Senor Parrot's Perch

Bad news on the local bookselling front. Here in the Madison, WI area, the Capital Times reported on a struggling bookstore . Opening a bookstore is a dream of my own, and the news is discouraging. Its discouraging, not just because the news for independent booksellers in general, is disheartening, but also because of what it says about reading.� Hope that things improve for this store.

When I taught, I could sense whether students were readers, either of books or papers and magazines. They new more and they had a context within which they could place new knowledge and it had meaning and value for them. They put things together: 2 plus 2 was 4 for them, not “whatever.”

We need to encourage reading. Its better than dull, repetitive TV. Its better than dull, repetitive video games. Of course, if you want to get rich, you can depend on the folks who thrive on the dull and repetitive to buy your stuff. Getting rich is great, but it’s not the same as getting ahead.

I see I haven’t written since I left El Paso over Christmas Break. I wasn’t able to do any reading or really any writing or even thinking over the break and now I feel like I’ve got a hard crust covering my head that I need to break through.

It’s not likely that I’ll be writing much, either. I need to rehabilitate my homepage. I can do better than that, but I’m working through a book to learn web authoring using CSS, or Cascading Style Sheets. I also am teaching myself dynamic programming with PHP and MySQL. Its very difficult finding the time to do this, right now. I’m so interested in this, though, that I keep working on it even if its only for a few minutes.

In the mean time, I’ve seen one good family movie, Charlotte’s Web, and found a few good blogs that I want to track. I also want to add some themes to the mix that don’t have anything to do with Kids Books per se, but do warrant some attention by parents. These are trends in college and school financial issues, such as student loans and 529 savings programs, and in Education News that affects children and parents.

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