you won last year or didn’t win. When next year’s team shows up, I try to help every player become as good as they can be.
Pep Guardiola is like going to university. I spent a year with him at City, learning something new every day. On the playing field, watching videos or at any time, when he approaches you and explains things to you. He has no problem teaching someone at 34 years old, as I was, like someone who is 18. He is a great teacher.
Back in the day, I actually studied photography in Florence for a few months, and my photography teacher took away my digital camera and said, ‘No, use this – it’s analog and it’s square.’ It was a Holga camera, a very cheap $3 or $4 plastic camera. And that’s what inspired ‘Instagram’.
As soon as ‘Hide Away’ came out, it was like everyone knew who I was, and I started getting all this attention. It was hard to get used to at first. I just remember that I suddenly couldn’t walk down the hallways without hearing a classmate or teacher playing it – it was unreal!
In high school, a teacher once suggested that I be a math major in college. I thought, ‘Me? You’ve got to be joking!’ I mean, in junior high, I used to come home and cry because I was so afraid of my math homework. Seriously, I was terrified of math.
I wanted to be a teacher. I love children, so I wanted to deal with children. Then I wanted to be a veterinarian. But by the age of ten or eleven, when I opened my mouth and said, ‘Oh, God, what’s this?’ I kind of knew teaching and being a veterinarian were gonna have to wait.
I want to talk about my very first play, when I was in eighth grade. One day, my English teacher, Mrs. Baker, announced that we were going to read ‘On Borrowed Time’ out loud in class. I was a mediocre student; I was terrified that she was going to call on me, so I hid my head.
I was quite a shy kid, but I was quite funny at school, and I was really into art. In our class, there were two of us who were good at drawing, and my teacher was like, ‘He’s going to make a wonderful artist one day, and Noel can make everyone laugh.’
We have a host of English teachers in the family. My mum is an English teacher, and so are my dad, my aunt and my uncle. I have grown up with family writing competitions, and I can’t remember a birthday or Christmas present that didn’t include books.
At the age of 6, a teacher full of ambitions, who taught in the small public school of Biran, convinced my family that I should travel to Santiago de Cuba to accompany my older sister who would enter a highly prestigious convent school. Including me was a skill of that very teacher from the little school in Biran.
Iggy Pop is a pure Michigan product – gritty, smart, but not afraid of looking stupid or foolish. His father was once a high school English teacher. I love Iggy as a physical entity, sinewy, twisty – even in old age – an embodiment of rock and roll history.
I created ‘Captain Underpants’ when I was in the second grade. I was constantly getting in trouble for being the class clown, so my teacher sent me out into the hallway to punish me. It was there in the hall that I began drawing ‘Captain Underpants’. Soon I was making my own comic books about him.
Animals are everything to me. I always say, ‘Who rescued who?’ with my horse Belle. She is my greatest teacher. She teaches me to be grounded, present, and in the moment, which I feel is key to happiness. My panic attacks become nonexistent when spending time with my animals, especially out in nature.
My view, as one who taught it, is that the whole purpose of a literary education should be to tell people that these things exist. I don’t think any teacher should try to ‘teach an author,’ but rather simply describe what the author has written. And this is what I tried to do.
I was inspired by many teachers when I started my channel, Bob Ross being one of them. His voice was so soothing, almost like hypnosis. He was that great of a teacher, even the casual viewer could learn how to paint from watching his show. Growing up, I just remember him being so mesmerizing on screen.
Whether you’re working in corporate America or you’re a journalist, construction worker, a teacher or an actor – we’re all trying to keep working. If one job is ending, you look for another job. When ‘Psych’ ends, I will be looking for another job.
In other words, if a teacher only teaches in one way, then they conclude that the kids who can’t learn well that way don’t have the ability, when, in fact, it may be that the way the teacher’s teaching is not a particularly good match to the way those kids learn.
When I was eight, an uncle, great uncle, gave a violin to me, and my father took me off to have lessons. After about six weeks, the violin teacher told my father he was wasting his money, wasting his time, and wasting my time, and it’s one of my big regrets.
I think that ‘Floor Sample’ is a story of resiliency, a lifelong spiritual search, and a lifelong sense of spiritual companionship that is most often expressed as creativity. My desire in writing the book was to step from behind the icon of ‘Julia the teacher’ and introduce ‘Julia the artist.’
My parents being Bengali, we always had music in our house. My nani was a trained classical singer, who taught my mum, who, in turn, was my first teacher. Later I would travel almost 70 kms to the nearest town, Kota, to learn music from my guru Mahesh Sharmaji, who was also the principal of the music college there.
By junior high, I was a horrible student. But during my sophomore year of high school, I did have a fabulous English teacher, and I would go to school just for her class and then skip out afterwards. That’s actually when I started writing, although I didn’t think of it then as something I might someday do.
I worked hard when I was a consultant. I worked hard when I was in graduate school looking at neuroscience. I worked hard as a teacher. But those are completely different career paths. And the lack of direction is why I didn’t get far enough in any of those things.
Listen to my advice; I have some experience. In a way, it is me being a teacher, which is what I wanted to be. I still feel I could go into teaching. What is teaching but passing on your knowledge to those who are at the beginning? Some people are born with that gift.
I was a victim of a stereotype. There were only two of us Negro kids in the whole class, and our English teacher was always stressing the importance of rhythm in poetry. Well, everybody knows – except us – that all Negroes have rhythms, so they elected me class poet.
