On Thursday,
Jan. 31, 2008, in Corona, California, I made my final
public presentation on reading. The remaining 20+ events
on my 2008 schedule are
all for private conferences or for teachers attending the
Bureau of Education
and Research seminars.
I've received a number of
inquiries about why I'm retiring, some even suggesting
there might be a sad reason for the departure. Others wonder
why I'm walking away from a battle for literacy before
it's been won. Allow me to explain.
First, there is no
sad reason but several very joyous ones. The first is
my wife Susan who says she's "patiently
waited 24 years for Jim to come in off the road so we
can travel together." Somewhere in that statement
there's an oxymoron, but let's not go there.
Second, I now have four
wonderful grandchildren who deserve more of my time, not
less. As they inch upward (ages 3, 4, 11, and 13), I don't
want to be stuck in a Holiday Inn in Indiana while one
of them is in a play in New Jersey.
But there are also
reasons beyond those. Haven't we all been in a situation
where dinner guests came to our home and then didn't
know when to leave, just as we've seen professors, entertainers,
and athletes who've stayed in the limelight too long,
whose talents have eroded and they don't know it's time
to retire? Through 67 years of life and 30 years of public
speaking, I've seen my share of such people, and each
time I've said a silent prayer, "Please, Lord, let
me know when it's time to go home." He/She has answered
that prayer. I know it's my time to go. Besides, if I
didn't get the message that way, the airline industry
was also telling me when they confessed to a decade-long
high for "bumped" passengers the day I retired
and three days later announced a $25 fee for any second
piece of luggage (I always had
two). Like everyone, I'll miss those generous folks and
their peanut dinners.
The
earlier sports analogy applies nicely to my situation.
In the old days, they left the pitcher out on the mound
until he either won or lost the game — or until his
arm fell off. Not any more. Now they do "pitch counts." After
x-number of pitches, they take him out of the game, ready
or not.
In my case, I've been pitching
ideas to parents and teachers for 30 years — 24 years nationally.
That adds up to approximately 2,500 program sites, and
250,000 people. That's a lot of pitches, never mind
a lot of hotel rooms and airports in 50 states. So before
it becomes too many pitches (and my tongue falls off),
I've decided to just pitch "home games"— the
ones I can do from my desktop and Web site. I look forward
to maintaining the site and improving it in ways I didn't
have the time to do in the past. I'm also not willing to
abandon the fight for greater literacy. In that regard,
I've taken the most popular overhead
transparencies and charts from my lectures and made
them available for downloading as PDF files here at my
Web site. By simply giving the appropriate credit, they're
yours to use in nonprofit efforts.
Not surprisingly, with
2,500 presentations, there were more than 3,000 airport
connections. Now here's where I was really blessed: I
never missed a program because of bad flights. A couple
of close calls, but no misses. Illness cancellations?
One (laryngitis) in 2,500 dates, though I had two places
where I was too sick to stand up and had to sit through
the presentation. I must have had a flock of guardian angels
looking over me to achieve those numbers and I know the
name of at least one — Linda
Long, my saintly
program manager for 20 years. The secret to our perfect
travel record: never catch the last flight in.
I ended up with a lot of 6:30 am departures for evening
events but it always left me enough time to rebook and
recover from canceled or delayed flights.
My worst nightmares
But even saintly Linda couldn't
prevent my worst nightmare from coming true: I slept through
a program date. It was back in the late 1980s and I'd flown
into southern California the night before from Hawaii,
thinking I had only a Monday evening program. Wrong — I
had an afternoon event as well. So when I was supposed
to be a few miles away, I was napping instead in my hotel
room. It was far and away the most embarrassing moment
in my career and haunted my dreams ever afterward and probably
will in the retirement years ahead.
Ranking
right up there with the forgotten program was
the warning from the United Airlines pilot as we were about
to land at LAX: rioters were shooting at low-flying planes
in the wake of the Rodney King verdict. That was when
you hoped your seat cushion was good for more than just
a flotation device).
