2021-12-03_Why_Reading_Aloud_to_Children_is_so_Absurdly_Effective_in_Improving_Academic

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00:00:30.000 | Earlier today, I recorded and released a podcast wherein I discussed why I believe helping

00:00:39.000 | your child to become a good reader by reading aloud when your child is young and also by

00:00:45.700 | surrounding your child with high-quality books and inspiring him as well as requiring him

00:00:52.460 | to read those books is perhaps your simplest, most effective investment into the education

00:01:00.000 | of your particular child and how it's easy, but not easy, to actually do it, and yet it's

00:01:06.120 | incredibly effective. I talked at length, I gave some examples of book lists, etc. After

00:01:11.840 | that show, I went back and I opened up my copy of Jim Trulisa's book that I referenced

00:01:18.060 | several times in that show called The Read Aloud Handbook, and I was just struck by how

00:01:24.300 | good it is, how much cogent, useful information it contains, and how well-presented some of

00:01:31.100 | the arguments are. And after looking through it, I felt like I didn't do the topic of reading

00:01:37.080 | aloud justice. This is something that I have talked about. I've repeatedly said that perhaps

00:01:43.680 | one of the best things that you can do for your children is to give your children the

00:01:48.320 | gift of a full-time mother, especially when your child is young, and that there's so much

00:01:55.840 | that can be done that will pay off in spades down the road. But I haven't presented a lot

00:01:59.640 | of the evidence for that. And looking through Trulisa's book, I just noticed how wonderful

00:02:05.280 | it is.

00:02:06.280 | And so what I'd like to do in this particular episode is I'd like to unhurriedly read you

00:02:11.700 | a few excerpts from this really wonderful book and present to you a couple of the very

00:02:18.440 | simple arguments and especially a couple of the numerical calculations and some of the

00:02:25.280 | research associated with those calculations as to why something as simple as reading aloud

00:02:31.620 | extensively to your children makes such a difference in all of their academic achievements

00:02:38.080 | and how then their academic achievements, of course, influence their entire life course.

00:02:46.040 | And so I want to read some excerpts from the introduction and chapter one of this book

00:02:51.600 | called The Read Aloud Handbook by Jim Trulisa. Again, this book has been on the market for

00:02:56.100 | several decades. Jim is now retired and the book is now being updated by other persons.

00:03:05.060 | But these arguments are really profoundly valuable. And what you'll see is that in

00:03:11.900 | many ways, if you're looking for something that even could be the great equalizer in

00:03:15.780 | society, one of the most powerful ways to eliminate the wealth gap or the achievement

00:03:22.360 | gap among classes, among races, etc., then this particular line of thinking and these

00:03:29.100 | particular actions are some of the best things that can be done to make progress in that

00:03:34.580 | direction.

00:03:35.580 | So I want to begin by reading some excerpts from the introduction to help you. I always

00:03:41.780 | try to be cautious because sometimes I abuse the author's copyright just a little. But

00:03:48.220 | when I do that, I do it in hopes of inspiring you to consume the author's work by presenting

00:03:55.880 | it in a way that is really powerful and useful to you. And so I'll do my best to read excerpts,

00:04:01.800 | but also I want to inspire you to take action on it. And I think that an author like Jim

00:04:06.060 | Trulise would be quite complimented most of all by your simply taking action on his recommendations.

00:04:12.660 | And I want to inspire you to go ahead and grab a copy of the audio book, grab a copy

00:04:16.260 | of the written book yourself.

00:04:19.820 | Introduction. The central task of education is to implant a will and facility for learning.

00:04:27.500 | It should produce not learned, but learning people. The truly human society is a learning

00:04:36.140 | society where grandparents, parents, and children are students together. Quote by Eric Hofer.

00:04:45.800 | In the 30 years since the first edition of this book, much has changed in the world and

00:04:49.960 | in American education. And so too, this book has evolved. Back in 1982, when the first

00:04:56.460 | edition appeared, there was no internet or email, no cell phones, DVD players, iTunes,

00:05:01.060 | iPods, iPads, Amazon, eBooks, Wi-Fi, Facebook, or Twitter. The closest thing to an instant

00:05:06.340 | message was a facial expression that exasperated mothers gave their children as a warning.

00:05:11.300 | Texting was something you did on a typewriter. The first CD player was just going on sale.

00:05:15.620 | Starbucks was just a coffee bean shop in Seattle. And if you said laptop to people, they'd

00:05:20.140 | have thought you were talking about a TV dinner tray. For all of those differences, there

00:05:24.620 | are some things that remain the same. In 1982, the US economy was in its worst recession

00:05:31.280 | since the Great Depression, and the nation's business leaders were looking for someone

00:05:35.260 | or something to blame. Sound familiar? Since SAT scores had been in a 20-year decline because

00:05:43.020 | lots of average and below average students, and not just the rich kids, were taking the

00:05:46.700 | test for the first time, the corporate executives blamed education as one of the culprits for

00:05:52.420 | the recession and demanded reforms and accountabilities at all levels, a more business-like approach.

00:05:59.620 | If our schools were more like Japanese schools, our economy would be more like theirs. This

00:06:04.860 | would open the door to nearly three decades of testing mania and school reforms. At practically

00:06:11.340 | the same time, the cost of college began a 400% rise, outpacing the increases in medical

00:06:16.420 | care and median family income. By 2011, student loans would be larger than either the nation's

00:06:22.380 | credit card debt or the auto loan industry. Which brings us to the present time. With

00:06:28.860 | all the new technology in place and billions of dollars in testing accomplished, we made

00:06:35.300 | a one-point improvement in reading scores between 1971 and 2008.

00:06:47.260 | If you're even half sane, you have to be asking yourself, "What in the world is wrong

00:06:52.860 | here?" I hope this book can answer that question, as well as what we can do about

00:06:57.580 | it, because surely there's a better way than what we've done in the past. For all

00:07:02.460 | that is wrong in education, there are still some positives. With the hundreds of distractions

00:07:08.020 | imposed on American children in the past 30 years, 200 cable channels, most children with

00:07:13.260 | TVs in their bedrooms, usually the lowest scoring students, more than half of teens

00:07:18.060 | attached to cell phones most of the day, single parents raising one in four children, and

00:07:22.380 | a baby born every 60 seconds to a teen mother, it's a wonder the scores actually rose by

00:07:27.000 | one point and didn't drop by 10 or 15. If that is the case, then something must be working.

00:07:34.440 | This book will examine what really works. In fact, let's look now at one of those

00:07:39.380 | some things. And by the way, I insert for context that my copy of this book is the 7th

00:07:45.940 | edition published in 2013. There has since been published an 8th edition, which I do

00:07:53.660 | not have nor have I read, but this was published or copywritten at least in 2013.

00:08:00.340 | The ideal and cheapest tutoring plan. We start with the family of Susan and Tad Williams

00:08:06.900 | and their two sons, Christopher and David. Of the 400,000 students taking the ACT exam

00:08:12.540 | with Christopher back in 2002, only 57 had perfect scores. He was the 58th. When word

00:08:20.140 | got out that this kid from Russell, Kentucky, population 3,645, had scored a perfect 36,

00:08:27.780 | the family was besieged with questions, the most common being, "What prep course did

00:08:32.540 | he take? Kaplan? Princeton review?" It turned out to be a course his parents enrolled him

00:08:37.140 | in as an infant, a free program, unlike some of the private plans that now cost up to $250

00:08:43.580 | an hour. In responding to inquiries about Christopher's prep courses, the Williamses

00:08:48.100 | simply told people, including the New York Times, that he hadn't taken any, that he

00:08:54.020 | did no prep work. That, of course, wasn't completely true. His mother and father had

00:08:59.980 | been giving him and his younger brother free prep classes all through their childhoods,

00:09:05.140 | from infancy into adolescence. They read to them for 30 minutes a night, year after year,

00:09:11.460 | even after they learned how to read for themselves. Theirs was a home brimming with books, but

00:09:16.500 | no TV guide, GameCube, or hooked on phonics. Even though Susan Williams was a fourth-generation

00:09:23.500 | teacher, she offered no home instruction in reading before the boys reached school age.

00:09:30.020 | She and Tad just read to them, sewed the sounds and syllables and endings and blendings of

00:09:36.660 | language into the love of books. Each boy easily learned to read and loved reading,

00:09:42.380 | gobbling books up voraciously. Besides being a family bonding agent, reading aloud was

00:09:47.600 | used not as test prep, as much as an insurance policy. It ensured the boys would be ready

00:09:54.960 | for whatever came their way in school.

00:09:57.860 | By 2011, David was a University of Louisville graduate working as an engineer, and Christopher

00:10:03.920 | was pursuing his PhD in biochemistry at Duke. Sometimes, Christopher's early reading experiences

00:10:11.340 | surface even in the biochemistry department, like when he remarked to his lunchmates the

00:10:16.300 | day after a Duke basketball loss, "Guess there's no joy in Mudville today." None

00:10:21.400 | of the other grad students grasped the reference to Ernest Tayer's classic sports poem.

00:10:27.300 | The Williams family experience didn't surprise me at all, because I was already familiar

00:10:31.120 | with reading aloud as a prep course. Tom Parker recommends it all the time. He's the former

00:10:36.220 | admissions director for Williams College, now at Amherst College, two of the nation's

00:10:41.620 | prestigious small colleges. Parker tells anxious parents who ask about improving their child's

00:10:47.780 | SAT scores, "The best SAT preparation course in the world is to read to your children in

00:10:52.460 | bed when they're little. Eventually, if that's a wonderful experience for them,

00:10:57.340 | they'll start to read themselves." Parker told me he's never met a student with high

00:11:01.960 | verbal SAT scores who wasn't a passionate reader, and nearly always they recall being

00:11:07.820 | read to. An ACT or SAT prep course can't package that passion, but parents like Susan

00:11:15.320 | and Tad Williams have done it and so can you. Even parents who are illiterate or semi-literate

00:11:21.780 | can do it, and we'll meet them later in the book, along with a father who read to

00:11:26.460 | his daughter just for fun for 3,218 nights in a row, never missing a night. Never before

00:11:33.740 | in American history has so much been written about the subject of reading as in the past

00:11:37.620 | two decades. Never has so much money been spent to test children in any subject. And

00:11:43.500 | never have so many reading rules and regulations been imposed on schools by a succession of

00:11:48.660 | administrations with little or no improvements to show for it.

