When I say to a parent, "read to a child", I don't want it to sound like medicine. I want it to sound like chocolate.
Interpretation
Encouraging reading to children should be enjoyable, not a chore.
This quote emphasizes that when encouraging parents to read to their children, it should be framed as a delightful activity rather than an obligation. Mem Fox uses the metaphor of chocolate to convey that reading should be a sweet experience, fostering a love for books and learning in children.
In practice
During a parent-teacher conference to emphasize the importance of reading.
If every parent understood the huge educational benefits and intense happiness brought about by reading aloud to their children, and if every parent- and every adult caring for a child-read aloud a minimum of three stories a day to the children in our lives, we could probably wipe out illiteracy within one generation.
The fire of literacy is created by the emotional sparks between a child, a book, and the person reading.
There may be frugality which is not economy. A community, that withholds the means of education from its children, withholds the bread of life and starves their souls.
Teachers are the one and only people who save nations.
When you write what you know, you stay in control. One of the first things I encourage my writing students to do is to lose control - say what they want to say, break structure.
The student has his Rome, his Florence, his whole glowing Italy, within the four walls of his library. He has in his books the ruins of an antique world and the glories of a modern one.
But the indeterminate future is somehow one in which probability and statistics are the dominant modality for making sense of the world. Bell curves and random walks define what the future is going to look like. The standard pedagogical argument is that high schools should get rid of calculus and replace it with statistics, which is really important and actually useful. There has been a powerful shift toward the idea that statistical ways of thinking are going to drive the future.
I have nothing against investment banking, but it's like massaging money rather than creating money. If you're in physics, you create inventions, you create lasers, you create transistors, computers, GPS.
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