Karen Rile urges parents to engage their kids in rigorous pursuits that require a large amount of practice early on in this week's Philadelphia Inquirer. She uses her own experience with daughters and their love of playing violin to make her case, which establishes some knowledge of the topic, but she fails to incorporate any statistics or evidence from true "experts" to further the credentials of her argument. Her own intellect, as a professor of creative writing at Ivy League school University of Pennsylvania, and her experience in the matter make up for this flaw almost entirely.
I think one of the most compelling parts to Karen Rile's argument is her casual tone, which makes me feel like I know her as a loving mother of one of my friends. She uses first-person point-of-view, and immidately begins the article by stating, "Me, I want to be a natural...But I'm usually that class dunce, or at least that's what it feels like as I struggle to keep up after the going gets tough" (D2). Rile becomes familiar and quickly gets the audience on her side, as she takes them through her life of Suzuki violin lessons and the lessons her daughters learned about "the habit of patient practice that has seen them through the long, slow development of mastery" (D2). Demonstrating her own realization of the power of practice, (which she notes is better than having natural talent in any field) Rile effectively convinces her audience to follow her conclusions and disregard the pressure to be a prodigy.
I think this article was extremely effective in proving the benefits to introducing kids to practice and hard work at an early age, but I would've liked seeing a variety of different activities incorporated. Is Suzuki better than pee-wee soccer? Perhaps I would need to read another article from a different author to find out...
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