00:11:53.620 | Strangely, the biggest impact seems to be on families that are the wealthiest and most

00:11:59.300 | educated. Where 40 years ago children were spending their after-school hours at ballet

00:12:05.820 | classes, scout meetings, or soccer practices, millennium moms and dads now have them enrolled

00:12:12.940 | in after-school tutoring. The suburban paranoia over state tests has ballooned the tutoring

00:12:20.180 | business into a $4 billion industry, and not just for school-age children. By 2005, Sylvan

00:12:28.460 | Learning was opening its 1,100 centers to 4-year-olds, while Kumon was accepting 2-year-olds.

00:12:36.620 | Where once these centers were mainly for remediation, half the enrollments now come from families

00:12:42.340 | looking to give their child an advantage. Like the mother who told the Wall Street Journal

00:12:46.580 | she had enrolled her 4-year-old because his "scissors skills" were not up to par.

00:12:52.820 | How about the parents, that's plural, who hire consultants to help their children make

00:12:57.860 | better eye contact and demonstrate leadership qualities with preschool directors while they're

00:13:03.740 | being considered for preschool admission? Just as they've hired life coaches for themselves,

00:13:09.620 | helicopter parents are hiring college counselors for their children, costing between $3,000

00:13:14.780 | and $6,000. The counselors are supposed to ensure the "right" school choices are

00:13:19.820 | made and that the paperwork is in order and on time. All of this provokes clinical psychologist

00:13:26.060 | Wendy Mogul to suggest these parents may someday be on the receiving end of a class-action

00:13:32.980 | suit from their children for stealing their childhoods.

00:13:38.340 | Not that parents are alone in their extreme behavior. They have more than enough company

00:13:42.340 | among school boards and high-ranking politicians who think if you "fix" the schools, you'll

00:13:48.420 | "fix" the kids. So, in Gadsden, Alabama, school officials eliminated kindergarten nap

00:13:55.740 | time in 2003 so the children would have more test prep time. Two hours away in Atlanta,

00:14:02.300 | school officials figured that if you eliminate recess, the kids will study more. And just

00:14:06.500 | in case those shifty teachers try to sneak it in, Atlanta started building schools without

00:14:12.740 | playgrounds.

00:14:13.740 | "We are intent on improving academic performance," said the superintendent. "You don't do

00:14:18.900 | that by having kids hanging on the monkey bars."

00:14:22.900 | Several years later, when it was apparent the anti-recess strategy wasn't driving

00:14:27.700 | up the scores, a new Atlanta superintendent created what state investigators called "a

00:14:33.020 | culture of fear and a conspiracy of silence" in pursuit of higher scores. Scores rose and

00:14:40.660 | bonuses were awarded. But a subsequent state investigation led to the largest standardized

00:14:47.140 | testing scandal in America, with more than 170 educators involved in the cheating, including

00:14:54.500 | 38 principals.

00:14:57.980 | In a New York Times online essay about the disappearance of recess in play, David Bornstein

00:15:03.740 | compared today's test-oriented curriculum with Dickens' novel Hard Times and its aptly

00:15:10.780 | named schoolmaster, Thomas Gradgrind. "On average, American kids get only 26 minutes

00:15:17.700 | of recess per day, including lunchtime. And low-income kids get less than that," Bornstein

00:15:24.340 | wrote. "High-scoring Finland has 15 minutes of recess for every 45-minute class. But more

00:15:31.820 | on Finland later."

00:15:33.340 | At the high school level, the new principal at one prestigious New England high school

00:15:38.600 | in Needham, Massachusetts, was so alarmed by the stress levels of his students he formed

00:15:44.100 | a committee to develop coping strategies. The end result was mandatory yoga classes

00:15:49.940 | for seniors. He also dared to end the publication of the school's honor roll in the local

00:15:55.340 | newspaper and pushed to lighten the homework load. Both issues provoked parental ire and

00:16:01.540 | within a year he'd accepted the principalship of the American School in London.

00:16:06.540 | Nonetheless, four years later, the yoga classes were still in place as part of faculty efforts

00:16:11.600 | to build student resiliency. Homework was curtailed around holidays and notice of honor

00:16:16.420 | roll achievement now comes in a letter to the parents from the principal instead of

00:16:20.200 | publicly via the local newspaper. Other select high schools have had to make lunch periods

00:16:26.800 | mandatory because so many students feel every period of the day must be filled with something

00:16:32.620 | that will reflect positively on their college application/resume and somehow lunch doesn't

00:16:39.460 | fit that bill. Where once it was only institutions like the University of Chicago that could

00:16:44.660 | be tagged as places where "fun comes to die," now we can apply the label to elite high schools.

00:16:52.260 | College admission officers and counselors are feeling the stress as well, but for different

00:16:56.420 | reasons. At Harvard, the nation's oldest university and recipient of the largest number

00:17:00.700 | of advanced placement students, a 30-year veteran of the admissions office said today's

00:17:05.980 | students "seemed like dazed survivors of some bewildering lifelong boot camp" and

00:17:14.500 | warned that "unless things change, we're going to lose a lot of them." In our pursuit

00:17:21.020 | of higher and higher scores, he said "the fabric of family life has just been destroyed."

00:17:29.780 | Ultimately there must be a way to raise a reader and a capable student without creating

00:17:34.940 | a stressed-out, dazed survivor. Of course, for every parent who is pressing children's

00:17:43.060 | stress buttons, there is the other extreme, the ones who think the job of education is

00:17:47.980 | the responsibility of teachers. These parents far outnumber the pushy ones, and they create

00:17:53.200 | another kind of problem. From this point on, it might be helpful if I arrange the discussion

00:17:58.160 | according to the kinds of questions I receive from parents and educators. For example, from

00:18:03.460 | the parent who is the complete opposite of helicoptering. Are you suggesting this reading

00:18:10.700 | stuff is the job of the parent? I thought it was the school's job.

00:18:18.400 | This brings us to the sponge factor, exemplified by a young lady named Bianca Cotton, whom

00:18:24.820 | I met in 2002 on the morning my grandson Tyler began kindergarten. Families were invited

00:18:30.940 | in for the first hour to help break the ice, and I was snapping some pictures of Tyler

00:18:35.220 | and a new friend when I became aware of an extended conversation going on behind me in

00:18:40.900 | the little housekeeping section of the kindergarten. Turning around, I found Bianca cooking up

00:18:45.600 | a make-believe meal on a make-believe stove while carrying on a make-believe conversation

00:18:50.560 | on a make-believe cordless phone. And, as you can see in the photo I snapped, she had

00:18:55.360 | all the body language down for talking on the phone and cooking at the same time. Every

00:19:02.320 | child, kindergartner or otherwise, is like a sponge, soaking up the behavior of the people

00:19:08.740 | around them. If Bianca had never seen an adult talking on the phone while cooking, she'd

00:19:15.360 | never have thought to grab a phone while cooking her first kindergarten meal.

00:19:22.940 | If Bianca isn't proof enough for you, consider this. Since 1956, no newspaper, network, or

00:19:28.320 | news agency has a better record for predicting the outcomes in presidential elections than

00:19:33.440 | Weekly Reader, the late national classroom magazine. Every four years for a half-century,

00:19:41.280 | a quarter million children voted in the Weekly Reader presidential poll. And in 13 of the

00:19:48.440 | 14 campaigns, they were absolutely correct. Like little sponges, they sat in their parents'

00:19:54.720 | living rooms, kitchens, and cars, soaking up parental values and then squeezed them

00:20:00.800 | out onto a Weekly Reader ballot. It comes down to simple arithmetic. The child spends

00:20:07.080 | 900 hours a year in school and 7,800 hours outside school. Which teacher has the bigger

00:20:16.280 | influence? Where is more time available for change? Those two numbers, 900 and 7,800,

00:20:24.000 | will appear over and over in this book.

00:20:27.360 | Jay Matthews, the Washington Post's longtime education columnist, looked back on all the

00:20:32.880 | student achievement stories he'd done in 22 years and observed, "I cannot think of

00:20:38.480 | a single instance in which the improvement in achievement was not tied, at least in part,

00:20:44.600 | to an increase in the amount of time students had to learn." I've been saying the same

00:20:50.120 | thing for as many years. You either extend the school day, as have the successful KIPP

00:20:56.560 | charter schools, or you tap into the 7,800 hours at home. Since the cost of lengthening

00:21:02.880 | the school day would be prohibitive in the places that need it most, the most realistic

00:21:07.460 | option is tapping the 7,800 hours at home. Ronald F. Ferguson, a black scholar and Harvard

00:21:13.280 | lecturer, has long studied racial achievement gaps in public schools. Complicated as those

00:21:18.560 | issues are, Ferguson boils them down to one. "The real issue is historical differences

00:21:24.520 | in parenting. That is hard to talk about, but that is the root of the skill gap."

00:21:32.080 | According to Ferguson, black households traditionally see schooling as a job for teachers, while

00:21:37.080 | white families are more involved in schooling the child or paying for special services.

00:21:42.880 | Contrary to the current screed that blames teachers for just about everything wrong in

00:21:47.440 | schooling, research shows that the seeds of reading and school success (or failure) are

00:21:52.600 | sown in the home long before the child ever arrives at school. For example, 21 classes

00:21:58.880 | of kindergartners were examined to determine which children displayed either high or low

00:22:04.100 | interest in books. Those students' home environments were then examined in detail.

00:22:10.860 | The numbers reinforce the adage that the apple doesn't fall from the tree. Therefore, if

00:22:15.840 | you want different apples, change the tree. I will not go over the numbers in the following

00:22:24.440 | chart other than to say that children with a high interest in books come from fathers

00:22:32.800 | and mothers with a high interest in books. Children with low interest in books come from

00:22:38.220 | fathers and mothers with a low interest in books. And you have enough of the introduction

00:22:43.020 | to get the flavor from it. I want to skip forward to a formula of reading success and

00:22:50.480 | then we're going to get into some data here. So the question is this, is reading still

00:22:54.140 | important in the video age? Reading is the heart of education. The knowledge of almost

00:22:59.760 | every subject in school flows from reading. One must be able to read the word problem

00:23:06.860 | in math to understand it. If you cannot read the science or social studies chapter, how

00:23:12.440 | do you answer the questions at the end of the chapter? Because reading is the linchpin

00:23:18.000 | of education, one can say it's a safety belt for a long life. When RAND researchers

00:23:26.560 | examined all the possible causes of long life expectancy, race, gender, geography, education,

00:23:32.680 | marriage, diet, smoking, and even churchgoing, the biggest factor was education. Another

00:23:40.040 | researcher went back more than a hundred years to when states initiated compulsory education.

