Especially the words ..
" ... after American students gave up learning anything anyway. Students that don’t bother learning reading, writing, and arithmetic don’t dedicate much time to ... "
pretty much sums up, for me, my opinion of what has happened to America.
My first wife of 21 years (now home with The Lord) and I homeschooled for 14 years and try as we did, both of us avid readers in school and proponents of generating and influencing that nebulous "imagination", failed to reproduce that in our own four children
I still love to read, but I fall asleep these days unless at a computer screen ... which has broken my back.
I’m sorry to hear that (both that she has passed, and that it wasn’t passed on); I’m getting mixed signals from my own brood (the oldest just entering high school). I push them to aim for high grades because I know the grades are overly generous to begin with (to combat “No Child Left Behind”); if my children had C averages I’d know they’d learned nothing at all (since nobody fails anymore).
I can’t get the youngest to read recreationally (not a problem with the others); hopefully we can change that. They mention a resurgence in comic books, which I was never into but any reading is better than none; one showed me a comic book he borrowed from a friend and it was much longer then the ones I remember as a kid (it was more like a real book than the magazine-types I remember).
...try as we did, both of us avid readers in school and proponents of generating and influencing that nebulous “imagination”, failed to reproduce that in our own four children...
They say the best way to get a kid to read is to read to them from an early age.