Are You Sometimes Confused By Written Medical Instructions? ... Now, imagine what it would be like if you were sick, scared and had only third grade reading skills. Your doctor tells you, "You've got to follow these instructions exactly, or you could die." About 200 recent studies have shown the reading difficulty of most health related materials FAR exceeds the average reading abilities of the American adult...
They say the seeds of what we will do are in all of us, but it always seemed to me that in those who make jokes in life the seeds are covered with better soil and with a higher grade of manure.
—Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)
Life begins at six—at least in the minds of six-year-olds. . . . In kindergarten you are the baby. In first grade you put down the baby. . . . Every first grader knows in some osmotic way that this is real life. . . . First grade is the first step on the way to a place in the grown-up world.
—Stella Chess (20th century)
Raising children is a spur-of-the-moment, seat-of-the-pants sort of deal, as any parent knows, particularly after an adult child says that his most searing memory consists of an offhand comment in the car on the way to second grade that the parent cannot even dimly recall.
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)