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The ADVANCE, January 19, 2022/Page 5A
OPINIONS
“I honor the man who is willing to sink
Half his repute for the freedom to think,
And when he has thought, be his cause strong or weak,
Will risk t’other half for the freedom to speak.”
—James Russell Lowell
editorials
Read With Malcolm
I admit it.
I pulled against
the Bulldogs (the
Dawgs) last Mon
day night when
they beat the tar
out of the Alabama
Crimson Tide to be
crowned 2021’s National Champions. My
aversion to the Dawgs is a holdover from
my college days at Georgia Tech, where I
learned to pull for the Yellow Jackets and
any other team playing against the Univer
sity of Georgia (UGA). I know the rivalry
is petty and I should’ve outgrown it by now,
but I haven’t. I’m trying to be a better per
son, but I’m just not there yet.
Still, I meet so many wonderful folks
who attended UGA, and I feel a little
guilty for always wishing they’d lose. A few
weeks ago, I spoke with Malcolm Mitchell,
a 28-year-old, black UGA alumnus who
played football as a wide receiver for the
Dawgs before moving on to the New Eng
land Patriots. He even has a Super Bowl win
under his belt.
As you may have guessed, Malcolm and
I didn’t discuss his football career, and I sure
didn’t tell him about my strong dislike for
his alma mater. Instead, Malcolm and I had
a lovely conversation about reading.
Malcolm is a respected voice in the na
tional literacy space — quite a twist of fate
for the Valdosta native who once struggled
to read.
“Growing up, I loved sports, especially
football, but I wasn’t the best student in
school,” he says. “I thought, ‘What differ
ence does it make if I make a C? A C will get
me to the next grade — same as an A — and
it’s less work.’”
He graduated from high school with an
athletic scholarship and moved to Athens to
play football for the Bulldogs.
“It didn’t take long for me to realize I
was in trouble in the classroom. I was not a
strong or productive reader, and I had to be
able to read well to keep up with my class-
work,” he remembers. “I knew I had to do
something, so I decided to approach read
ing like I approached football — by practic
ing. I started reading children’s books and
worked my way up from there.”
His reading skills improved, and he
also discovered he enjoyed the activity. In
deed, he became known as “the guy who
always has a book to read.” One day as he
browsed the shelves of the Barnes & Noble
in Athens, he asked another customer to
recommend a good book. The middle-aged
woman paused and studied the young black
football player standing before her. Then
she suggested a book she and others were
reading in a book club. Malcolm’s face lit up.
“I said, ‘You’re in a book club?’ Then
I immediately asked her if I could join her
book club, too,” he remembers. “I think she
thought I was crazy or joking, but I wasn’t.”
Malcolm joined the book club and
loved the experience, even though he was
different from the other members who were
older, white women.
“The differences in our race and age and
backgrounds didn’t matter at all. None of
that mattered,” he says. “I connected with
those women because of our passion for
books and reading.”
In addition to regularly meeting with
his book club buddies, he visited schools
around Athens and read to the kids.
As he approached graduation, Mitch
ell decided to write his own book. He
self-published The Magician’s Hat, a book
later re-published by Scholastic as part of
a three-book contract he signed. That same
year, he also signed a contract with the New
England Patriots.
“And I started the Share the Magic
Foundation (www.readwithmalcolm.com)
to promote reading challenges, organize
school events and provide books to kids to
help them read their way to better futures.
We’ve touched well over 300,000 students
across the country and given away thou
sands of books.”
Today, he still makes appearances at el
ementary schools and hosts reading rallies.
He addresses the kids by saying, “In or
der to succeed, you have to ...”
“Read!” the young students scream in
unison.
They love him.
Malcolm told me he’s most proud of his
accomplishments off the football field —
improving his own reading skills, writing
books for children, and promoting literacy
to a new generation of readers.
“When you give a child a book, you
give him hope,” he says. “We’ve got to get
our young people reading again. It’s as sim
ple as that.”
I may harbor a senseless dislike for
those Dawgs (Go Jackets!), but I really re
spect Malcolm Mitchell and applaud his ef
forts in getting kids to “read with Malcolm.”
From the Porch
By Amber Nagle
The left did us a great favor
By Jim McGauley, writer for American Thinker
Lest we become permanently deflated
as the new year begins as to the future of
our Republic in light of what’s happened
the past twelve months, and the speed with
which it happened, consider this:
“Not so fast with the doom and gloom,”
tell yourself. Here’s why.
It was far from his design, but Joe Biden
has done a favor to the sizable mass of vot
ers (vs. citizens) who fall into the ranks of
independents and conservatives. Actually,
it’s not Joe Biden; it’s the ranks of the Karl
Marx Book Club elites and grandchildren
of the Yippies now occupying the White
House, along with Obama, Rice, Pelosi, et
al.
They have taken us to a place, and
swiftly, that we never imagined before.
They are center stage, revealing on an al
most daily basis how truly wacky is the road
to socialism with its accompanying de
mands for the masses to adhere to their de
mands. They, after all, know better than we.
They know we will be better served
with higher fuel and food prices, trillions
more in national debt, prosecutors who no
longer prosecute, millions of illegals cross
ing the southern border, depleted law en
forcement ranks, solar and wind energy,
fear of COVID, fear of global warming (cli
mate change), placement of teacher unions
in charge of public education and...well, the
list goes on.
All of this, mind you, in one year, the
245th year of our Grand Republic.
Unbeknownst, the “woke wing” of the
Democrat party has done us a great favor.
