When I got out of acting school I was lucky to have gotten any job at all. A lot of people hiring African American actresses - it was right after 'Roots ' and for society not me it was great. Nice richly dark-skinned people was the fashion and I was not.

When you look at where the real problems are among minorities in our society particularly blacks it's at the bottom. It's the people who are in school systems that don't educate neighborhoods where there is a lot of crime drugs the whole bit.

I want to help middle-school girls stay interested in math and be good at it and see it as friendly and accessible and not this scary thing. Everyone else in society tells them it's not for them. It's for nerdy white guys with pocket protectors.

Since my retirement I've spent a lot of time trying to help the School of Social Work at the University of North Carolina. A society like this just can't afford an uneducated underclass of citizens.

I had a little insight into life that most kids probably didn't have. My mother was a schoolteacher and my father was a social worker. Through his eyes I saw the underside of society.

In junior high school I was an object of pure ridicule for my dress withdrawal and asocial manner. Dozens of times I saw individuals laugh and smile more in ten to fifteen minutes than I did in all my life up to then.

We must be willing to pay inspiring math and science teachers who have high paying alternatives in industry more to teach and reward students who take more challenging courses in high school.

Math and science fields are not the only areas where we see the United States lagging behind. Less than 1 percent of American high school students study the critical foreign languages of Arabic Chinese Japanese Korean or Russian combined.

Today over half of China's undergraduate degrees are in math science technology and engineering yet only 16 percent of America's undergraduates pursue these schools.

I was sent to a finishing school which didn't last long when mother found out how badly chaperoned we were. Then I 'came out' before going to a domestic science school.

People challenge my nerd cred all the time. I just show them the photo of me winning my middle-school science fair wearing my Casio calculator watch and eyeglasses so big they look like they can see the future.

I was on the football team because I wanted to experience the different iconic social classes of high school. So football for me was an attempt to socially integrate in an interesting way. And then I didn't like it anymore and stopped doing it and focused more on drama and science and other forms of art and music.

American high school students trail teenagers from 14 European and Asian countries in reading math and science. We're even trailing France.

It was generally believed that Catholics were not interested in arts and science graduate schools. They weren't going to be intellectuals. And so I put the theses to the test. And they all collapsed.

I do not think we are ever going to be able to for a long time get the kind of quality of school personnel that we need in our schools especially in the areas of science and math. One of the answers to that problem is to use more educational technology.

Usually girls weren't encouraged to go to college and major in math and science. My high school calculus teacher Ms. Paz Jensen made math appealing and motivated me to continue studying it in college.

If I wasn't doing this I'd be in school studying political science or socioeconomic something. I love visiting different cultures and finding out how they make up a society.

I shopped at J. Crew in high school I studied computer science. I was a nerd-nerd now I'm a music-nerd.

Many of the mainstream agricultural scientists especially at the agricultural schools but at all of our major universities are tied into all sorts of contractual relationships and consulting relationships with the life science companies.

I'm an amateur science enthusiast. I'm not even a professional enthusiast. I don't know anything I never even passed biology in high school. But I read the science section of the newspaper.

I suggest that the introductory courses in science at all levels from grade school through college be radically revised. Leave the fundamentals the so-called basics aside for a while and concentrate the attention of all students on the things that are not known.

The No Child Left Behind Program was an incentive to the schools to get their kids up to snuff on math and science and reading.

The enlightenment is under threat. So is reason. So is truth. So is science especially in the schools of America.

It is a sad commentary that today we face a choice between having schools that are a monument to our past - or schools that will be the lifeblood of our future. But since that is our choice let us resolve to choose wisely.