RUSH: Katie, San Andreas, California. Hi. Great to have you with us. Hello.
CALLER: Hi, Rush. It’s an honor to talk to you. I’ve been dreaming about this day for so long because I was a Rush child and I’m raising Rush children now. My mother is probably listening to this, and she’s like, “Oh, my God. She got on.”
RUSH: Well, congratulations. That’s great to hear.
CALLER: And I also want to say mega prayers to you. Our thoughts and prayers are with you all the time, and we pray for a full recovery.
CALLER: You’re welcome. I was told I need to get to the point. I live in a small community in California. I wanted to talk about and share with you how this is affecting us. I’m homeschooling my children now. I have three children 8, 5, and 2. And this has rocked our world. We are healthy, thank God. But it’s rocked our world in the fact that I don’t know how to teach my daughter Common Core. I don’t know how to teach the reading strategies that are expected so that she’s gonna pass the state tests. I don’t know how to teach reading to my 5-year-old with the expectations that they’re teaching.
I’m concerned for their future education. My husband and I have the conversation daily, do we hold them back? What do we do? They are missing a third of the school year, and like you were pointing out before, why? The numbers aren’t there. I’m having such a hard time wrapping my head around this. We’re changing everyone’s daily life for such a small —
RUSH: But the California situation — now, one thing, I need to be as accurate as I can here. The New York metropolitan area is home to the largest and most prominent ethnic Chinese population outside of Asia.
CALLER: Yes.
RUSH: But that still didn’t mitigate the fact that five to 7,000 Chinese flying into and out of California every day for who knows how long and that the numbers of people infected and the death toll in California is so far below what common sense would tell you it should be. And there has to be a reason for it. As a layman, I don’t know what it is.
CALLER: I can’t wrap my head around it. We’ve been locked down. They canceled school the week of St. Patrick’s Day so the 16th of March they canceled school. The kids were supposed to be on spring break for two weeks. That Thursday after St. Patrick’s Day — so the 19th, I guess — our governor, who’s a genius, put us all on lockdown. And, you know, we’ve been sheltered in place. My husband has an essential job, so thank God he’s still working and he’s still getting paid. But, I mean, you’re just changing everyone’s daily life. And I have a hard time, I’m just having such a hard time with it.
RUSH: Well, let me get back to your homeschooling question.
CALLER: Yeah.
RUSH: And maybe I misinterpreted it. You don’t want to do it? You would rather they be exposed to Common Core?
CALLER: No, I’d rather — see, I guess I’m torn on that one is I think the social aspect of my kids going to school, they miss that daily, but then for me to make sure that I’m still teaching them so they’re not gonna be behind next year, I feel like I have to expose them a little bit to Common Core. Does that make sense?
RUSH: Okay, I get what you mean.
CALLER: Yeah.
RUSH: I get what you mean.
CALLER: I don’t want to be a teacher. I taught nine years ago.
RUSH: I actually was thinking about this over the weekend as I was plotting my return to the EIB studios, and I was just recording random thoughts as I had them so that I wouldn’t forget them, and one of the random thoughts I had, I heard somebody — don’t remember, doesn’t matter — complaining about having their kids at home with them all day and what the hell they were gonna do. And kids don’t do well at home, they gotta get out but they can’t get out, people are going crazy.
So I thought, you know, I happen to like home. I’ve built my life around being home. I got everything I need at home. I’ve set it up that way. I don’t have to leave home for anything. I love being home. I’ve always dreamed of having a home. It’s just one of my quirks. So how can I be helpful and transfer this attitude to other people? Because right now people don’t have any choice. We’re being ordered to stay home under penalty of this or that.
So what can you tell your kids? Well, educating them, you have such a golden opportunity here. You have no choice, they are at home. They’re prisoners. You’re prisoners. You have a golden opportunity to correct whatever kind of drivel they have been taught. And you’re not under time pressure. You don’t have to do eight hours of school a day. You can devise your own method for doing this. You can instill in them the concept of nationalism and patriotism and tell them exactly why they have to stay home. You know, they’re not too young to learn. How old are your kids?
RUSH: The 8-year-old is not too young to learn some of these things.
CALLER: Oh, absolutely not. Like, we start our day with the Pledge. We do the Star-Spangled Banner, and my 8-year-old, I don’t know what she was being taught in school, but she just was under the assumption everything was free. And I was like no, nothing is free. No. Everything costs money. We’re gonna go back to capitalism 101 here.
RUSH: Right. Well, exactly. But in the meantime there are some other lessons that they’re learning, and among them — and I wish I had had more of it my whole life, particularly when I was younger, and that’s discipline. You have an opportunity to teach discipline that you don’t even have to be mean about it because there is no alternative. They have to learn to deal with these restrictions. They have to learn to come up with ways to keep themselves, quote, entertained, busy, whatever to pass the time because that’s the key. You can find ways for it to be productive.
Discipline, I think, is one of the greatest lessons that could be taught during this. And also there is this concept — a lot of people disagree, but there is the concept of denial. They can’t go out. They can’t do this, they can’t do that. You have to tell ’em why. We’re in a war. We are being attacked by an invisible enemy that doesn’t care who it attacks and can kill a lot of people. It’s your job to keep them safe, and you love them, and that’s why this is all happening. And there’s certain things that right now they just can’t do and just can’t have.
It’s a combination of discipline and denial. You can’t always go where you want. You can’t always go where you want when you want. And you have to learn to use your time at home to learn things, to become a better person, become more educated, more informed. There are opportunities in all this. I believe that there’s good in everything that happens. It may be hard to find, it may be invisible, but it will reveal itself.
CALLER: I completely agree. And, you know, I had my mental emotional breakdown Sunday when this was gonna go on for 30 more days, but then I was like I need to look at it as a half full glass, that I have the opportunity to spend more time with my children, to influence them in the way that I want them to be influenced, to teach them how great of a country we do live in and the Founding Fathers and all that stuff that they’re not being taught in school.
RUSH: There you go. There you go. Now, folks, a lot of this stuff I imagine to some of you sounds very Pollyannish out there and to some of you it may sound very naive and unrealistic, but it is what it is, to use the cliche. And there are opportunities here that are presenting themselves, and they’re not incidental, and they’re not insignificant, and they’re not cliched. But the other thing, Katie, this can’t go on. I’m gonna keep saying this until it permeates. You say 30 more days and then — you know what they’re gonna do?
I’m gonna be a little selfish. I have a teaching aid for you. That would be the Rush Revere series, five books that are written for the kids a little older than your 8-year-old, but she can do it. And then the other two that you have will be qualified before long. The Rush Revere series on the founding of America, that’s written truthfully for kids in your age group and coming. I’m glad you called. It’s great to talk to you.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: By the way, we are preparing an entry page at RushLimbaugh.com — on the Rush Revere page — because we have some Rush Revere copies that we are gonna be donating to families once we have an entry page set up. It’s not ready to go yet. We’re working on this, and as soon as we get it set up, I’ll let you know.
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