The majority of citizens who can be
counted on to turn out at the polls assume
those they put in charge of the public’s busi
ness are making decisions in their best in
terest as they go about raising their chil
dren, going to work, and tending to matters
closest to them. Civics and the workings of
government are generally things they
learned in school (back when they were
taught) and other than in a general sense,
not front and center in their everyday lives.
They are now.
Polls as 2021 came to a close reflect
widespread dissatisfaction with the decep
tion foisted on members of both major po
litical parties and independents in one short
year. They see a federal government that is
simply not functioning in their best inter
est.
The unrest and, yes, disgust over what
an administration that sold itself as a “uni
fier” has done by a grand design it never
revealed before an election that most of us
suspect now was a cheat-fest is not theo
retical. It is real.
We have our civics lesson in spades.
The conventional wisdom is that Re
publicans will sweep the boards in Novem
ber. The House will turn red, and the Sen
ate will pick up a few seats (tougher going
there). Conservative GOP candidates in
state and local contests will repeat in the
fashion of the Virginia governor’s race.
Republicans have this stellar opportu
nity to take charge and bring independent
and perhaps some Democrat voters along
with them, not just in November, but in
years hence. They’ve blown it before, but
they can’t this time. The stakes are too
great.
Opportunities like this don’t come
around every cycle. Played correctly, we
can thank Scranton’s Wonderboy for years
to come.
Georgia’s pandemic test
scores a no-brainer
I received
an email from
a group called
Cherry Digital
in Portland,
Oregon, or
what remains
of the town
after being
firebombed to
near
obliteration by
denizens of the Looney Left.
They tell me that Georgia adults
(that includes you and me, although
some readers would dispute my
inclusion) are ranked 16th in the
nation in correctly answering typical
SAT questions.
The SAT is widely used in
assessing students’ readiness for
college admission in the United
States. That is unless you are six-four,
weigh 250 pounds and run a 4.6 forty.
Then the SAT is pretty much
irrelevant. Kind of like CNN.
According to Cherry Digital, the
website I’m-a-Puzzle.com tested 5,000
adults around the country on their
proficiency in math and EBRW (a
fancy name for how well we read and
write.) The concern was whether or
not the pandemic has caused us to
begin losing whatever brain power we
may have had before being asked to
mask-up and wash our hands.
“If you felt as if you were losing
your mind during the pandemic,
you’re not alone,” Cherry Digital
observed in a news release. “What
with being constantly bombarded by
bad news, unable to go to work and
having stimulating conversation with
your colleagues, or, if you’re a parent,
only having had toddlers or little kids
to talk to all day, it might well have felt
like your brain was deteriorating. And
in fact, because people’s minds were
so dormant over the whole period, it
has given rise to a condition known as
‘pandemic brain.’”
Obviously, I’m-a-Puzzle.com
successfully avoided “pandemic brain”
because they thought up the idea of
testing 5,000 adults about reading and
writing and arithmetic. Neal Taparia
from I’m-a-Puzzle.com says, “It’s great
to see that, overall, most adults across
the country haven’t got too much to
worry about when it comes to their
post-pandemic brain sharpness.”
An example of the questions
posed in the SAT quiz was this one:
“If x + 6=9, then 3x + 1 equals: (A) 6,
(B) 10, (C) 4, or (D) 12.” And this:
“What does ‘burgeon’ mean?: (A) To
rapidly shrink, (B) to become tired,
(C) to make, or (D) to rapidly
expand.”
I have an addition question: Who
cares? When you can once again
attend a cocktail party and feel
compelled to tell folks that you know
what 3x + 1 equals, you are likely to
find them burgeoning to avoid you
like a bat out of Wuhan.
By the way, the answer to the
math question is: (B) 10 and the
EBRW answer is: (D) “to rapidly
expand.” But since you are smarter
than the know-it-alls in New York
(25th) and the Socialist State of
By Dick Yarbrough
California (30th), I suspect you knew
that already.
Cherry Digital says the best
overall scores came from New Jersey
and surmises that is because a lot of
Princeton University alumni live
there. Obviously, they don’t have
anything better to do with their time
than take quizzes. What else in there
to do in New Jersey?
Arkansas finished at the bottom
of the 50 states in both categories in
the SAT test. Cherry Digital doesn’t
say so, but in my opinion it’s because a
lot of Arkansas alumni live there that
wear plastic pig hats to football games,
wiggle their fingers and yell,
“Woooooooooo, Pig! Sooie!” Even
someone with pandemic brain could
have figured that one out.
Georgia exceeded the national
average of 55% in math with a score of
59% and had a 61% mark in EBRW
which was the national average. Our
overall mark of 60% was above the
national average of 58%. Not quite
National College Football
Championship rankings but better
than Joe Biden’s approval ratings.
I think it is only fair to say that our
state’s respectable scores were due in
part to the fact that I’m-a-Puzzle.com
didn’t ask me to participate. I still
count on my fingers and have yet to
figure out “i before e, except after c, or
whatever my neighbor weighs.” I
could have single-handedly gotten us
down into Arkansas territory.
I find the news reassuring that
COVID-19 hasn’t turned us all into a
bunch of brain-mushed zombies, but I
am taking no chances. I will still
mask-up when I feel it necessary. I will
still wash my hands often and I will
continue to try and maintain a little
space between me and others. But I
still refuse to eat broccoli. As I’m-a-
Puzzle.com will tell you, I haven’t lost
all my pandemic brain power yet.
You can reach Dick Yarbrough at dick@
dickyarbrough.com; at P.O. Box 725373,
Atlanta, Georgia 31139 or on Facebook at
www.facebook.com/dickyarb.
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