This
is a brief excerpt from the Introduction to The
Read-Aloud Handbook by Jim Trelease (Penguin,
2006, 6th edition).
See
also Handbook FAQs.
ISSUES
ADDRESSED HERE IN THE INTRODUCTION |
PAGE
ONE :
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PAGE
TWO:
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INTRODUCTION —
page 2
Time
in school versus time at
home: a gigantic difference
Jay Mathews,
the Washington
Post's education writer, looked back on all the
student achievement stories he'd written in 22 years
and wrote: "I cannot think of a single instance in which
the improvement in achievement was not tied, at least
in part, to an increase in the amount of time students
had to learn."8 I've
been saying the same thing as Mathews for as
many years. You either extend the school day (as the
successful KIPP Academies charters have done9) or you
tap into the 7,800 hours at home. Since the dollar cost
of lengthening the school day would be prohibitive in
the most needy places, the most viable option is tapping
the 7,800 hours at home, something government mistakenly
sees as the equivalent of raising taxes.
Harvard's
Ronald F. Ferguson, a black scholar and Harvard lecturer,
has long studied racial achievement gaps in public
schools. Complicated as those issues are, Ferguson
boils them down to one: “The real issue is historical
differences in parenting. That is hard to talk about,
but that is the root of the skill gap.” According
to Ferguson, black households traditionally see schooling
as a job for teachers while white families are more
involved in schooling the child or paying for special
services.10
 Footnote 11
Home Information |
High Interest |
Low Interest |
| No. of books
in home |
80.6 |
31.7 |
| Child owns
library card |
37.5 |
3.4 |
| Child is taken
to library |
98.1 |
7.1 |
| Child is read
to daily |
76.8 |
1.8 |
|
Contrary
to the doctrine that blames teachers for reading scores,
research shows the seeds of reading and school success
are sown in the home, long before the child ever
arrives at school. Twenty-one classes of kindergartners
were examined for children who displayed either
high or low interest in books. Those students'
home environments were then examined in detail
(see chart left).11 The numbers reinforce the
adage that "the apple doesn't fall far from
the tree." Therefore you change the tree
if you want different apples.
Research like this helps crystallize
education issues that politicians too often turn into
fog. But research alone would bore the traditional parent
and teacher, so I've also included the personal and anecdotal
to bring the research alive.
 y personal and anecdotal I mean people like Leonard and his mother. As he describes
her, "She was not a learned woman, never finished high school. But then,
it's hard to be learned when you grow up black in Depression-era Mississippi.
Still, not being learned is not the same as not being smart." His mother
"was a voracious consumer of books and newspapers, a woman filled with
a thirst to know." With
that in mind, picture this 46-year-old son sitting down at his computer in
2004, typing the following words:
"My first reader was a welfare mother with a heart condition.
She lived in a housing project near downtown Los Angeles.
"This
is circa 1962 or '63 and technically, she
wasn't my reader back then but my listener.
I would follow her around as she ironed clothes
or prepared a meal, reading aloud from my
latest epic, which, like all my epics, was
about a boy who was secretly a superhero,
with super strength and the ability to fly.
"Surely
there came a point when the poor woman secretly
regretted having taught the bespectacled
child his ABCs, but she never let on. Just
nodded and exclaimed in all the right places
and when the story was done, sent me off
to clean up my room or wash my hands for
dinner."12
Leonard
Pitts Jr. (above) was writing a thank-you note to his mother. Even
though she had died 16 years earlier, he wanted her to
know how grateful he was. After all, you don't win the
Pulitzer Prize for commentary just any day of the week.
His thank-you note became his syndicated Miami
Herald column for that day.
“What we teach children to love
and desire will always outweigh what we make them learn.”
Mrs. Pitts couldn't afford to spend
her son's 7,800 hours by driving him around to tutoring
classes. Instead, she tutored him herself by listening,
enthusing, and reading. She couldn't afford high-priced "eye-contact" tutors
but she skimped to buy him a toy typewriter when he was
eight, and a used one when he was 14. Loose change? Just
enough so her son could buy the latest "Spider-Man" and "Fantastic
Four" comic
books.
What Mrs. Pitts was doing is one of
the great trade secrets in American education. Keeping
that stuff a secret and focusing exclusively on testing
is like telling people with cancer that they need to
do something about their dandruff.
What
Mrs. Pitts did wasn't expensive, so income level need not be a
blockade. It may not be easy for poor people, but it's not impossible.
For example, the most comprehensive study of American school children
(22,000 students) showed us that while poverty children made up
52 percent of the bottom quarter when they entered kindergarten,
six percent scored in the highest quartile—right up there with
the richest children in America.13 Furthermore, of all
college graduates each year, six percent come from poverty.14 They
might be the same six percent—but
collectively they demonstrate it's not impossible to achieve at
high levels if the parents do the right things.
Will
this book help me teach my child to read?
This
is not a book about teaching a child how to read; it’s about teaching a child to want to read. There's an education adage that goes, “What we teach children to love and desire will always outweigh what we make them learn.” The
fact is that some children learn to read sooner than others, and some better
than others. There is a difference. For the parent who thinks sooner is better,
who has an eighteen-month-old child barking at flashcards, my response is:
Sooner is not better. Are the dinner guests who arrive an hour early better
guests than those who arrive on time? Of course not.
However,
I am concerned about the child who needlessly arrives late and then struggles
through years of pain with a book. Not only will he miss out on large
portions of what he needs to know in school, he'll experience a pain
connection with print that may stay with him for a lifetime. There are
things that families must do as "preventive maintenance" to ensure against
those pains.
Even I have to admit
that the subject of children's reading is broader than simply reading
aloud to children, passionate as I am about that subject. And that's
why there's a chapter (five) devoted to SSR—sustained silent reading, reading aloud's silent partner, if you will. And just as the best baseball players come from countries and states where they can play baseball most often, research shows that children who have access to more print (magazines, newspapers, and books) have higher reading scores—because
they end up reading more. That's explored in chapter seven.
There is also a chapter on television (nine), including some new research correlating
infants' daily TV exposure with attention deficit disorder by age seven. That
chapter also includes information about a mechanical device for the TV that
is the most successful reading tutor in the world!
Questions covered in the Introduction for print
edition of The Read-Aloud Handbook:
- What if the No Child Left Behind
Act is wrong? Where does that leave the nation’s children?
- Are you suggesting this reading stuff is the job of the parent?
- Can we really change families and homes in America?
- Will this book help me teach my child to read?
- How did a parent come to write this book?
- How do I convince my husband he should be doing this with our
children?
- Is reading still important in the video age?
See Handbook Contents for a list
of all issues and questions in the book.
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