00:23:45.380 | She found that for every year of education, the individual lived an average of one and

00:23:50.400 | a half years longer. When her research was applied to other countries, the same pattern

00:23:55.120 | appeared. Similarly, today's Alzheimer's researchers have found what they consider

00:23:59.800 | to be an immunizing effect from childhood reading and vocabulary buildup. And of course,

00:24:06.800 | these are all linked with supporting sources and studies and references.

00:24:13.400 | All things considered, reading, not video, is the single most important social factor

00:24:17.720 | in American life. Here's a formula that may sound simplistic, but all of its parts

00:24:23.600 | have been documented and I would add are linked in the book or cited in the book. But all

00:24:30.960 | of its parts have been documented and while not 100% universal, it holds true far more

00:24:36.840 | often than not. 1. The more you read, the more you know. Again, 1. The more you read,

00:24:47.680 | the more you know. 2. The more you know, the smarter you grow. Again, the more you know,

00:24:58.480 | the smarter you grow. 3. The smarter you grow, the longer you stay in school. 4. The longer

00:25:08.040 | you stay in school, the more diplomas you earn and the longer you are employed. Thus,

00:25:14.120 | the more money you earn in a lifetime. 5. The more diplomas you earn, the higher your

00:25:21.440 | children's grades are in school and the longer you live. The opposite would also be

00:25:30.000 | true. 1. The less you read, the less you know. 2. The less you know, the sooner you drop

00:25:37.600 | out of school. 3. The sooner you drop out, the sooner and longer you are poor and the

00:25:45.980 | greater your chances of going to jail. The basis for that formula is firmly established

00:25:52.480 | as poverty and illiteracy are related. They are the parents of desperation and imprisonment.

00:26:00.280 | 70-82% of prison inmates are school dropouts. 60% of inmates are illiterate to semi-literate.

00:26:09.200 | The more education, the greater likelihood of employment and less likelihood of imprisonment.

00:26:15.480 | Why are students failing and dropping out of school? Because they cannot read well enough

00:26:19.040 | to do the assigned work, which affects the entire report card. Change the reading scores

00:26:24.000 | and you change the graduation rate and then the prison population, which changes the social

00:26:29.080 | climate of America.

00:26:31.840 | I hope you see how powerful that particular formula is. I want to emphasize it by simply

00:26:40.000 | reading it again and I want to tell you that again, all of this is cited. The more you

00:26:44.320 | read, the more you know. The more you know, the smarter you grow. The smarter you grow,

00:26:48.640 | the longer you stay in school. The longer you stay in school, the more diplomas you

00:26:52.080 | earn and the longer you are employed. Thus, the more money you earn in a lifetime. The

00:26:56.600 | more diplomas you earn, the higher your children's grades are in school and the longer you live.

00:27:04.720 | The opposite is also true. The less you read, the less you know. The less you know, the

00:27:07.640 | sooner you drop out of school. The sooner you drop out, the sooner and longer you're

00:27:10.360 | poor and the greater your chances of going to jail.

00:27:14.600 | And just a short bit of personal commentary, I think that the important thing is to acknowledge

00:27:22.440 | that when you come to a financial return on investment, college has a very high return

00:27:28.600 | as I'll read in just a moment in a separate section. And there's no question about that.

00:27:34.040 | That is proven again and again and again. It's not to say that all people who do not

00:27:40.440 | go to college are destined for failure, but going to college is highly correlated with

00:27:47.240 | significant levels of financial success. Let's hear what the author has to say on this topic.

00:27:53.520 | "Considering today's economy and rising tuition costs, is college worth the money?"

00:27:57.760 | The economists at the Brookings Institution tackled that question and rephrased it to

00:28:02.360 | look like this. If you had $102,000 to spend on either a really good college education

00:28:08.520 | or to put into investments like stocks, bonds, gold, or housing, where would you get the

00:28:12.600 | best return on your dollar? Considering the average lifetime earnings of a college graduate

00:28:17.600 | and the investment market for the past 60 years, the long-term return would play out

00:28:23.920 | like the following chart, which indicates that an associate's degree gets you in excess

00:28:29.200 | of a 20% rate of return, internal rate of return. A bachelor's degree gets you a 15%

00:28:35.200 | internal rate of return, compared with the stock market that by their numbers is somewhere

00:28:40.360 | around looks like about 6.5 to 7. Gold at 2.5, long-term treasury at 2.5, and housing

00:28:46.280 | at 1%. Looks like an easy choice. College is double the return on anything else. The

00:28:53.240 | Great Recession took its toll on everyone, but least hurt were those with the most education.

00:28:59.880 | Those with only a high school degree were twice as likely to be unemployed. And here

00:29:04.720 | I wish to interrupt Jim with an emphasis that right now in the recession related to the

00:29:16.920 | pandemic that we've been going through, I think you see very clearly the same exact

00:29:22.240 | trend. And while I don't have all the data at my fingertips to go over with you, nor

00:29:27.800 | would I do it, given this is an audio program, I want you just to notice that the most highly

00:29:34.280 | educated people throughout the markets have been able to maintain their productivity.

00:29:43.440 | Most of the radical personal finance listening audience has not had any meaningful decline

00:29:49.640 | in income because we have not had any meaningful decline in productivity throughout the pandemic.

00:29:56.840 | That's very different than the lesser educated people have faced given the significant decline,

00:30:04.680 | temporary decline in the job market related to the pandemic. And so you can see that we

00:30:09.600 | are living in an intensely knowledge-oriented society, and the most productive people are

00:30:16.040 | generally those who have the most formal education and who are able to continue their productivity

00:30:24.440 | and are in high demand no matter the market conditions. That's the economy in which we

00:30:28.760 | live. Continuing with the reading.

00:30:32.680 | So if college is the best investment of time and money for the student, and the best way

00:30:36.720 | to succeed at college to be a proficient reader, then a parent's best financial investment

00:30:42.880 | is to spend the time and energy to raise a reader. If the child prefers not to attend

00:30:50.120 | college but is an avid reader, she will still make wiser decisions in her personal and business

00:30:57.080 | life and certainly be a better informed voter and juror, which benefits the entire community.

00:31:05.320 | Overall, raising readers is a win-win situation. We just have to care enough to do it. Notice

00:31:14.520 | the chain. College is a good investment of time and money. The best way to succeed at

00:31:20.860 | college is to be a proficient reader because being a proficient reader is the mark of success

00:31:26.420 | in academics all the way up through college. So thus a parent's best financial investment

00:31:31.980 | is to spend the time and energy to raise a reader. And as I have commented on, this is

00:31:36.940 | actually quite simple. It doesn't cost a lot. You don't need to hide all our coaches.

00:31:40.620 | You simply need to read to your children. So you have to invest into creating the appropriate

00:31:44.620 | home environment where you can have your children read to and then in time surround them with

00:31:50.820 | books.

00:31:53.540 | Let's talk about why read aloud. One day back in the 1980s, I visited the kindergarten

00:31:59.980 | room I had attended years earlier as a child at Connecticut Farms Elementary School in

00:32:05.220 | Union, New Jersey. Gazing up at me were the faces of about 15 children, each of them seated

00:32:11.940 | expectantly on their story rug. "How many of you want to learn to read this year?"

00:32:17.140 | I asked. Without a second's hesitation, every hand shot into the air, many accompanied

00:32:22.440 | by boasts like, "I already know how!" Their excitement matched what every kindergarten

00:32:26.880 | teacher has told me. Every child begins school wanting to learn to read. In other words,

00:32:32.620 | we've got 100% enthusiasm and desire when they start school, the first chapter in their

00:32:38.100 | life. In subsequent years, when the National Reading Report Card surveyed students, they

00:32:42.860 | found very different attitudes and behaviors as the students aged. Among fourth graders,

00:32:49.020 | only 54% read something for pleasure every day. Among eighth graders, only 30% read for

00:32:55.300 | pleasure daily. By twelfth grade, only 19% read anything for pleasure daily. The Kaiser

00:33:01.540 | Family Foundation's 2010 Longitudinal Study of Children 8 to 18 years of age found 53%

00:33:09.420 | read no books in a given day, 65% read no magazines, and 77% no newspapers. In a Bureau

00:33:18.460 | of Labor Statistics survey in 2010, young adults between ages 15 and 19, the largest

00:33:25.020 | concentration of high school and college students, reported spending only 12 minutes a day reading

00:33:33.720 | versus 2.23 hours watching television. Think about it. We have 100% interest in kindergarten

00:33:40.980 | but lose three-quarters of our potential lifetime readers by the time they're 18. Any business

00:33:46.300 | that kept losing that much of its customer base would be out of business. Admittedly,

00:33:50.840 | there is a natural fall-off during adolescence and early adulthood. These are the busiest

00:33:55.300 | social and emotional times of human life. But what if the early interest never returns?

00:34:01.240 | If schooling's objective is to create lifetime readers who continue to read and educate themselves

00:34:05.940 | after they graduate, and then they fail to do so, that's a major indictment of the

00:34:11.580 | process. Let's see how the childhood figures are reflected in adulthood these days. The

00:34:17.660 | National Endowment for the Arts surveyed adult reading habits for 25 years, and its most

00:34:22.620 | recent report coincided perfectly with the National Assessment of Educational Progress

00:34:29.660 | (NAEP) of pleasure reading among 13 and 17-year-olds. The number of adults who read literature was

00:34:37.280 | down 22% from its 1982 survey in every age, gender, ethnic, and educational category.

00:34:44.540 | By 2002, only 46.7% had read any fiction in the previous year. When expanded in a different

00:34:52.380 | survey to include newspapers or any kind of book or magazine, the figure rose to only

00:34:56.660 | 50% of adults. In short, half of America is alliterate.

00:35:05.760 | As I showed in the introduction, reading scores improved by only 1 point for 17-year-olds

00:35:10.180 | and 5 points for 13-year-olds between 1971 and 2008. That's 37 years, half of it devoted

00:35:18.960 | to national and state curriculum reform. Couple those figures with mobile multimedia usage

00:35:24.880 | soaring to more than 7.5 hours a day for students ages 8 to 18, and one can see a perfect storm

00:35:31.820 | on the horizon, threatening to hinder reading even further.

00:35:37.700 | But aren't kids reading when they're checking Facebook, checking tweets, or online? There

00:35:41.680 | is a school of thought that finds some hope in that theory. I don't attend that school.

