Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Her motivation was love, her love for her father, and her journey of finding out who she truly is. That was my homework, and I would say that it motivated me to prepare myself mentally, but also physically, with a lot of gym stuff, fight training, horse training. But at its core, 'Mulan' is really about the character, the spirit.
By the age of 14, I had stopped doing homework and stopped studying - as soon as I had any spare time, I was up to the local snooker club. I was fortunate my parents never forced me to stop playing snooker and told me to carry on at school. Nowadays, that probably isn't the best advice. I basically had nothing else to fall back on.
I used to listen to 'Perfect Day' by Hoku every single day in high school! 'On this perfect day, nothin' standin' in my way... Don't you try to rain on my perfect day.' It pumped me up when I was feeling down or defeated, whether it was from the cool kids making me feel left out or feeling overwhelmed with homework and mean teachers.
As for my studies in school, I was a solid student. I was strong in English and Latin, but I got lost anytime the subject included math. I wish I had paid more attention to biology and science in general, subjects that came to interest me as an adult. I could have gotten better marks, but I never took a book home, never did homework.
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.
The best schools tend to have the best teachers, not to mention parents who supervise homework, so there is less need for self-organised learning. But where a child comes from a less supportive home environment, where there are family tensions perhaps, their schoolwork can suffer. They need to be taught to think and study for themselves.
My mornings start with mom coming into my bedroom and waking me up, or trying to wake me up, and then I go back to sleep. Then my mom wakes me up again and yells at me. Then she'll get me to wake up, and I'll get dressed and go to school. We go to school, and my teacher tells me that I didn't do the homework well enough. And that's that.
I've had times when I've done what seems like a thousand interviews to promote a film that I'm in. I start to think that I'm the best thing that ever happened to the world, talkin' about myself for cryin' out loud. Then I come home, and my wife needs me to help with dinner and empty the garbage, and the kids need help with their homework.
We've turned film into such an industry that we pursue naturalism just by shaking the camera and cutting the film to ribbons to provoke a bogus sense of documentary. But we haven't done the homework. To push the depth that the Actor's Studio did or the Russian theatres did with their actors is to rehearse, to spend time, to dig, to excavate.
When MUDs appeared, that was an entirely novel experience, and often an addictive one. Long before Twitter or Snapchat, MUDs inspired the moral panic of the moment: a 1993 'Wired' article titled 'The Dragon Ate My Homework' described university students losing themselves in these virtual worlds. Keep in mind: they were just words on a screen.
I love the fact that little kids think I'm a witch. A mum might come over and say 'I'm sorry to disturb you, but my daughter thinks you're in 'Harry Potter.' I'll say 'That's cool' and take the kid aside and say, 'I'm a witch. If you don't listen to your mum, I'm going to haunt you!' It's brilliant. I can scare kids into doing their homework.
Most therapists do not appear to know how to pinpoint and reverse therapeutic resistance - to head it off at the pass. Instead, they try to persuade the patient to change, or to do the psychotherapy homework, while the patient resists and 'yes-butts' the therapist. The therapist ends up feeling frustrated and resentful, and doing all the work.
I had amazing intellectual privilege as a kid. My mom taught me to read when I was two or three. When I was five, I read and wrote well enough to do my nine-year older brother's homework in exchange for chocolate or cigarettes. By the time I was 10, I was reading Orwell, Tolstoy's 'War and Peace,' and the Koran. I was reading comic books, too.
Many kids, particularly in lower-income families, would actually benefit from more structured activities. Plenty of children, especially teenagers, thrive on a busy schedule. But just as other trappings of modern childhood, from homework to technology, are subject to the law of diminishing returns, there is a danger of overscheduling the young.
