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The star of Modern Family and new animated film Mr Peabody & Sherman found that being taught by his mother didn't mean he got off lightly at school.
I wasn't a great student when my mom, Sheri Burrell, taught me at the age of about 10. And I wasn't a great student after I left her class either. But the one year of my education when I got the most out of myself was the year my mom was my teacher. It was fifth grade.
It was a really important time for me because we had just left a small town of about 20,000 people called Ashland in Oregon and moved to an even smaller town of just 200 called Applegate. Applegate was essentially an outpost in the logging territory of Oregon, very remote. My mom taught me in a one-room schoolhouse that used partitions to separate the grades. Each grade had 10 to 12 kids.
It was an odd transition; we...