00:35:46.500 | Text messages are as close to reading as refrigerator magnets are, except the magnet messages are

00:35:52.160 | usually spelled better and have longer sentences. At last count, American teens are racking

00:35:57.680 | up 3,339 text messages a month and rising, or 6 per waking hour. If they're only absorbing

00:36:05.920 | 130 to 160 characters at a time, there is little opportunity to improve reading or thinking

00:36:12.400 | skills. Since most of the subject matter is gossip, clothes, music, and entertainment,

00:36:16.900 | there is not a lot of deep thinking taking place either, especially if your responses

00:36:21.640 | are instant. As for online reading, studies indicate only

00:36:25.760 | 18% of a webpage is actually read by the visitor, with the average page view lasting 10 seconds

00:36:32.760 | or less. It has always been true that a certain percent

00:36:36.600 | of students get through school without reading an entire book, in the old days and today.

00:36:42.040 | Now teachers worry the numbers are rising, including at the college level. The one refrain

00:36:47.320 | I hear from professors, including those teaching future teachers, is this, "Only 25 to 30%

00:36:54.480 | of my students are avid readers. Few have voluntarily read a novel in the past year,

00:36:59.720 | and they can't name a favorite author or a favorite childhood book." One teacher

00:37:05.200 | at a top preparatory school explained how students pull it off, "They read the key

00:37:10.120 | parts of the text, or they go online, or they ask the kids who do the reading to tell them

00:37:14.360 | what happens, or they sit in class and listen to their teacher tell them what the reading

00:37:18.220 | is about and feed off that. Having no affection for reading, they slip through the class by

00:37:24.400 | gaming the system." Why no affection for reading? It was either never planted or driven

00:37:33.680 | out by seat work and test prep, leaving no room for a pleasure connection. None of this

00:37:41.120 | means we're a nation of illiterates. We're not. The average American student can read.

00:37:47.500 | In fact, 60% of today's young people attempt advanced education compared with 20% in 1940.

00:37:53.040 | In other words, they're getting by. It's when they haven't read much and then enroll

00:37:59.360 | in college classes that the void is exposed. 74% of community college students never achieve

00:38:05.380 | a diploma, and 43% of students of four-year public colleges never graduate. Woody Allen

00:38:11.820 | may have been right when he said, "Showing up is 80% of life, but that doesn't include

00:38:15.800 | college diplomas. Those usually require more than just showing up." Why the diploma failure?

00:38:23.720 | Three-quarters of the incoming freshmen at New York State community colleges need remedial

00:38:27.800 | help in reading, writing, and/or math, putting a $33 million strain on the state's education

00:38:34.040 | budget. Most of these are high school graduates. More important, these are students from working

00:38:39.880 | class homes or lower, often among the first members of their families attempting college.

00:38:46.040 | Worth noting is that students who experience the least success in classrooms at any level

00:38:51.440 | usually come from homes and schools with the worst print climate, the fewest books, magazines,

00:38:57.600 | newspapers, etc. It's difficult to get good at reading or even read much if there's nothing

00:39:02.620 | to read. So how do we fix the reading problem? We start by looking at the recommendation

00:39:08.820 | of the 1983 Commission on Reading, funded by the U.S. Department of Education, which

00:39:14.120 | was alarmed by school scores. Since nearly everything in the curriculum rested upon reading,

00:39:19.200 | the consensus was that reading was at the heart of either the problem or the solution.

00:39:25.160 | The commission spent two years poring through thousands of research projects conducted in

00:39:29.120 | the previous quarter century and in 1985 issued its report, Becoming a Nation of Readers.

00:39:36.840 | Among its primary findings, two simple declarations rang loud and clear. "The single most important

00:39:44.800 | activity for building the knowledge required for eventual success in reading is reading

00:39:51.060 | aloud to children." Also, "It is a practice that should continue throughout the grades."

00:39:59.100 | The commission found conclusive evidence to support reading aloud not only in the home

00:40:03.340 | but also in the classroom. In their wording, "The single most important activity,"

00:40:09.820 | the experts were saying, "reading aloud was more important than worksheets, homework,

00:40:13.940 | book reports, and flashcards. One of the cheapest, simplest, and oldest tools of teaching was

00:40:18.780 | being promoted as a better tool than anything else in the home or classroom." And it's

00:40:24.180 | so simple you don't even need a high school diploma in order to do it. And how exactly

00:40:29.100 | does a person become proficient at reading? It's a simple two-part formula. One, the

00:40:35.580 | more you read, the better you get at it. The better you get at it, the more you like it,

00:40:40.260 | and the more you like it, the more you do it. Two, the more you read, the more you know,

00:40:45.140 | and the more you know, the smarter you grow. Let me repeat that. The more you read, the

00:40:49.860 | better you get at it. The better you get at it, the more you like it, and the more you

00:40:53.380 | like it, the more you do it. The more you read, the more you know, and the more you

00:40:57.100 | know, the smarter you grow. The vast majority of students know how to read by fourth grade.

00:41:02.180 | In fact, by eighth grade, 24% are below basic level, 42% are at basic level, 25% are at

00:41:08.220 | proficient level, and only 3% are at advanced level. To improve from basic to proficient

00:41:13.380 | and then advanced, one must practice by reading a lot. This is identical to riding a bicycle.

00:41:19.860 | The more you ride it, fall off, climb back on, and ride some more, the better you get

00:41:22.980 | at it. You learn to lean left when turning left, where to place your feet when coming

00:41:26.620 | to a stop, etc. This practice amounts to what Margaret Meek called "private lessons."

00:41:33.500 | The beginning of students' negative attitude toward reading appears to begin in fourth

00:41:38.420 | grade, when they must take the individual skills they have learned in the three previous

00:41:44.180 | years and apply them to whole paragraphs and pages. This juncture is famously called the

00:41:52.020 | fourth grade slump, a phrase coined from the research of the late Gene Chall. It's where

00:41:58.140 | school separates the readers from the strugglers and remedials. But, and this is a very loud

00:42:06.620 | but, if the way they have learned or been exposed to basic reading skills is so boring

00:42:16.060 | and joyless they hate it, they will never read outside their classroom. Since the bulk

00:42:22.340 | of their time, 7,800 hours a year, is spent outside school, these hours dictate whether

00:42:28.180 | they read often enough to become proficient or begin to fall behind. No reading outside

00:42:34.940 | school, low scores inside school. Reading to these students, preferably from infancy

00:42:43.900 | but certainly as they got older, in school and out of school, is what the Commission

00:42:48.260 | on Reading was begging the nation to do, to sow the seeds of reading desire. How can something

00:42:57.520 | as simple as reading to a child be so effective? As lumber is the primary support for building

00:43:03.860 | a house, words are the primary structure for learning. There are really only two efficient

00:43:12.720 | ways to get words into a person's brain, either by seeing them or by hearing them.

00:43:24.300 | Since it will be years before an infant uses his or her eyes for actual reading, the best

00:43:29.940 | source for vocabulary and brain building becomes the ear. What we send into that ear becomes

00:43:37.580 | the foundation for the child's brain house. Those meaningful sounds in the ear now will

00:43:46.060 | help the child make sense of the words coming in through the eye later when learning to

00:43:52.500 | read. We read to children for all the same reasons we talk with children, to reassure,

00:43:59.340 | to entertain, to bond, to inform or explain, to arouse curiosity and to inspire. But in

00:44:08.660 | reading aloud, we also build vocabulary, condition the child's brain to associate reading with

00:44:16.340 | pleasure, create background knowledge, provide a reading role model, plant the desire to

00:44:24.660 | read. One factor hidden in the decline of students' recreational reading is that it

00:44:29.180 | coincides with the decline in the amount of time adults read to them. By middle school,

00:44:33.860 | almost no one is reading aloud to students. If each read aloud is a commercial for the

00:44:38.740 | pleasures of reading, then a decline in advertising would naturally be reflected in a decline

00:44:46.020 | in students' recreational reading. There are two basic reading facts of life that are

00:44:52.620 | ignored in most education circles. Yet, without these two principles working in tandem, little

00:44:58.620 | else will work. Reading fact number one, human beings are pleasure-centered. Reading fact

00:45:09.660 | number two, reading is an accrued skill. Let's examine fact number one. Human beings will

00:45:19.940 | voluntarily do over and over that which brings them pleasure. That is, we continually go

00:45:25.460 | to the restaurants we like, order the foods we like, listen to the radio stations that

00:45:29.220 | play the music we like, and visit the neighbors we like. Conversely, we avoid the foods, music,

00:45:33.900 | and neighbors we dislike. Far from being a theory, this is a physiological fact. We approach

00:45:41.560 | what causes pleasure and we withdraw from what causes displeasure or pain. When we read

00:45:49.740 | to a child, we're sending a pleasure message to the child's brain. You could even call

00:45:55.300 | it a commercial, conditioning the child to associate books and print with pleasure. There

00:46:04.220 | are, however, displeasures associated with reading in school. The learning experience

00:46:09.100 | can be tedious or boring, threatening, and often without meaning. Endless hours of worksheets,

00:46:15.300 | intensive phonics instructions, and unconnected test questions. If a child seldom experiences

00:46:21.300 | the pleasures of reading but increasingly meets its displeasures, then the natural reaction

00:46:27.020 | will be withdrawal. That brings us to reading fact number two. Reading is like riding a

00:46:34.020 | bicycle, driving a car, or sewing. In order to get better at it, you must do it. And the

00:46:41.380 | more you read, the better you get at it. The past 30 years of reading research confirms

00:46:47.100 | this simple formula, regardless of gender, race, nationality, or socioeconomic background.

00:46:53.280 | Students who read the most also read the best, achieve the most, and stay in school the longest.

00:47:03.500 | Conversely, those who don't read much cannot get better at it. Why don't students read

00:47:08.300 | more? Because of reading fact number one. The large number of displeasure messages they

00:47:14.420 | received throughout their school years, coupled with the lack of pleasure messages in the

00:47:18.780 | home, nullify any attraction books might have. They avoid print the same way a cat avoids

00:47:26.100 | a hot stovetop. There is ample proof for all these hypotheses in my answer to the next

00:47:34.060 | question. Which country has the best readers? One of the most comprehensive international

00:47:40.500 | reading studies was conducted by Warwick Ely for the International Association for the

00:47:45.460 | Evaluation of Educational Achievement, IEA, in 1990 and 1991. Involving 32 countries,

00:47:53.380 | it assessed 210,000 9 and 14-year-olds. Of all those children, which ones read best?

