I'll second this notion. I no longer write C, but it is what I learned in high school. My teacher had an interesting class requirement: we needed to review one C/C++ Users Journal article. Length, difficulty, or topic didn't matter - just read a trade article and write about it. We also had to code a lot, and we had to write code by hand on paper tests, and we had some fun competing, but the journals let me know what the Real World was doing.

It takes a large volume of work to really get into programming, and I think that reading is easier than writing, so it's a fast way to dig in (keeping in mind that feedback is critical - so reading without writing has severe diminishing returns)!