Another time I had to take a chartered
Piper Cub (just the pilot and me) from Palm Springs to
tiny El Monte airport near L.A. We were flying into the
fiercest Santa Ana wind storm on record and, to make
matters worse, as we approached the El Monte area we
were greeted by a blinding sunset decorated with lovely
California smog, at which point I heard the words I'd
never heard a pilot utter before (or since): "Mister,
I'm gonna need a little help right about here. See if you
can spot the airport."
Sometimes travel circumstances just
left you lost for words. At the top of such a list was
the Friday night the cab ran out of gas at the top of
a busy freeway overpass in Houston — where
there was no breakdown lane and the traffic couldn't see
the stopped cab until they were nearly on top of it. Talk
about prayerful moments! Come to think of it, Houston had
another nightmare moment: the Saturday noon when I was
robbed bya derelict with a box-cutter when I was out for
a power walk.
By working in California every January
and February for 24 years, I thought I could outwit the
weather man and avoid the dozens of ice and snow cancellations
I'd normally encounter home in the east. But there
was no escaping those staples of California climate: earthquakes
(one cancellation) and mudslides (one cancellation). And
then there was the morning I was driving on Mulholland
Drive to speak to a church conference and the breaks failed
on my rental car while coming down a hill. Talk about a
"wake-up call."
Sometimes all you could do was laugh,
like the time the teacher they sent to pick me up at the
airport was 50 minutes late, ran over an abutment in the
airport parking lot, and went the wrong way on a one-way
street getting to the hotel. Didn't phase her a bit and
she talked non-stop all the way. In Toledo,
Ohio back in the 1980s, the person picking me at the airport
(a lifelong resident of the city) got lost getting to the
hotel, lost again getting to the restaurant, lost a third
time getting to the high school, and then couldn't find
the auditorium in the school. Needless to say,
when she offered to drive me to the airport in the morning,
I begged off (profusely stating I'd inconvenienced her
enough) and took the hotel shuttle. Otherwise I might still
be driving round and round in Toledo like that
man named Charlie on the MTA.
The best and worst
For me, California was the state that
had the best record for parent turnout; New England was
the worst. In the latter case, I think the school scores
have been good for so long, parents don't feel they have
to be involved and administrators don't want to be bothered
by intruding parents. Nationally, public schools nearly
always outdrew private schools. My guess here is that private
school parents figured either they were raising perfect
children or, with the tuition they were paying, the teachers
ought to be doing this stuff themselves. I finally stopped
booking private schools. Texas was the place where they
made you feel the most welcome, including asking you to
come to church with them.
Two places invited me back so often I felt like they
were second homes: Tustin (Community
Preschool) and Modesto
City Schools, both in California. Those two also had two
of the finest administrators it was my pleasure to
work with: Director Libby Kayle in
Tustin and Superintendent
Jim Enochs in Modesto.
The
biggest disappointment in 30 years of education work was
the No
Child Left Behind Act. It did (and does)
more damage to schools and children than anything short
of war. Indeed, in my opinion, it's a war on childhood.
Created by lobbyists for the textbook-testing industry
and a Congress that never sees the inside of a school
except for photo-ops, it has driven out thousands of
the most experienced teachers (who refuse to practice
intellectual child abuse) while disillusioning thousands
of the youngest teachers — all
in the name of testing that makes hundreds of millions
for the testing industry. Beyond profits, NCLB's only
other accomplishment has been to create hundreds of thousands
of school children who associate reading with dry-boned
textbooks, boredom, pain, and the threat of failure.
A strange way to create a nation of readers! Saddest
of all, it was built on a hoax — there was no Texas
education miracle. They cooked the books the Enron way
and that's been documented time
and again. The one thing they really got right in Washington
was calling it the No Child Left Behind Act.
The most worrisome occurrence, other
than NCLB, is the drastic decline in newspaper readership,
something that portends sad things for American literacy,
never mind democracy. No matter which country, children
who come from homes containing the most print — newspapers,
books, and magazines — have
the highest reading scores. As more American homes
go without a daily newspaper, fewer children see a parent
reading anything, and the less there is to model on. True,
there is plenty of print on the Internet, as this very
text demonstrates, but few people read anything of
any length or depth online. Most computer "reading" is
done in seconds, not minutes or hours, and most children
use the Internet for downloading music and playing games
while their parents use it for shopping. None of this paints
a bright future.