00:48:01.220 | For 9-year-olds, the four top nations were Finland (569), the United States (547), Sweden

00:48:09.700 | (539), and France (531). But the U.S. position dropped to a tie for 8th when 14-year-olds

00:48:18.620 | were evaluated. This demonstrates that American children begin reading at a level that is

00:48:27.460 | among the best in the world. But since reading is an accrued skill, and U.S. children appear

00:48:35.960 | to do less of it as they grow older, their scores decline when compared with countries

00:48:41.380 | where children read more as they mature. We also have a higher proportion of children

00:48:48.100 | in poverty and their scores decline as they go through school. And while the racial gaps

00:48:55.940 | in education have narrowed in recent years, the achievement gap between rich and poor

00:49:02.420 | students has widened by an alarming 40% since the 1960s. When Sarah Ransdell, a professor

00:49:11.340 | at Nova Southeastern, a Florida research university, studied the reading comprehension of 270,000

00:49:17.420 | students at 259 schools in Broward County, Florida, she found poverty was the single

00:49:22.220 | largest common denominator among children who failed at reading. As you will see, these

00:49:27.540 | are children who are spoken to the least, who are seldom read to, who see the least

00:49:33.900 | print in school or at home, and who therefore struggle the most with reading.

00:49:40.540 | To finish, children start reading classes sooner. Just the opposite. Finland's high

00:49:44.780 | scores should give pause to those who think an earlier reading start (hot housing) will

00:49:50.660 | produce better results. They're really not into baby Einstein toys over there. There

00:49:55.500 | was only a three-month difference in age between the first-place Finnish children and second-place

00:49:59.180 | American students. Yet the Finnish children, who are introduced to formal reading instruction

00:50:04.300 | at age seven, two years later than American children, still manage to surpass them by

00:50:09.660 | age nine. Indeed, almost everything Finland does contradicts what some experts in America

00:50:15.660 | advocate. Most mothers work outside the home, most children are in child care by age one,

00:50:21.180 | school begins at age seven, and then only for half-days, children remain in the same

00:50:25.020 | school from age seven to age 16, there are no gifted programs, class size often reaches

00:50:30.060 | 30, there are 15 minutes of recess for every 45-minute class, Finnish students spend less

00:50:34.700 | time in class than any other developed nation, there is no national curriculum and no standardized

00:50:40.080 | testing until age 16, all meals are free, as is university education, and there is a

00:50:45.580 | high family literacy rate, with reading to children emphasized heavily and supported

00:50:50.760 | by a powerful public library system. Finally, Finnish families are heavy users of a mechanical

00:50:58.040 | device that serves as a reading tutor for their children. More on that in chapter 8.

00:51:09.420 | In the 20 years since Eli's study, excuse me, not Beredelit, I mixed up my metaphors,

00:51:15.060 | I'm not going to tell you, buy the book, read chapter 8, and you'll find out what

00:51:19.940 | that mechanical device is that serves as a reading tutor for the children of Finnish

00:51:25.620 | families. In the 20 years since Eli's study, the Finns have remained atop the International

00:51:30.720 | Scoreboard for Reading, Math, and Science, as measured by the Organization for Economic

00:51:35.100 | Cooperation and Development, OECD, every three years. It's worth noting that one school

00:51:41.140 | system in the US comes the closest to mimicking the Finnish environment for teacher assessments,

00:51:46.100 | student demographics, and testing regulations. US military-based schools, exempt from mandated

00:51:52.720 | testing and handily outscoring their public school counterparts, who are awash in test

00:51:59.720 | mania. What do the best readers have in common? In Eli's study, two of the factors that

00:52:07.900 | produced higher achievement (two others will be found later in chapter 6) are (1) the frequency

00:52:14.440 | of teachers reading aloud to students, and (2) the frequency of sustained silent reading

00:52:21.100 | (SSR) or pleasure reading. Children who had daily SSR scored much higher than those who

00:52:33.880 | had it only once a week. Those two factors also represent the two reading facts we've

00:52:40.520 | just examined. Reading aloud is the catalyst for the child wanting to read on his own,

00:52:46.400 | but it also provides a foundation by nurturing the child's listening comprehension. In

00:52:51.480 | an international study of 150,000 4th graders, researchers found that students who were read

00:52:57.100 | to often at home scored 30 points higher than students who were read to sometimes. It stands

00:53:04.640 | to reason that the more often a child is read to, the more words are heard, bringing the

00:53:09.840 | child closer to comprehending more, and the more likely it is the child will associate

00:53:15.260 | reading with a daily pleasure experience.

00:53:21.240 | Where does phonics fit into all this? There's more than enough research to validate the

00:53:27.080 | importance of phonics in children's reading. Children who understand the mechanics of reading,

00:53:32.600 | who know that words are made up of sounds and can break the sound code, have a great

00:53:37.240 | advantage as the included chart demonstrates. The U.S. Department of Education's 1999

00:53:43.200 | Early Childhood Longitudinal Study found that children who were read to at least three times

00:53:48.080 | a week had a significantly greater phonemic awareness when they entered kindergarten than

00:53:54.360 | did children who were read to less often, and that they were almost twice as likely

00:53:58.980 | to score in the top 25% in reading.

00:54:03.120 | What phonics cannot do is motivate. Nobody has a favorite vowel or blend. Phonics is

00:54:10.000 | like teaching a boy how to wash his neck, an important skill for a growing boy. But

00:54:15.160 | teaching him how to scrub is no guarantee he'll have a clean neck even if he knows

00:54:19.040 | how. The missing ingredient is motivation. If he knows how but doesn't want to wash

00:54:24.520 | his neck, it's going to stay dirty. But when that boy meets the right girl, he'll

00:54:29.000 | be motivated enough to have a clean neck. You need the combination of know-how and motivation.

00:54:36.860 | If you ask doctors, coaches, even probation officers about the importance of motivation

00:54:41.280 | for the people they're dealing with, they all will tell you it's crucial. In a national

00:54:46.580 | survey of reading teachers on which education topic most interested them, motivation topped

00:54:52.160 | the list. Nonetheless, little actual class time is spent in pursuit of motivation, unless

00:54:59.360 | you think test prep is motivating.

00:55:02.640 | What motivates children and adults to read more is that 1) they like the experience,

00:55:07.800 | 2) they like the subject matter, and 3) they like and follow the lead of people who read

00:55:12.440 | a lot.

00:55:15.600 | Is there any read-aloud proof in research? So many read-aloud claims had accumulated

00:55:20.100 | in a 30-year period that researchers subjected 33 of them to a meta-analysis to see if the

00:55:25.440 | concept lived up to those claims. Looking at the impact of frequent household reading

00:55:30.220 | on preschoolers, the analysis showed clear positive gains for phonemic awareness, language

00:55:36.520 | growth, and beginning reading skills. In addition, there was just as much of an impact for children

00:55:42.340 | of a lower socioeconomic status as there was for children with a higher socioeconomic status.

00:55:50.980 | And the earlier or younger the reading began, the better the results. Research shows that

00:55:56.340 | even when children reach primary grades, repeated picture book reading of the same book at least

00:56:02.080 | three times increases vocabulary acquisition by 15 to 40 percent, and the learning is relatively

00:56:09.120 | permanent. The international assessment of 150,000 fourth graders in 2001 showed an average

00:56:16.140 | 35-point advantage for students who were read to more often by parents.

00:56:22.660 | The OECD is a 50-year-old cooperative among industrial nations aimed at helping member

00:56:26.780 | nations work through the modern growth challenges, including education. For more than a decade,

00:56:30.980 | this organization has been testing hundreds of thousands of 15-year-olds in various school

00:56:35.260 | subjects and comparing scores among nations. Since 2006, the OECD has interviewed the parents

00:56:40.900 | of 5,000 students who were part of the test-taking corps, asking them if they ever read to their

00:56:48.080 | children when they were in first grade and how often the reading took place. The responses,

00:56:54.820 | when compared with those children's reading scores on the Program for International Student

00:56:59.740 | Assessment (PISA) exam, showed a powerful correlation. The more they were read to, the

00:57:06.900 | higher the scores at age 15, sometimes an advantage of as much as a half-year's schooling.

00:57:16.860 | The results were true regardless of family income.

00:57:21.420 | A few years after I had lectured in a Northern California community, one of its residents

00:57:25.580 | sent me a copy of a letter to the editor in the local paper. Prompting the letter was

00:57:29.640 | an article about a fifth-grade teacher who had been named Teacher of the Year, including

00:57:35.280 | a quote from another teacher who marveled at the honoree's ability with voices as

00:57:39.180 | he read to his students. That apparently outraged a father in the district who wrote, "I also

00:57:45.540 | am disturbed by his apparent taking of class time to read aloud to his students, capturing

00:57:50.740 | the voices of the characters and the attention of the students. When did our schools become

00:57:55.120 | babysitting centers with story time? By the time my daughter is in the fifth grade, I

00:57:59.300 | hope she is able to read to herself. If he wants to recreate characters, he should join

00:58:03.900 | a local theater group."

00:58:06.540 | Far from being "babysitting," reading aloud has a rich intellectual history. More

00:58:13.080 | than 2,000 years ago, Hebrew fathers were urged by the Talmud to take their children

00:58:17.300 | upon their laps and read to them. 1,000 years later, in that manual of Christian monastic

00:58:23.060 | life called the Rule of St. Benedict, chapter 38 specifies that meals be taken in silence

00:58:30.620 | except for the spoken word of the monk designated to read aloud to the diners. Does anyone think

00:58:37.820 | this was babysitting the monks, the people who kept the lights on through the Dark Ages?

00:58:43.820 | I would also note that reading aloud at table is still practiced at least once a day among

00:58:48.820 | the Benedictines, sometimes spiritual readings, other times secular, but never textbooks.

00:58:55.100 | In one monk's words to me, "We have a 1,500-year-old love affair with books and manuscripts."

00:59:02.720 | As of this writing, the monks at St. John's Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota, are listening

00:59:08.020 | to "Marcel Brewer and a Committee of Twelve Plan a Church, a Monastic Memoir" by Father

00:59:13.340 | Hilary Thimmesch. The church in question is St. John's very own, an edifice so magnificent

00:59:19.700 | the architect I. M. Pei once said it would be world famous if it were located in New

00:59:25.940 | York City.

00:59:27.700 | Then there is the history of the reader aloud in the labor force. One could even argue that

00:59:33.080 | this foreshadowed audiobooks. When the cigar industry blossomed in the mid-1800s, supposedly

00:59:39.520 | the best tobacco came from Cuba, though much of the industry later moved to the Tampa,

00:59:44.080 | Florida area. These cigars were hand-rolled by workers who became artisans in the delicate

00:59:49.600 | craft, producing hundreds of perfectly rolled specimens daily. Artistic as it might have

00:59:56.240 | been, it was still repetitious labor done in stifling factories. To break the monotony,

01:00:02.640 | workers hit upon the idea of having someone read aloud to them while they worked, known

01:00:07.960 | in the trade as la lectura. The reader, of which there were hundreds in the Tampa area

01:00:13.800 | alone, usually sat on an elevated platform or podium in the middle of the room and read

01:00:20.400 | aloud for four hours, covering newspapers, classics, and even Shakespeare. Somehow none

01:00:26.760 | of that sounds like babysitting to me.

