You can't catch a cold or the love of reading from someone who has neither.

By Jim Trelease © 2006, 2007

Let’s take a look first at the average adult’s reading, then we’ll scrutinize the faculty. The National Endowment for the Arts has been surveying those reading habits for almost 25 years and its most recent report of adult reading of literature (fiction books, short stories, or poetry) was down 22 percent from its 1982 survey, and the decline was evidenced in every age, gender, ethnic, or educational category. By 2002, only 46.7 percent of 17,000 adults surveyed had read any fiction in the last year.¹ When that was expanded in a different survey to include newspapers or any kind of book or magazine, the figure rose to only 50 percent of adults.² In short, half of America is alliterate.

Moving to the school faculty

Research with teachers shows that in schools where administrators talk about books and professional journals, the teachers read more on their own.³ So why wouldn't the same be true for students if their instructional leaders talked more about books? In other words, the teacher stands before the class and daily gives mini–book talks based on the classroom library.

The fly in this ointment is that book talks work only when the person talking has actually read the book. And the harsh reality here is most teachers don’t read much.

That’s not a speculative comment but one based on both research and personal experience. One study of 224 teachers pursuing graduate degrees showed they read few or no professional journals that included research.⁴ (Suppose your doctor only read Prevention magazine?) More than half said they had read only one or two professional books in the previous year, and an additional 20 percent said they had read nothing in the last six months or one year. What did they read beyond professional material?

This means that teachers don’t read any more often than adults in the general population (where the majority don't have a degree beyond high school).

More recently (1998), in a national survey of 666 academic high school teachers, almost half reported not reading one professional journal or magazine. The 51 percent who did such reading regularly were also more apt to belong to professional associations linked to their teaching area. The survey group averaged fifteen years of teaching, with 63 percent holding graduate degrees. Science teachers led all disciplines, with 61.8 percent reading at least one journal, while social studies trailed the faculty at 36.4 percent.⁵

There are only two efficient ways to get words into the head.

There are only two practical ways to get words into the human brain: through the ear and through the eye. If the child comes from a home where there is a dearth of spoken language and little or no print, the only remaining way for the child to acquire good vocabulary is through the eye—that is, by reading. And here's where the classroom teacher plays a pivotal role.

If a teacher approaches reading in a rote manner (drill-and-teach-the-test), the student will never be inspired to read outside school, where the largest amount of time resides (7,800 hours a year). On the other hand, if the student child enters a school or library and meets a clone of "America's number one reading teacher," then the kid has a chance.

Oprah set the "gold standard"
for book talks.

That number one reading teacher is Oprah Winfrey. In the last decade, she's inspired more people to read more pages in more good books than anyone in American history. Now that's a reading teacher! (See Chapter Eight in The Read-Aloud Handbook for more on Oprah.) So if the child walks into a classroom or library that has an Oprah clone in it, he's far more likely to be inspired enough to start reading the particular author or book she talked about. Now the kid is reading and reading a lot—outside school; he's reading on the bus, he's reading in bed, on the toilet, and at the breakfast table. And through all those pages, he's accumulating the vocabulary words he never hears at home or from family.

In order for that to happen, however, the teacher or librarian has to be an avid reader like Oprah. You can't talk about a book you haven't read, any more than you can talk about a movie you haven't seen. When I do teacher seminars, at this juncture I walk over to a teacher, pick up her bottle of water, and say, "You and I could share this bottle today, we could share a cell phone, even a pen, and you can't catch a cold from me today. Because I don't have a cold. In the same way, if a teacher or librarian doesn't have the love of reading, the class can't catch it from her. And half the teachers don't have the love—which is a big problem for half the kids in the country, especially the ones coming from homes where the parents don't have it either.

Where The most at-risk teach the most at-risk

If you think the above is an exaggeration, let me give you a first-hand example. In March of 2002, I gave a workshop for 60 teachers on a Tuesday morning, then two days later spoke in a different state (Maryland) at a state reading conference. I asked each group of teachers the same question: "Have you ever heard of or read the book Tuesdays With Morrie?" the nonfiction account of the impact one professor had on one student and the latter’s home visits to the professor in his dying months.