Equally troubling is the new
breed among "anti-library" administrators who
think books are outdated, especially novels ("after
all, it's made-up stuff").
I actually had districts ask me not to dwell on fiction
in my talks because "most of the test material from
the state is on informational text." Lost on such
people is the distinction between information and knowledge.
As one writer put it, if all you need is information, then
we could all be citizen heart surgeons.
I was fortunate enough to work in the
richest and poorest school districts of America
— from Greenwich, Connecticut and Scarsdale, New
York to Webb and Tunica, Mississippi. The adage says that
travel is broadening and I'll second that. Any doubts I
might have had about the economic
divide in American education were wiped out by visits
to schools like those. If I had one moment to live over
again on the road, it would be to revisit the boys'
room at an extremely impoverished Mississippi high school.
This time I'd have my camera with me so I could take a
photo and compare that room with the toilet facilities
we offer the public gamblers in Las Vegas — one
of Bill Bennett's favorite city.
What's missing here?
Some experiences are in a category all
their own; they are neither the best or the worst—they're
just utterly bizarre. Such was the case when I visited
a small town on the gas fields of southwestern Kansas back
in 1986. I knew things were going to be different when
the principal picked me up at the tiny Liberal, Kansas
airport in his Cadillac. All the way to the school, he
bragged about his school library. "Wait'll you see
the thing— you're
gonna love it! It's just bursting with books." As
it turns out, they had no problem with a book budget. Their
abundant gas fields put two computers into every classroom
when most folks had only two to a school. Their elementary
school gymnasium had a scoreboard that would have made
the Lakers proud.
And then we arrived at the library. Sure
enough, it was bursting at the seams with books. But, strolling
through its aisles, I noticed there was something strange
about the collection. I couldn't put my finger
on it at first but then it struck me: nearly all the books
were missing their dust jackets. Just bare covers. "Who
took the covers off all the books?"
I asked. The smiling librarian just laughed and said it
saved a lot of time in the end to just remove them in the
beginning—after all, the kids will just rip them
anyway."
Apparently nobody ever clued them into why magazines have
covers and cookie boxes have front-space, or even why you
might need bright fancy lettering on a popsicle wrapper.
Takes all kinds, but like Molly Ivans used to
say about Texas legislators, "If the I.Q. sinks any
lower, we'll have to water 'em twice a day."
The
most encouraging signs in 30 years were the mega-book stores
like Barnes & Noble and Borders; online booksellers like Amazon and Bookfinder.com;
libraries with coffee shops; the Harry
Potter phenomenon;
the proliferation of audio books that can be downloaded
to near-weightless devices like iPods; podcasts of NPR
and its affiliates with great author interviews; and Oprah's blessed book club. Twenty-five years ago you would have
had to be in the audience to hear the Pulitzer-winning
Tom Friedman talk about
his book, The
World Is Flat. Now
we can download such things, hear them, and share
them. Just when you thought there was no hope on
the reading horizon, one of those items popped up and gave
you hope. What a far cry from the misery of yesterday's
Puritanism to sit in book stores' cushioned chairs today
and browse a book or magazine while drinking a latté and
nibbling a pastry. We've come a long way in the last 30
years, Samuel Johnson, and you missed it!
Of all the educational research published
during my three working decades, the one that made the
most lasting impression on me and which I continually
shared with audiences was the work of Drs.
Betty Hart and Todd Risley: Meaningful Differences in the
Everyday Experience of Young American Children. It
contradicted a large part of government's education propaganda
which says "If we fix the schools, we can fix the child."
Meaningful Differences clearly showed the home and family
were the reasons at-risk children show up for kindergarten
with a 32 million-word deficit in their language experiences.
To get the child caught up with the higher-scoring affluent
students, the kindergarten teacher would have to speak
10 words a second for 900 hours. The government's obsession
with testing to cure this gap is equivalent to weighing
the cattle more often to make them fatter.