01:00:30.920 | As labor became more organized in the United States, the readings kept workers informed

01:00:35.280 | of progressive ideas throughout the world as well as entertained. When factory owners

01:00:40.040 | realized the enlightening impact of the readings, they tried to stop them, but met stiff resistance

01:00:45.260 | from the workers, each of whom was paying the readers as much as 25 cents per week out

01:00:49.420 | of pocket. The daily readings added to the workers' intellect and general awareness

01:00:54.460 | while civilizing the atmosphere of the workplace. By the 1930s, however, with cigar sales slumping

01:01:00.320 | due to the Great Depression and unions growing restive with mechanization on the horizon,

01:01:06.020 | the owners declared that the reader aloud had to go. Protest strikes followed, but to

01:01:11.140 | no avail, and eventually readers were replaced by the radio.

01:01:16.520 | But not in Cuba. The Cuban novelist Miguel Barnett reports, "Today, all over Cuba,

01:01:23.620 | this tradition is alive and well. Readers are in all the factories, from Santiago to

01:01:28.380 | Havana to Pinar del Rio. The readings have specific timetables and generally begin with

01:01:34.300 | the headlines of today's newspapers. After reading the newspaper, the readers take a

01:01:38.360 | break and then begin reading the unfinished book from the day before. Most are women."

01:01:44.340 | Unlike the factories of yore, today's Cuban factory settings include modern lighting,

01:01:48.620 | air conditioning, and microphones with amplifying systems. Considerably better conditions than

01:01:53.300 | many contemporary American urban classrooms, I might add. Considering the stifling boredom

01:01:58.180 | in the American classroom and the fact that many high schools look like factories, schools

01:02:03.120 | seem to me to be the perfect setting for "reading aloud" a la Cuba, especially when you couple

01:02:09.100 | the history of reading aloud with the academic benefits noted here.

01:02:13.720 | As for babysitting, any babysitter who could accomplish all of that would be a bargain.

01:02:21.700 | You mentioned background knowledge. What is it? The easiest way to understand background

01:02:27.080 | knowledge is to read the following two paragraphs and see if there is a difference in your understanding

01:02:32.100 | of each.

01:02:33.840 | 1. But Sabathia, who pitched three days earlier in game three, gave up a lead-off broken-bat

01:02:42.840 | double to Austin Jackson. He struck out the next two batters, then walked Miguel Cabrera

01:02:50.060 | intentionally with first base open.

01:02:54.880 | Paragraph 2. Callas and Rhodes put on 84, but with the ball turning, Mark Wall could

01:03:01.960 | not hit with impunity and his eight overs cost only 37. The run still had to be scored

01:03:07.500 | at more than seven and over, with McGrath still to return and Warren having two overs

01:03:12.720 | left, when Rhodes pulled rifle to Bevan at deep square leg.

01:03:17.980 | You probably had an easier time grasping the first paragraph, a newspaper account of a

01:03:22.340 | baseball game in 2011. The second paragraph came from a newspaper story on the World Cricket

01:03:28.040 | Championship in 1999. Any confusion was because the less you know about a subject or the vocabulary

01:03:34.320 | associated with that subject, the slower you must read, the more difficult comprehension

01:03:39.320 | becomes and the less you understand. Sounding out the cricket paragraph phonetically wouldn't

01:03:46.800 | have helped much, would it?

01:03:50.320 | Background knowledge is one reason children who read the most bring the largest amount

01:03:53.720 | of information to the learning table and thus understand more of what the teacher or the

01:03:58.480 | textbook is teaching. Children whose families take them to museums and zoos, who visit historic

01:04:05.400 | sites, who travel abroad, or who camp in remote areas, accumulate huge chunks of background

01:04:13.200 | knowledge without even studying. For the impoverished child lacking the travel portfolio of affluence,

01:04:22.900 | the best way to accumulate background knowledge is by either reading or being read to. Yes,

01:04:31.600 | educational TV can help, but most at-risk children are not exposed to it often enough.

01:04:37.860 | The background knowledge of at-risk students took a further hit with No Child Left Behind

01:04:43.780 | when 71% of districts narrowed their curriculum to math and reading, curtailing subjects like

01:04:50.820 | art, music, science, and languages. The lack of background knowledge surfaces very early

01:04:55.980 | in a child's school life. In the longitudinal kindergarten study, researchers found that

01:05:00.540 | more than 50% of children coming from the lowest education and income levels finished

01:05:05.700 | in the bottom quartile in background knowledge. So once again, poverty rears its ugly head

01:05:12.900 | as an obstacle to learning.

01:05:16.100 | What are the skills a child needs for kindergarten? Let me make an analogy here. Inside a child's

01:05:23.100 | brain, there is a huge reservoir called the listening vocabulary. You could say it's

01:05:30.380 | the child's very own Lake Pontchartrain, the famous estuary outside New Orleans that

01:05:35.340 | overflowed because of all the water brought by Hurricane Katrina. That extra water breached

01:05:41.020 | the levees and tragically flooded New Orleans. We want the same thing to happen, but not

01:05:46.080 | in a tragic way. This time, the levees will be breached inside the child's brain. The

01:05:52.900 | first levee would be the speaking vocabulary. You pour enough words into the child's listening

01:06:01.220 | vocabulary and it will overflow and fill the speaking vocabulary pool. Thus, the child

01:06:09.940 | starts speaking the words he's heard. It's highly unlikely you'll ever say a word if

01:06:16.940 | you've never heard the word. More than a billion people speak Chinese, so why not the

01:06:23.580 | rest of us? Because we haven't heard enough Chinese words, especially in our childhoods.

01:06:29.900 | The next levee is the reading vocabulary. It's nearly impossible to understand a word

01:06:37.360 | in print if you've never said the word. And finally, there's the writing vocabulary.

01:06:47.060 | If you've never said the word or read the word, how in the world will you be able to

01:06:51.660 | write it? All the language arts flow from the listening vocabulary, and that has to

01:06:59.940 | be filled by someone besides the child. Simple. As you read to a child, you're pouring into

01:07:09.220 | the child's ears and brain all the sounds, syllables, endings, and blendings that will

01:07:16.940 | make up the words she will someday be asked to read and understand. And through stories,

01:07:23.900 | you are filling in the background knowledge necessary to understand things that aren't

01:07:28.180 | in her neighborhood, like war or whales or locomotives. The one pre-kindergarten skill

01:07:36.180 | that matters above all others, because it is the prime predictor of school success or

01:07:42.100 | failure, is the child's vocabulary upon entering school. Yes, the child goes to school

01:07:50.500 | to learn new words, but the words he already knows determine how much of what the teacher

01:07:56.460 | says will be understood. And since most instruction for the first four years of school is oral,

01:08:06.100 | the child who has the largest vocabulary will understand the most, while the child with

01:08:11.820 | the smallest vocabulary will grasp the least. Once reading begins, personal vocabulary feeds

01:08:21.420 | or frustrates comprehension, since school grows increasingly complicated with each grade.

01:08:30.820 | That's why school entry vocabulary tests predict so accurately. How is it that some

01:08:39.020 | kids get a head start on vocabulary? Conversation is the prime garden in which vocabulary grows,

01:08:47.660 | but conversations vary greatly from home to home. The eye-opening findings of Drs. Betty

01:08:53.500 | Hart and Todd Risley at the University of Kansas from their research on children's

01:08:58.300 | early lives demonstrate the impact of this fact. Published as "Meaningful Differences

01:09:04.260 | in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children," the research began in response

01:09:08.340 | to what Hart and Risley saw among the four-year-olds in the university lab school. With many children,

01:09:14.260 | the lines were already drawn. Some were far advanced and some far behind. When the children

01:09:21.660 | in the study were tested at age three and then again at nine, the differences held.

01:09:26.380 | What caused the differences so early? The researchers began by identifying 42 normal

01:09:32.260 | families representing three socioeconomic groups, welfare, working class, and professional.

01:09:42.460 | Beginning when the children were seven months old, researchers visited the homes for one

01:09:47.340 | hour a month and continued their visits for two and a half years. During each visit, the

01:09:55.060 | researcher tape-recorded and transcribed by hand any conversations and actions taking

01:10:00.480 | place in front of the child. Through 1,300 hours of visits, they accumulated 23 million

01:10:08.780 | bytes of information for the project database, categorizing every word, noun, verb, adjective,

01:10:14.660 | etc. uttered in front of the child. The project held some surprises. Regardless of socioeconomic

01:10:21.540 | level, all 42 families said and did the same things with their children. In other words,

01:10:30.180 | the basic instincts of good parenting are there for most people, rich or poor. Then

01:10:36.340 | the researchers received the data printout and saw the meaningful differences among the

01:10:42.300 | 42 families. When the daily number of words for each group of children is projected across

01:10:48.780 | four years, the four-year-old child from the professional family will have heard 45 million

01:10:58.060 | words, the working class child 26 million, and the welfare child only 13 million. I repeat,

01:11:09.460 | when the daily number of words for each group of children is projected across four years,

01:11:15.380 | the four-year-old child from the professional family will have heard 45 million words, the

01:11:21.500 | working class child 26 million, and the welfare child only 13 million. All three children

01:11:30.700 | will show up for kindergarten on the same day, but one will have heard 32 million fewer

01:11:37.500 | words. If legislators expect the teacher to get this child caught up, she'll have to

01:11:45.060 | speak 10 words a second for 900 hours to reach the 32 million mark by year's end. I hope

01:11:54.900 | they have life support ready for her. Those 42 children would perform differently in class

01:12:03.060 | because their word totals created different brains. By the time the study group reached

01:12:10.020 | age 3, the professional's children had 1,100 word vocabularies to the welfare children's

01:12:17.700 | 525. Similarly, their IQs were 117 vs. 79 by the time the study finished. Brain differences

01:12:30.280 | have nothing to do with how much parents love their children. They all love their children

01:12:35.620 | and want the best for them. But some parents have a better idea of what needs to be said

01:12:41.060 | and done to reach that "best." They know the child needs to hear words repeatedly in

01:12:47.660 | meaningful sentences and questions, and they know that plunking a two-year-old down in

01:12:52.020 | front of a television set for three hours at a time is more harmful than meaningful.

