Look Freddie, you have posted and excellent--and very timely article here. I commend you.

And now you've generated a voluntary case study: me.

I was a Student Council President in high school, graduating 1969. Then I went across town to LSU. But I was a dreamer and drifted through with an English/Political Science University College degree.

Rule #1, and you just gotta trust me on this one:

Learn to Read!

Moving right along . . . I drifted into Sales. . . insurance, newspaper advertising, printing . . but there was this compulsion to work with my hands, accompanied by a desire to see something material done by the end of the day.

I drifted into construction.

Long story short: spent rest of life building structures. An early opportunity landed me at a major concrete project where I spent two years "tieing steel" rebar for structural reinforcement.

"Steel" being those very same bars pictured above, rebar.

But by 'n by I moved into real carpentry, and that is how I ended up putting three kids through college, with the aid of my wife, who was a "psych" grad who later trained to serve as an RN in ICU after our third kid entered middle school.

All that to say: Learn to read. Learn to research, and you will never forget it.

PS In these last years (I'm 69) I have gravitated back to my English major roots. In the last dozen years, wrote and published 4 novels: Glass half-Full, Glass Chimera, Smoke, King of Soul.

Bottom line: Its all good if you learn how to read and how to research whatever interests your.

Thanks, Freddie, for sharing on Medium.

Keep up the good work of educating people during these tough times!