Rick Riordan Quotes

I realize the differences between my children and use what works for each of them individually.

Instead of a national curriculum for education, what is really needed is an individual curriculum for every child.

I myself love getting cookbooks and novels that some congenial person has already tried and liked.

I have different books for different times of the day, let alone different seasons of the year!

I read pretty eclectically - fiction, non-fiction, and poetry - and I've been inspired and influenced by a number of writers.

If the education and studies of children were suited to their inclinations and capacities, many would be made useful members of society that otherwise would make no figure in it.

Poverty places not just one or two obstacles but multiple obstacles in a child's pathway to what we would consider to be regular development - cognitively, intellectually and emotionally.

If a child wants to read 'Twilight' over Middlemarch, they should be encouraged - the important thing is to get them reading in the first place.

Readers can read what they want and easily switch to other books, so we're seeing a lot of reading behaviors. Some verticals attract different usage than others. We can spot reading patterns.

It's hard recommending books for kids, and a huge responsibility. If you get it wrong, they don't tell you they hate that particular book, they tell you they hate reading.

Reading is such a personal thing to me. I'd much rather give someone a gift certificate to a bookstore, and let that person choose his or her own books.

The future of education is individualized education.

I have books I like very much, but I don't think there are any books that everyone should read. I prefer a world in which some people read this, and others read that.

A one-size-fits-all lecture is not the way to go about education.

As a reader, I read quite widely.

You can make your own son or daughter one of a kind if you have the time and will to do so; school can only make them part of a hive, herd or anthill.

A reader's tastes are peculiar. Choosing books to read is like making your way down a remote and winding path. Your stops on that path are always idiosyncratic. One book leads to another and another the way one thought leads to another and another. My type of reader is the sort who burrows through the stacks in the bookstore or the library (or the Web site — stacks are stacks), yielding to impulse and instinct.

When a child is thriving, there is no reason to spend time assessing intelligences. But when a child is NOT thriving - in school or at home - that is the time to apply the lens of multiple intelligences and see whether one can find ways to help the child thrive in different environments.

What's gotten in the way of education in the United States is a theory of social engineering that says there is ONE RIGHT WAY to proceed with growing up.

We need to have an education system in New Jersey and all over the country that makes all of our kids, either college or career ready. It should be their choice. I mean, every kid doesn't want to go to college. But I think we should aspire to let every child reach his maximum or her maximum potential.

The objects in our system are instead a help to the child himself, he chooses what he wants for his own use, and works with it according to his own needs, tendencies and special interests. In this way, the objects become a means of growth.

I think every single one of us can think back on the key individuals in our lives who really made a difference, and also maybe some of those who sent us astray. There are those are the teachers who are brave enough to buck the system, and obviously not in such a way that jeopardizes their jobs, but brave enough to say, "I know I have to accomplish that, but I want to know how I'm going to help this child get there differently. I want to know what makes this child tick, and I want to help him get there from a place of curiosity, rather than from a place where I impose my ideas on him."

The fact is that given the challenges we face, education doesn't need to be reformed -- it needs to be transformed. The key to this transformation is not to standardize education, but to personalize it, to build achievement on discovering the individual talents of each child, to put students in an environment where they want to learn and where they can naturally discover their true passions.

There isn't a right way to become educated; there are as many ways as there are fingerprints.

Instead of trying to educate the human race, they should imitate the pedagogues of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, who concentrated their efforts on the education of a single person.