Ninety-nine percent of the time, your parents never have to know, though. The school doesn’t want your parents to think you became a fuckup here any more than you want your parents think you’re a fuckup.

She doesn’t speak. She hasn’t said a word since right after she started middle school. Not a word. And from what Hatori says, the problem is all in her mind. He said, for some reason, she’s locked away all of her words. After she stopped talking, she stopped going to school. And then today, she ran away from home. That’s why I went out looking for her. By the time I found her, she had transformed into a tiger.

Yuki, I DO hope you enjoy this new school year and I would be VERY happy if you paid me a visit sometime soon?

Kyo Sohma: Why do you want to go to a school with all these crazy, giggling girls, anyway?
Yuki Sohma: I suppose YOU’D prefer I live

They’re not. We’re the same gender and we go to the same school. But other than that, they’re perfect strangers to me.

High school girls! 1, 2, 3!

Baby, that’s grammar school. Any damn fool can beg up some kind of job; it takes a wise man to make it without working. Out here we call it hustling. I’d like to be a good hustler.

The week before I left my family and Florida and the rest of my minor life to go to boarding school in Alabama, my mother insisted on throwing me a going away party. To say that I had low expectations would be to underestimate the matter dramatically.

My name, is Dr. Hyde. I have a first name, of course. So far as you are concerned, it is Doctor. Your parents pay a great deal of money so that you can attend school here, and I expect that you will offer them some return on their investment by reading what I tell you to read when I tell you to read it and consistently attending this class. And when you are here, you will listen to what I say.

“Yeah,” I said. “What is that? A bird?”
“It’s the swan,” he said.
“Wow. A school with a swan. Wow.”

Unfortunately for the Culver Creek Nothings, we weren’t playing the deaf-and-blind school. We were playing some Christian school from downtown Birmingham, a team stocked with huge, gargantuan apemen with thick beards and a strong distaste for turning the other cheek.

Screw this, I thought, and for the first time, I imagined just going back home, ditching the Great Perhaps for the old comforts of school friends.

Once you become very powerful and advanced, you must be willing to go back to school and start over, and go to a wise person who will show you the way. Very few people are willing to do that.

Tuesday — we had school for the first time. Madame O’Malley had a moment of silence at the beginning of French class, a class that was always punctuated with long moments of silence, and then asked us how we were feeling.

“Awful,” a girl said.

“En français,” Madame O’Malley replied. “En français.”

They call me School Boy. The name stuck with me since sniper school, my mates won’t stop calling me it no matter how many people I shoot.

I’ve gone into prisons, I’ve gone into schools, I’ve gone into corporations, all over the world. It doesn’t matter where you go, people are essentially the same. Our culture is different, but culture is nothing but group habit, culture is paradigm and when you get past the culture, people are essentially the same.

Driving up I could see the crowd, but living in New Orleans, I actually thought it was Mardi Gras. There was a large crowd of people outside of the school. They were throwing things and shouting, and that sort of goes on in New Orleans at Mardi Gras.

I then realized that it wasn’t Mardi Gras or college, it was about me going to school there. I wasn’t mad at the boy because he said his mother said not to play with me because I was a nigger. ‘If my mother said not to play with him because he was another race, I wouldn’t.’

It’s not who you’re going to sit beside at school that matters now: it’s what resources will your school have.

Administrations and administrative faculty work very hard to see that schools are diverse as much as possible.

All of our schools should be good enough to attract a healthy racial mix, which, I believe, leads to the most effective learning for everybody.

I was the first black child to desegregate the all-white William Frantz Elementary School in Louisiana in 1960.

When I think about our babies today and them not being safe in school, I think that should be the next civil rights movement, you know, is to ban the assault weapons so that our babies can be safe.

Schools should be diverse if we are to get past racial differences.

The people I passed every morning as I walked up the school’s steps were full of hate. They were white, but so was my teacher, who couldn’t have been more different from them. She was one of the most loving people I had ever known.

I’ve seen schools in Detroit where the windows are broken, where there’s no heat, and children are sitting with their coats on in class in the middle of a snowstorm. I’ve also seen schools in California with Olympic-sized swimming pools and cafeterias like five-star restaurants.

He loves me. He loves all y’all, too. He just loves the school more. That’s the thing. He thinks busting us is good for the school and good for us. It’s the eternal struggle, Pudge. The Good versus the Naughty.

I thought of Florida, of my “school friends,” and realized for the first time how much I would miss the Creek if I ever had to leave it. I stared down at Takumi’s twig sticking out of the mud and said, “I swear to God I won’t rat.”

In school I was the one that was thinking outside boxes
So everybody in them would say that I got problems.

Insomnia

I cannot get to sleep tonight.
I toss and turn and flop.
I try to count some fluffy sheep
while o’er a fence they hop.
I try to think of pleasant dreams
of places really cool.
I don’t know why I cannot sleep –
I slept just fine at school.

I went to barber school. That’s how I met everyone I know, by cutting hair.

Hello. School, can you hear me? Good morning, students, teachers, faculty members, lunch ladies, janitors. This is Kenny Powers, professional baseball player, and I got something I wanna say. A lot of you m**********rs think you know who Kenny Powers is. Well, I’m here today to tell y’all you don’t know s**t. There comes a time in every man’s life when he’s got to take a look at himself in a mirror and decide just exactly who he is. Well, I’ve come to that crossroads and I’ve decided. Kenny Powers is a man. Kenny Powers is an athlete. Kenny Powers is a lover. But the most he is, I mean, the thing that Kenny Powers is the most, is a goddamn champion. And the one thing a champion does not do is f**king quit. A true champion faces his enemies and he conquers them. And that is why I’m here today to tell you all that Kenny Powers is officially accepting the position of PE Coach here at Jefferson Davis Middle School. That is, until the majors call me back up. So, let’s get the teaching on!

Stay in school. Fight the power. Don’t do drugs. Unless, of course, you’re doing them with me.