I asked this question at a time when the book had been on The New York Times bestseller list for two straight years and recently had been made into a feature-length network movie starring Jack Lemmon as "Morrie." One could build a strong case for Morrie being the bestselling education book of the last decade.

The two groups could not have been more different in either their makeup or in their responses. The Tuesday group taught at a largely at-risk school; the principal thought the faculty could benefit from an entire-day's workshop with me, though he himself could only attend for 20 minutes that day. The district resided in a state that ranks in the bottom half of the nation in reading. The community and district was far from an affluent suburb, though it did boast a Barnes & Noble book store and the site of one of the largest military bases in the U.S. Not one teacher in the 60 had ever heard of, never mind read Tuesdays With Morrie.

The Thursday Maryland conference was a well-heeled group, representing more affluent districts that could afford to send teachers to an education conference. The immediate response of the approximately 350 teachers attending my presentation was 70-75 percent had either heard of or read Tuesday's With Morrie.

In short, our federal mandates mistakenly think "skill and drill" is the magic bullet of reading, ignoring the fact that too often we take our most at-risk students and turn them over to the most at-risk teachers. Furthermore, we house the "risks" in schools with the fewest books and the least number of minutes devoted to recreational reading. And when the scores don't rise, they buy a new reading series, which amounts to rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

When someone becomes a teacher, they're supposed to be opening up a dating service, with a specialty in "blind dates." The teacher is like the matchmaker in "Fiddler on the Roof": All year long she's trying to entice students to go out on dates with authors; that is, to pick up this book or that book and hang out with the author, someone they've never met. The better he or she knows the students and authors or books, the more successful will be the "matchmaking." But the teacher (or librarian) who doesn't read much will fail for sure.⁶

But there are teachers who read

  In all fairness to those who work with at-risk children, not all fall into the category of non-readers. A decade ago I observed at one of New York City's teacher book discussion groups (of which there were more than 150); it ran from 7 am to 8:30 am, on a school day, in an at-risk school. These were teachers who were avid readers, their enthusiasm flowed from their personal lives into their classrooms, and they were there for the discussion on their own time. But they were not representative of most at-risk school districts in America or even in New York. None of this is to say such teachers are lazy. They work hard, maybe harder than their suburban counterparts and maybe they're too tired to read after they're done with school for the day. In which case, they're too tired to play Oprah to some child whose parents can't or won't read and there's not a role model in sight—home or school.

  As I have noted before, it's almost impossible to catch a cold from someone who doesn't have one. And it's almost impossible for a child to catch the love of reading from a teacher who doesn't have it. And if the child is also unfortunate enough to come from a home where neither the mother nor the father has it, that student is nearly doomed as a reader. Does anyone really believe intensive phonics instruction will be his salvation?

FOOTNOTES:

1. Tom Bradshaw and Bonnie Nichols, Kelly Hill, and Mark Bauerlein, “Reading At Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America,” Research Division Report #46 (Washington, DC: National Endowment for the Arts, June 2004), online at http://www.nea.gov/pub/ReadingAtRisk.pdf.
2. "National Household Education Survey" (NHES), National Center for Education Statistics, 1999.
3. Sid T. Womack and B. J. Chandler, “Encouraging Reading for Professional Development,” Journal of Reading, February 1992, pp. 390–94.
4. Stanley I. Mour, “Do Teachers Read?” The Reading Teacher, January 1977, pp. 397–401. This study was somewhat skewed in favor of teachers because the subjects were more motivated professionally as graduate students. If anything, the results would be worse with teachers not as professionally involved. Included in the numbers were 202 females and 22 males; 6 counselors; 6 principals; 5 supervisors; most of the teachers (145) were elementary level; see also Kathleen Stumpf Jongsma, “Just Say Know!” The Reading Teacher, March 1992, pp. 546–48.
5. Cheryl B. Littman and Susan S. Stodolsky, “The Professional Reading of High School Academic Teachers,” The Journal of Educational Research, vol. 92, (2), November 1998, 75.
6. I borrowed the “date” analogy from the novelist Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. , who, when asked if you could actually teach a person how to write, replied indignantly that such teaching is the job of an editor—the person who teaches the writer how to behave on “a blind date with a total stranger"—the "reader." See: Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., “Despite Tough Guys, Life Is Not the Only School for Real Novelists,” The New York Times, May 24, 1999, pp. B1, B2.