01:12:57.140 | Sociologists George Farkas and Kurt Barron studied the research on 6,800 children from

01:13:03.100 | ages 3 to 12 and found that children from the lower SES were far more likely to arrive

01:13:12.060 | at school with smaller vocabularies 12 to 14 months behind, and they seldom made up

01:13:18.820 | the loss as they grew older. The message in this kind of research is unambiguous. It's

01:13:27.620 | not the toys in the house that make the difference in children's lives. It's the words in their

01:13:33.500 | heads. The least expensive thing we can give a child outside of a hug turns out to be the

01:13:39.220 | most valuable. Words. You don't need a job, a checking account, or even a high school

01:13:45.140 | diploma to talk with a child. If I could select any piece of research that all parents would

01:13:50.040 | be exposed to, meaningful differences would be the one. That's feasible. The authors took

01:13:55.680 | their 268-page book and condensed it into a six-page article for American Educator,

01:14:00.540 | the Journal of the American Federation of Teachers, which may be freely reproduced by

01:14:03.660 | schools. There is one inexpensive, common-sense move that parents could make that would impact

01:14:09.300 | their children's language skills and maybe their emotional development as well, yet it

01:14:14.100 | goes largely unpublicized here in the United States. First, consider how badly it would

01:14:19.300 | affect a conversation with someone if she wouldn't look at you while you were

01:14:25.580 | talking to her. Most conversations would slow to a crawl. Let's apply that principle of

01:14:31.380 | human behavior to children in strollers. Until the 1960s, nearly all strollers were engineered

01:14:37.100 | so the child was facing the parent. Now it's either way, but far more often facing away.

01:14:43.020 | Does it make a difference? Researchers found it makes a huge difference in how much conversation

01:14:48.460 | takes place between parent and child, twice as much when the child faces the parent. It

01:14:53.820 | was even more frequent when the child walked with or was carried by the parent. Of course,

01:14:58.580 | it's not going to help that much if the child is facing the parent and the parent is on

01:15:02.940 | the cell phone all the time. I interrupt the author to comment that it's far worse since

01:15:10.100 | 2013, because it's not going to help the parent all that much if the child is not facing the

01:15:17.620 | parent. Excuse me. It's not going to help if the child is facing the parent, the parent

01:15:23.420 | is on the cell phone all the time, and also the child is on the cell phone all the time.

01:15:30.100 | Make my living staring at a screen and a microphone and evaluate what that is, but it is deeply,

01:15:37.460 | deeply harmful to conversation for us to be disconnected from the ones that we are together

01:15:45.760 | with physically so that we can try to forge somewhat tenuous connections from our virtual

01:15:53.620 | friends.

01:15:57.940 | Where is the better vocabulary? Conversation or reading? Most conversation is plain and

01:16:05.980 | simple, whether it's between two adults or with children. It consists of the 5,000 words

01:16:12.220 | we use all the time called the basic lexicon. Indeed, 83% of the words in normal conversation

01:16:19.700 | with a child come from the most commonly used thousand words, and it doesn't change much

01:16:24.420 | as the child ages. Then there are another 5,000 words we use in conversation less often.

01:16:31.620 | Together, these 10,000 words are called the common lexicon. Beyond that 10,000 mark are

01:16:38.740 | the rare words, and these play a critical role in reading as we grow older. The eventual

01:16:45.860 | strength of our vocabulary is determined not by the 10,000 common words, but by how many

01:16:51.860 | rare words we understand. If we don't use these rare words very often in conversation,

01:16:59.300 | where do we find them? The chart included in the book shows that printed text contains

01:17:03.980 | the most rare words. Whereas an adult uses only nine rare words per thousand when talking

01:17:11.700 | with a three-year-old, there are three times as many in a children's book and more than

01:17:27.380 | seven times as many in a newspaper. As you can see from the chart, oral communication,

01:17:33.580 | including a TV script, is decidedly inferior to print for building vocabulary. As shown

01:17:40.220 | by the data for printed material, the number of rare words increases significantly. This

01:17:45.280 | poses serious problems for at-risk children who hear fewer words and encounter print less

01:17:50.860 | often at home. Such children face a gigantic word gap that impedes reading progress throughout

01:17:58.540 | school. And that gap can't possibly be breached in 120 hours of summer school or through morphonics

01:18:05.900 | instruction. How can I give my kids words if I don't have them? This is a question

01:18:12.700 | I've heard from parents who have learning disabilities or for whom English is a second

01:18:16.580 | language. While there are few easy answers in parenting, this one is easier than most.

01:18:22.020 | There is a public agency that comes to the rescue in such instances. In fact, it's

01:18:26.860 | been doing this job for more than a century. What the agency does is take all the nouns,

01:18:31.300 | verbs, and adjectives a person would ever need and bundle them into little packages

01:18:36.220 | for anyone to borrow. Free! It asks only that you bring the packages back in a few weeks.

01:18:41.540 | I'm referring to the American Free Public Library, the People's University. And for

01:18:48.060 | those who can't read the words, they are now available on audio cassette and CD. Forty

01:18:53.100 | years ago, you had to be blind to get a recorded book in America. Now, anyone can.

01:18:59.820 | Has anyone ever applied reading aloud and SSR, sustained silent reading, to an at-risk

01:19:05.900 | school? Just as parents in low-income situations need to be reminded that their task is not

01:19:11.620 | insurmountable, so too do educators who work with children coming from those homes. Reading

01:19:19.500 | achievement and pleasure do not have to be mutually exclusive. During his ten years as

01:19:24.940 | principal of Boston's Solomon Leuenberg Middle School, Thomas P. O'Neill Jr. and

01:19:30.940 | his faculty proved it. The pride of Boston's junior high schools during the 1950s and early

01:19:37.100 | 1960s, Leuenberg subsequently suffered the ravages of urban decay. And by 1984, with

01:19:43.820 | the lowest academic record and Boston teachers calling it the "Looney Bin" instead of

01:19:47.980 | "Luenberg," the school was earmarked for closing. But first, Boston officials would

01:19:53.180 | give it one last chance. The reins were handed to O'Neill, an upbeat first-year principal

01:20:00.860 | and former high school English teacher whose experience there had taught him to "sell"

01:20:05.660 | the pleasures and importance of reading. The first thing he did was abolish the school's

01:20:12.140 | intercom system. As a teacher, I'd always sworn someday I'd rip that thing off the

01:20:16.380 | wall. Now I could do it legally. He then set about establishing structure, routine, and

01:20:21.980 | discipline. "That's the easy part. What happens after is the important part—reading.

01:20:27.740 | It's the key element in the curriculum. IBM can teach our graduates to work the machine,

01:20:32.300 | but we have to teach them to read the manual." In O'Neill's first year, sustained silent

01:20:38.300 | reading was instituted for the nearly 400 pupils and faculty for the last ten minutes

01:20:43.660 | of the day, during which everyone in the school read for pleasure. Notice "ten minutes."

01:20:49.100 | Each teacher and administrator was assigned a "room," much to the consternation of

01:20:55.100 | some who felt those last ten minutes could be better used to clean up the shop or gym.

01:20:59.260 | "Prove to me on paper," O'Neill challenged them, "that you are busier than I am and

01:21:04.860 | I'll give you the ten minutes to clean." He had no takers. Within a year, critics became

01:21:10.940 | supporters and the school was relishing the quiet times that ended the day.

01:21:14.540 | The books that had been started during SSR were often still being read by students filing out to

01:21:21.260 | buses, in stark contrast to former dismissal scenes that bordered on chaos. The next challenge

01:21:28.460 | was to ensure that each sixth, seventh, and eighth grade student not only saw an adult

01:21:35.980 | reading each day, but also heard one. Faculty members were assigned a classroom, and the

01:21:43.180 | school day began with ten minutes of reading aloud to complement the silent ending at the

01:21:47.820 | end of the day. Soon, reading aloud began to inspire awareness, and new titles sprouted

01:21:56.220 | during SSR. In effect, the faculty was doing what the great art schools have always done,

01:22:02.780 | providing life models from which to draw. In the first year, Leuenberg's scores were up.

01:22:09.100 | In the second year, not only did the scores climb, but so too did student enrollment

01:22:14.940 | in response to the school's new reputation. Three years later, in 1988, Leuenberg's 570

01:22:23.260 | students had the highest reading scores in the city of Boston. There was a 15-page waiting

01:22:29.340 | list of children who wanted to attend. And O'Neill was portrayed by Time as a viable

01:22:35.100 | alternative to physical force in its cover story on Joe Clark, the bullhorn and bat-toting

01:22:42.300 | principal from Paterson, New Jersey. Today, Tom O'Neill is retired, but the ripple effect of his

01:22:49.100 | work has reached shores that not even his great optimism would have anticipated. In the early

01:22:55.900 | 1990s, a junior high school civics teacher in Japan, Hiroshi Hayashi, read the Japanese edition

01:23:02.300 | of the Read Aloud Handbook. Intrigued by the concept of SSR and Tom O'Neill's example,

01:23:08.780 | he immediately decided to apply it in his own school. Contrary to what most Americans believe,

01:23:15.500 | not all Japanese public school students are single-minded overachievers, and many are

01:23:19.900 | rebellious or reluctant readers, if they are readers at all. Although SSR was a foreign concept

01:23:25.900 | to Japanese secondary education, Hayashi saw quick results in his junior high school with just 10

01:23:31.500 | minutes at the start of the morning. Unwilling to keep his enthusiasm to himself, he spent the next

01:23:36.460 | two years sending 40,000 handwritten postcards to administrators in Japanese public schools.

01:23:44.460 | His personal crusade has won accolades from even the faculty skeptics. By 2006,

01:23:51.500 | more than 3,500 Japanese schools were using SSR to begin their school day.

