My junior high was dreadful. I see a lot of my fellow alumni on America's Most Wanted.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I hated high school. It was a prison.
I had an all right high school, even though I hated school. I wasn't massively popular, but I was okay. But I wouldn't want to do it again.
High school wasn't so bad though because, by then, I had worked out that there were far more nerdy kids and poor kids than there were rich, popular kids, so, at the very least, we had them outnumbered.
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.
Harvard was the most intimidating experience. I felt so out of my league there.
I have vivid memories of junior high school. I didn't quite know how to deal with kids and make friends and all of that. If you talked to people who knew me at the time, they'd think I was a popular kid in school. But boy, I didn't feel that.
My dad never graduated high school. He was a printing salesman. We lived in a two-bedroom, one-bath house in St. Louis Park, Minnesota. We weren't rich - but we felt secure.
It doesn't make me happy to go back and talk about how great high school was.
I never graduated high school; they had to change the Ivy League rules. During my tenure at Brown, I helped them become the number one Ivy League school.
At 16, when I was at Henry M. Gunn High School, I had a crush on the English teacher, and my grades improved dramatically. This great school had only 400 students, mostly children of Stanford professors, and it was more usual to have classes under one of the oak trees dotted around the campus than in the classroom.