The Atlanta Journal Constitution – Maureen Downey
“I think it’s a peculiar American notion that learning should always be fun. Ask anyone who mastered a skill, whether writer, musician, carpenter, painter, or bus driver whether every step in their learning process was fun. Of course it wasn’t. They mastered a skill because they stuck it out during difficult, probably boring stages and because they had the discipline and the imagination and the drive to work toward a goal. I’m glad I learned correct grammar and how to spell so when I write something, the reader is not distracted from my ideas by the mechanical faults in my writing; I’m glad the pianist I go to hear has practiced and practiced again the difficult passages so that the music she makes is not marred by unintended dissonance; I’m glad I learned to do calculations in my head so I don’t have to scramble for my calculator to see if I’m being cheated in a purchase or misled by erroneous statistical claims in a popular magazine article; I’m glad I had to memorize endless French vocabulary lists when I was a middle school student in Austria because eventually I became fluent in French — and it helped me to learn English.”(more)