Starbucks

This quote was on my Starbucks cup last week. I keep thinking about it, and how a lot of my students are the ones with the machetes.

A child’s mind isn’t a blank slate; it’s more of a jungle. Each time a parent helps a toddler read, the child is walked through this jungle from one side to the other. Trip after trip, a seemingly impossible passage becomes a well-worn path. Children sent to kindergarten skipping merrily along this path to literacy fare far better than those sent to school with machetes.

-- Keith Mastrion
“Reading Man” and 1998 National Teacher of the Year