There were some high school teachers. I remember a math teacher, Mr. Ewen — actually a math teacher in eighth grade, Mrs. Matwell, who got excited about my ideas and wanted to listen to them. My mother actually was kind of a fan of my ideas and would listen to them. Marvin Minsky I actually communicated with in high school and came to visit him, came up to Boston, and to my delight, took me, a high school student, as seriously as he would take a professor. I mean, that is his approach. He treats everybody the same. I think he really doesn’t care if somebody’s a professor or a high school student. He’s very excited with ideas and very honest with his reactions. But that encouragement was important to me.

Yes. I had a couple of great, great teachers. The teacher who changed my life was my journalism teacher, whose name was Charles Simms. I always tell this story. I love it. I had already decided that I was going to be a journalist. I didn’t know why exactly, except that I had seen a lot of Superman comics. Lois Lane and all of those major literary characters like that, but Mr. Simms got up the first day of class, and he went to the blackboard, and he wrote “Who, what, where, why, when, and how,” which are the six things that have to be in the lead of any newspaper story. Then he did what most journalism teachers do, which is that he dictated a set of facts to us, and then we were all meant to write the lead that was supposed to have “who, what, where, why, when, and how” in it. He dictated a set of facts that went something like, “The principal of Beverly Hills High School announced today that the faculty of the high school will travel to Sacramento, Thursday, for a colloquium in new teaching methods. Speaking there will be Margaret Mead, the anthropologist, and two other people.” So we all sat down at our typewriters, and we all kind of inverted that and wrote, “Margaret Mead and X and Y will address the faculty in Sacramento, Thursday, at a colloquium on new teaching methods, the principal announced today.” Something like that. We were very proud of ourselves, and we gave it to Mr. Simms, and he just riffled through them and tore them into tiny bits and threw them in the trash, and he said, “The lead to this story is: There will be no school Thursday!” and it was this great epiphany moment for me. It was this, “Oh my God, it is about the point! It is about figuring out what the point is.” And I just fell in love with journalism at that moment. I just fell in love with the idea that underneath, if you sifted through enough facts, you could get to the point, and you had to get to the point. You could not miss the point. That would be bad. So he really kind of gave that little shift of mind a major push.

My father was a lawyer. My mother was a homemaker. My father was president of the Egyptian Bar Association. He was involved very much during the Nasser era — which was one of the most repressive eras in Egyptian history — in fighting for democracy, fighting for human rights, and I think that to a lot of extent shaped my view as to what I wanted to do in the future. I wanted to have a world where people are free to express their views, to have freedom of worship, to have freedom from want, and I saw poverty in Egypt when I grew up. To me, freedom, in the larger sense — to be able to speak, to worship, free from want, free from fear — I think it was a key as to what I thought I would like to do when I grow up.

There were definitely teachers who made a huge impact. I think about a woman whose name was Mrs. Fish who was my seventh grade English Language Arts teacher. What I remember about her was just how hard she pushed. I thought I was a perfectly strong student at this point, but she just pushed everyone to their limits. That was very instrumental for me. In fact, all the teachers I remember had that same thing: they just had such high expectations and wouldn’t stop pushing. I think she just conveyed the idea that good wasn’t good enough, and I think the skill development and critical thinking skills that that year developed were also instrumental. But I also think, I don’t know, there’s something about that year that probably instilled within me that ethic that you just have to keep pushing to get better and better, and that if you work hard enough it will pay off.

That’s difficult for someone to talk about themselves. If I’ve helped improve the game of golf and if I’ve helped improve people’s outlook on life and the game of golf, that would be something that I would be very happy for. I would really like to think that maybe I have left something that other people will look at and say, when people come in back of them, that they have given them the same opportunity that we had. And that means give our kids the opportunities that we’ve had through these years. And if I can do that and leave something along those lines to people, I’ll be very happy for that.