A child's learning is a function more of the characteristics of his classmates than those of the teacher.

At school I pretended I had a normal life, but I felt lonely all the time and different from everyone else. I never felt like I fit in, and I wasn't allowed to participate in after-school activities, go to sports events or parties or date boys. Many times I had to make up stories about why I couldn't do anything with my classmates.

I couldn't help but to think back to my classmates at Thomas Jefferson High School in San Antonio. They had the same talent, the same brains, the same dreams as the folks we sat with at Stanford and Harvard. I realized the difference wasn't one of intelligence or drive. The difference was opportunity.

Almost 50 years old now, some 30 years after graduation, I look at my Caltech classmates and conclude that math whizzes do not take over the world.

I was in high school - and I went to an all-boys Catholic high school, a Jesuit high school, where I was focused on academics and athletics, going to church every Sunday at Little Flower, working on my service projects, and friendship, friendship with my fellow classmates and friendship with girls from the local all-girls Catholic schools.

When I came out of Stanford, I looked at my brilliant classmates, who were going into Wall Street high finance, Silicon Valley, advanced engineering, and I said to myself, 'Jeff, go into an industry where nobody can add.'

My most famous commercial was for Fruit Of the Loom underwear. I took a lot of razzing from my classmates.

Sloppy casual has always been my default look. My preppier classmates in high school would sometimes sport two, three, even four shirts at a time - Lauren, Izod, Brooks Brothers, all collars-up - while I wore secondhand faded olive German-army fatigues and this cool T-shirt with a troll on it.

When I was growing up, I had lots of smart classmates that were girls, but none of us were really pushed into math or computers or anything like that. Girls took AP history and AP English and AP European history. And boys took calculus and physics.

It was very weird when my classmates were getting hundred-thousand-dollar cars because that was so not my reality.

Life is a classroom, and people are classmates

Neither Every Friend is your Classmates nor Every Classmate is your Friend.

A child's learning is a function more of the characteristics of his classmates than those of the teacher.

For a Catholic kid in parochial school the only way to survive the beatings - by classmates not the nuns - was to be the funny guy.

I was so afraid to even read a paper in front of my classmates. It is very funny because at that point my teachers would never have believed that I could speak in front of an audience of over 2 000 people.

I couldn't help but to think back to my classmates at Thomas Jefferson High School in San Antonio. They had the same talent the same brains the same dreams as the folks we sat with at Stanford and Harvard. I realized the difference wasn't one of intelligence or drive. The difference was opportunity.