Learning
from parents and learning to adjust
And
just as no pitcher wins a game alone, I, too, had lots
of help. Starting in 1978 when principals Jim
Moriarty and Mary McGrath of Springfield, Massachusetts, asked
me to speak to their combined PTO's, I worked with some
of the most dedicated, caring educators and parents in
America. They inspired me and educated me, sharing their
triumphs and failures with me, and allowing me to incorporate
them into my lectures, books, and films.
While most of my efforts
were in educating parents about what they could do to raise
readers, there were more than a few who educated
me instead. Marcia
Thomas and her husband Mark were
raising their Down Syndrome daughter Jennifer when she
wrote to tell me her family's inspiring story and then
trusted me to share it with my Handbook readers.
Likewise, Linda
Kelly-Hassett and her husband Jim kept
a diary of their dozens of daily read-alouds with their
adopted daughter Erin, then shared the list with me and
my readers through the years. I am more than proud to have
been even a tiny part of these families' lives and triumphs.
I'd be lying if I painted
every one of my 2,500 presentations as rosy perfect. A
few were the direct opposite. Consider, for example, the
school inservice one morning near the Jersey shore:
- Directions to the program
site arrived at my office the day of the program, 24
hours after I'd departed for Jersey;
- The
microphone didn’t work;
- Only half the overhead projector image
was bright enough, the other half too dim;
- The screen
was old, too small, and placed too low for attendees
to see;
- There weren’t enough chairs
for the 160 attendees (despite advance registration);
- When
the microphone was fixed, it hummed loudly if the overhead
was turned on.
Aren't you
glad they weren’t
in charge of the kindergarten field trip or the parent
picnic?
But if you're going to travel and speak
for a living,
you learn to adjust — to almost anything. Once I
arrived in a town (Arcadia, California) right after a Santa
Ana wind storm of record strength. Power lines were down
all over town, including at the school site, but
six parents showed up with high-power flashlights, sat
in the front row, and the show went on. One Saturday morning
in Tucson, Arizona, there were 500 teachers for a literacy
conference at a local high school. The only problem
was the light switches for the stage were locked up and
only the missing custodian knew where the key was. So I
presented on a darkened stage, barely able to see in front
of myself, telling the audience that if they were wondering
what I looked like, think of a young "Robert Redford."
They took it seriously, until a half hour into the program
when someone found the keys and put on the lights. It took
me five minutes to get them to stop laughing.
Five great principals
The occasional inept principal-host
was always overshadowed by people like Tom O'Neill Jr.,
Mike Oliver, Ross Scarantino, Randy Overbeck, and Joan
Moorman. I say we should forget about cloning
the sheep and start cloning people like these.
Tom 
O'Neill was a Boston high school teacher when he attended two of
my programs back in '82 and '83. One year later they made
him principal of the worst-performing junior high in Boston
— where he incorporated two of my seminar subjects:
SSR and reading aloud to classes. By 1988, his school (the
one Boston teachers had nicknamed "the Loonybin")
had the highest reading scores of the city's 22 junior
highs. When I wrote of Tom's success in a subsequent edition
of The Read-Aloud Handbook, it was included in
the Japanese edition where his SSR program was adopted
by first one Japanese school and then by more than 3,000
schools.
Mike
Oliver, a Mesa, Arizona
principal truly devoted to children and literacy, attended
one of my BER seminars and took the idea of rain gutter
bookshelves to heights the rest of the nation could model
on. In 2008, ten of the top education officials from
Russia visited his school to see what they could learn
from his successes.
Ross
Scarantino, of Pittston,
Pennsylvania, and Randy Overbeck, of Xenia, Ohio, both
taught me how little I truly knew about inspirational leadership
in small communities. They predicted they'd have huge numbers
of parents for my presentations, despite my calm assurances
they had no chance of getting such numbers. Ross had
900 and Randy had 1,100. When I asked someone in Pittston,
PA, how Scarantino could have gotten that kind
of turnout, he laughed and said, "You
don't know how things work here in this town. They love
this guy so much that when he says jump, parents say,
'How high?'"
Joan
Moorman consistently
drew hundreds of parents to her school events, even though
she was principal of a largely blue-collar, Latino community
school in Covina, California. She not only shared her formula
with me, she also allowed me to post it at my Web site
through the years. Here's how successful it was. On two
successive nights a few years ago, I was speaking in two
southern California communities: Fontana and Laguna Niguel.
Fontana is a very blue-cola town, and home to one of the
largest numbers of trucks and truck-drivers
in America. Using the Moorman
formula for reaching parents,
the school district attracted 400 parents, half of whom
heard the presentation via headphones and simultaneous
translation in Spanish. The next night, a Laguna Niguel
school chose not to use the Moorman approach and drew 28
parents. You can lead a horse to water . . .
My professors of reading
and lit
Just like any rookie pitcher,
I benefited greatly from the counseling I received from
veterans who had been around the education field longer
than I. First, there was Bill Halloran who
shared his experiences and wisdom, while inspiring me with
his example. Nobody ever gave me bigger professional boosts
than Pat
Koppman,
one of the best presidents the International Reading Association
ever had. And then there were four college professors and
one librarian who were kind enough to treat me as an equal
when I was far from that: Diane Lowe at
Framingham State (MA); Stephen Krashen at
USC; Bee
Cullinan at NYU; the grand dame of children's
lit,
Charlotte Huck; and a librarian in Santa
Clara, California named Jan Lieberman (my
Renaissance woman). These people made more sense of reading
than 90 percent of superintendents and secretaries of education
could in 100 years and I was blessed to have them touch
my life.
How does one begin to thank
the hundreds of classroom teachers who shared their thoughts
and classes with me? Whom do I dare slight by leaving
them off a list of accolades? Nonetheless, I could never
sleep at night if I didn't name these three: Ann
and Mary Dryden; and Kathy
Nozzolillo. The Dryden sisters were two extraordinary educators in
Springfield, Massachusetts, who were the very first to
invite me to their classrooms back in 1967. That first
school is now named after Mary and, appropriately, her
sister is principal. Kathy Nozzolillo, also from Springfield,
Massachusetts, has been my friend for a half century and
is the consummate educator who shared her love of reading
with her students and then couldn't wait to share those
same students with me in my films and books.
Those were
just the teachers who helped me professionally.
There were also the ones who took me in hand when I was
one of the students in their classrooms, beginning with Harold "Bud" Porter and Al
Schmidt in North Plainfield, New Jersey, and the
Sisters of St. Joseph in Springfield, Massachusetts.
The most important lesson I carried away from their classrooms
was this: "We really care about you and think you're
capable of great stuff." I never learned anything
more important.
My unofficial 'fan club'
Every
pitcher draws a big chunk of energy from his fans and
I had a few who, when you look up the word "kindness" in
the dictionary, there ought to be a picture of these
three. Marilyn Carpenter was a mom with three kids, working
her way through her education degrees toward a doctorate,
when she and her husband Warren invited me to stay in
their Arcadia, California home for several weeks back
in 1984. It was my first Wes Coast tour and I was a neophyte
on the freeways. The Carpenters' generosity with home,
hospitality, and freeway tips has never been forgotten.
And then there was Connie
Martin. She heard me 13 times and says she learned something
every time. As grateful as I am for her loyalty, I'm also
grateful she never died of boredom at any of my presentations.
One
night in 1995, I spoke in Pacific Palisades,
California, an affluent community outside L.A. I knew
my childhood hero lived in the town and while I was talking
with parents that night I told them I arrived two hours
early and drove around town hoping to see him, then chided
them for not having him on public display. They laughed,
but a stranger in the audience, Janet
Zarem, filed my
words away in her memory bank. A year later she saw in
the paper that I was speaking in town again, remembered
my words about that childhood hero, and she wrote
him a letter asking if he could spare an hour for coffee
with me. That's how I came to be sitting awestruck in a
sidewalk cafe, Jan. 30, 1997, with Vin
Scully, the longtime
voice of the Dodgers. (The story of that day can
be found online at American Public Media's "The Story
with Dick Gordon"; you can download the show's mp3
file at The
Story (the file will
automatically download to your computer; see second half
of show).
That hour with Scully ranked
at the top of my celebrity list, followed by sharing a
cab and later a catfish dinner with Chicago's legendary Studs Terkel.
And the only thing I've tasted on the road that was better
than those Mississippi catfish was "Aggie
Ice Cream" at
Utah State in Logan, something that ought to be
a controlled
substance.
Still
on the subject of food, back in the early '90s, my friend
Steven Herb invited me to a dinner party at his home
before I was to speak in the Hershey, Pennsylvania area.
This was decades before Steven would become director of
the Pennsylvania Center for the Book. I'm not sure if Steven
or his wife made out the seating chart,
but whoever it was deserves an "A" for timing
and placement. I ended up seated next to a man named Paul
Serf who happened to be on the Hershey historical commission.
In the course of our dinner conversation, he gave me one
of the great shocks of my travel life: There was no existing
broadcast recording of Wilt Chamberlain's famous 100-point
game that had been played in Hershey back in 1962. Really? Absolutely.
The commission had checked everywhere. None. And then it
was my turn to jolt Mr. Serf: I had made a recording that
night in 1962, right
off the radio in my dormitory room at the University of
Massachusetts—a
recording I still had. Now, 40 years after that game, the
recording is part of the Basketball Hall of Fame. All thanks
to a seating chart at Steven Herb's house.
Every pitcher needs a
catcher (and some luck)
And finally, no pitcher
could win even one game without a catcher and some luck.
My luck (and it was gigantic)
was in having my neighbor Shirley
Uman bump into an old
family friend who was beginning his career as a literary
agent — Rafael Sagalyn. He was looking for his first
client and my neighbor mentioned the young dad up the street
with his self-published little booklet on reading to kids.
More luck: six publishers turned it down (including Scholastic)
before Penguin took it on in 1982 and now we're approaching
2 million copies in print, while Rafe Sagalyn is one of
Washington's top literary agents. And then there was even
more luck when a new mom (Florence
Brodkey) down in Arlington,
Virginia was given a copy of my book by a grad-student
carpenter. The new mom, in turn, reads it and writes a
letter of endorsement to "Dear Abby," who reads
it herself and devotes almost an entire column to the book.
Result: orders for 120,000 copies in 10 days. Long before
there was an Oprah, there was a "Dear Abby," God
bless her.
I was also lucky enough
to have a crew of great catchers in my family: my wife,
my children, and my brothers. I bounced more ideas off
them than anyone, trying things out on them long before
the audiences heard them. And like good catchers, they
kept me on track, told me when I was working too fast,
and helped me redirect my pitches and ideas. My brother
Brian not only caught the ideas, he practiced them with
his own family, and shared his own lesson plans with me.
I never had a better counselor.
Catchers are supposed
to manage the game on the field, keeping distractions
to a minimum — and nobody
did that better than my wife Susan. I never had to pay
a bill, write a check, or balance a checkbook. She took
care of business and just let me pitch. To top it off,
she cooked meals that rivaled great works of art. Who
could ask for more?
My children, Elizabeth and
Jamie, were the best audience a reader-aloud could ever
find. None of the thousands of sites I worked in through
the last 24 years were as good their bedrooms were from
1965 to 1982. They were the original inspiration for The
Read-Aloud Handbook, showing me what worked and what
didn't. Years later they shared their children with me
and I learned even more. All together they were the best
classes I ever took.
So now it's time to relax
a bit, pick up some of the books I've been buying for the
last 20 years but didn't have enough time to read (ah,
David McCullough), master my SLR digital camera (see Jim's
photos), exercise and bike more often, play with my
grandkids, listen to (and download to my iPod) the BBC
online and NPR podcasts, travel with Susan, and update
this Web site.
Thanks for being there for
me. I'm very grateful. And, if you're not too busy
yourself and you think there's something I need to know,
send me an email about it.
When
my father sat me on his lap and read to me each
evening in New Jersey, he had no idea where the "reading
seeds" he was planting would finally end up
sixty
years later—in a national reading campaign in
Poland.
See
Reading Seeds. |