01:23:56.700 | Who has the time these days? People carry on these days as though the universal clock has

01:24:04.460 | somehow shrunk from 24 hours to 18. Granted, there are a few people whose work schedules

01:24:10.300 | are truly beyond the norm. But they are few and far between. If there were a national time

01:24:16.060 | shortage, the malls would be empty, Netflix would be defunct, and the cable TV companies would be

01:24:20.540 | bankrupt. Ultimately, what it boils down to is Sister Patricia Joseph's cautionary words to me

01:24:27.020 | when I was 16. I was the designated class artist, and she had asked me to draw something for her

01:24:33.500 | bulletin board over the weekend. I showed up empty-handed on Monday with the excuse that I

01:24:38.700 | hadn't had enough time. With a steely look, she said quietly, "That's alright, James. But please

01:24:46.860 | understand even the busiest people find the time for the things they truly value." Her thought was

01:24:53.820 | on target that day, and it still is. If you understand what you've read so far and you truly

01:24:59.180 | value children and their futures, you will find the time. Like Sister said, it's all about the

01:25:07.020 | value system. The last word on reading aloud, vocabulary and old brains. Of all the endorsements

01:25:14.060 | for reading aloud, the following is the most unusual and perhaps most sobering. Back in the

01:25:18.780 | mid-1990s, two men and a woman sat talking in an office of the University of Kentucky Medical

01:25:23.820 | Center. One man was an epidemiologist, the other man was a neurologist, and the woman was a

01:25:31.100 | psycholinguist. All were involved in what would become a celebrated Alzheimer's study. Two of them

01:25:36.940 | had been researching an order of nuns who had consented to regular mental examinations and brain

01:25:41.580 | autopsies upon death and had turned all their personal records over to the researchers. The

01:25:46.380 | autopsies, when coupled with autobiographical essays written by the nuns when they were about

01:25:51.340 | 22 years old, showed a clear connection. Those with the densest sentences, the most ideas jam-packed

01:25:59.100 | into a sentence without breaking them into separate clauses, were far less likely either

01:26:03.260 | to develop Alzheimer's or to show its ravages. Simply put, the larger the vocabularies and the

01:26:09.100 | more complex the thinking processes in youth, the less chance of Alzheimer's damage later,

01:26:14.700 | even if they developed a disease. Could the rich vocabulary and crammed thinking process

01:26:20.460 | in one's youth be an early insurance policy against Alzheimer's? As the three discussed

01:26:26.300 | these issues, the neurologist Bill Marksbury, father of two, asked Susan Kemper, the psycholinguist,

01:26:32.540 | "What does this mean for our children?" In his absorbing book about the study,

01:26:37.900 | Aging with Grace, David Snowden, the epidemiologist, describes what followed,

01:26:44.540 | quoting, "The question caught me off guard, but when I saw the look on his face, I realized that

01:26:50.860 | he was speaking as a father, not as a scientist." Bill has three grown daughters, and it was clear

01:26:57.180 | he wanted to know whether he and his wife, Barbara, had done the right things as parents.

01:27:01.580 | "Read to them," Susan answered. "It's that simple. It's the most important thing a parent can do with

01:27:07.260 | their children." Susan explained that idea density depends on at least two important learned skills,

01:27:13.900 | vocabulary and reading comprehension. And the best way to increase vocabulary and reading

01:27:19.340 | comprehension is by starting early in life by reading to your children, Susan declared.

01:27:24.300 | I could see the relief spread over Bill's face. "Barbara and I read to our kids every night,"

01:27:30.860 | he said proudly. In the years since our study came out, I have been asked Marksbury's question

01:27:37.900 | many times. Parents ask me if they should play Mozart to their babies or buy them expensive

01:27:43.340 | teaching toys or prohibit television or get them started early on the computer.

01:27:48.140 | I give them the same simple answer Susan Kemper gave to Marksbury, "Read to your children."

01:27:56.300 | And I hope on that note that if you are interested in more details, you will be motivated to go ahead

01:28:06.140 | and buy this wonderful book from which I have been reading to you and read it for yourself.

01:28:14.380 | Again, this is the Read Aloud Handbook by author Jim Trillese. I was reading to you from the

01:28:23.260 | seventh edition, the preface and the first chapter. I want to add just simply one comment

01:28:31.340 | that is from my personal experience and also a little bit of data analysis on this topic.

01:28:43.100 | I have often been... I have long been a reader, but I have often wished that I were more of a

01:28:52.060 | reader. I, like you, have frequently found myself distracted by shinier and oftentimes more enticing

01:28:59.420 | things. And I've noticed that whenever I stray away from reading, the quality of my thoughts

01:29:03.580 | goes down, the quality of my life goes down, the quality of my ability to focus goes down,

01:29:07.340 | the quality of my motivation goes down, and I suffer from it. And then I recognize what's

01:29:12.220 | happening and if I can correct and I go back to steadily reading, it provides a calming thing for

01:29:18.860 | me. And it changes my motivation, it gives me clarity on my thinking, etc. My thinking is better

01:29:26.380 | because of my reading ability. But I'm vastly ahead of many people due to years and years of

01:29:33.100 | doing it. And I want to point out that in reading, there is simply no substitute for quantity when it

01:29:40.940 | comes to the basics, the basics of especially things like vocabulary acquisition. I got into

01:29:48.700 | this heavily a couple of years ago when I started really digging into foreign language acquisition.

01:29:54.860 | I had never done any kind of foreign language acquisition. I had never... I took... Let me

01:30:03.900 | rephrase. I took two years of high school Spanish, just like most people did. I had Spanish one and

01:30:10.700 | Spanish two. I did a few things right, namely I tried to use the Spanish that I learned and I

01:30:19.020 | developed the habit of trying to talk to people. And in college, when I was getting ready to go to

01:30:26.620 | Costa Rica for a study abroad program, in preparation for that, because of course,

01:30:32.940 | I was quite aware of the fact that I couldn't speak Spanish, I got a box of flashcards from

01:30:38.060 | Barnes & Noble that had 1000 Spanish vocabulary words and I forced myself to memorize those 1000

01:30:43.820 | words before the trip. And when I arrived on the trip, I could speak Spanish. It was

01:30:50.620 | quite poorly spoken, but I could communicate in most cases. And that made all the difference in

01:30:56.380 | the world from my experience. But I never was a reader in Spanish because it was too hard.

01:31:02.460 | And I came across too many words that I didn't understand. I'm now glad for that experience.

01:31:10.700 | I was annoyed about it for a long time, but I'm now glad for that experience because it's given

01:31:14.380 | me a greater amount of empathy for people who are not readers. It's really, really frustrating

01:31:22.300 | to read a book and in every paragraph encounter three or four words that you don't understand.

01:31:30.940 | You think it doesn't matter. You think, "Ah, it's only three to four words. You should be

01:31:34.060 | able to skip past it and just go on with your life." It does matter. It's really annoying

01:31:38.460 | and it makes you not want to read. And over the years, I would pick up various Spanish books and

01:31:43.260 | screw up my enthusiasm. "I'm going to read this." And I'd find myself put off by my inability to

01:31:50.220 | read the words. And I recognized how isolating that is, how stunting that is, how what a block

01:31:57.580 | it is to learning. That's something I never struggled with in English. So over the years,

01:32:03.100 | last two years specifically, I started studying foreign language acquisition.

01:32:07.020 | I came across some of the leading academics in the field. The most commonly cited academic in

01:32:15.020 | the field at this point that I could find is Stephen Krashen, who's also spoken and written

01:32:21.340 | extensively on simple reading, not for foreign language acquisition, but for primary language

01:32:27.180 | acquisition. But I also came across the work of Paul Nation, Dr. Paul Nation, New Zealand

01:32:32.060 | academic who has similarly talked about things. And they both talked about extensive reading.

01:32:38.460 | And I came across a paper that Dr. Paul Nation had written where he talked about how much input

01:32:47.580 | you need to learn the most frequent 9,000 words in a language. Now, there are various estimates

01:32:58.940 | as to how many times you need to actually see a word in order for you to remember it and understand

01:33:04.380 | it. And back to Jim Trulise's image, first a word has to go into your listening comprehension. And

01:33:12.380 | then later, some of those words will flow down to your speaking pool where you can actually use them

01:33:19.580 | in speaking and then maybe sometime you can use them in writing. But you got to put a lot more

01:33:23.580 | words into your comprehension first. And you need to be exposed to words a lot of times.

01:33:29.580 | And there are different estimates, but Dr. Paul Nation used the number of 12 in this particular

01:33:38.620 | publication from 2014. He said that 12 repetitions of a word is a safe bet in most cases. The idea

01:33:45.100 | being that if you come across a word 12 times and you don't know it, but then you look it up and

01:33:50.700 | you figure out what it is, after about 12 times, you'll be able to remember it. So you need to see

01:33:55.740 | a word 12 times in order for you to remember it. What this means is that if you start reading,

01:34:02.060 | you're going to very quickly learn the most frequently used vocabulary of any language,

01:34:08.140 | especially including your own, but you're certainly going to be able to acquire foreign

01:34:13.100 | language vocabulary as well. And so if you calculate the goal of acquiring a 2000-word

01:34:20.700 | vocabulary, and then we'll go up from a 2000-word vocabulary to a 3000-word vocabulary, 4000-word

01:34:26.860 | vocabulary, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9000-word vocabulary. And the 9000-word vocabulary would basically be

01:34:34.540 | vocabulary that would allow you to function at the college level in most cases. Not to say that you

01:34:40.540 | know all the words, you certainly don't. I think the English language has the largest

01:34:46.060 | vocabulary in the world, like 250,000 words if memory serves me correctly. But you know all of

01:34:51.500 | the most important words, and then you'll acquire the specialized vocabulary of whatever your

01:34:57.100 | personal area of expertise is. So how many words – so Natschen did a study and he calculated how

01:35:05.660 | much do you have to read in order for you to see these words 12 times in order for you to be able

01:35:14.060 | to learn them. And so at the 2000-word level, you need to be exposed to basically two novels

01:35:24.460 | is the number, 170,000 tokens. And there are basically 120,000 tokens per novel is the

01:35:32.780 | estimate that you would use, 220,000 words per novel. So if you're exposed to two novels,

01:35:39.900 | you'll be able to acquire, if you can understand them, 2000 words.

01:35:43.900 | Then to go from a 2000-word vocabulary to a 3000-word vocabulary, you need to be exposed

01:35:52.380 | to an additional 300,000 words or three novels. To go from a 3000-word vocabulary up to five,

01:36:03.420 | total five books read, five novels, full-length novels, to go from a 3000-word vocabulary to a

01:36:10.460 | 4000-word vocabulary, you need to add an additional 530,000 words read or about six novels.

01:36:22.220 | To go from 4000 to 5000, you need to add 1,060,000 words read for about nine books.

01:36:30.540 | To go from a 5000-word vocabulary to 6000, you need to add 1.45 million words read.

01:36:38.140 | The next step requires an additional 2 million words read. To go the next step up from 7000

01:36:46.860 | to an 8000-word vocabulary, another 2.4 million words read. And then to make that final jump,

01:36:53.740 | to gain an additional 1000 words, you need to read an additional 3 million words

01:37:03.340 | to gain that next 1000 level of vocabulary. Now, you can speed up the process sometimes.

01:37:11.180 | You may be able to study vocabulary intensively. There may be a case for it, but you can acquire

01:37:16.940 | it very naturally with reading. And the number is actually quite manageable. So at this point

01:37:23.260 | in time, once I read this, everything became clear to me and I said, "That's it." The total

01:37:31.500 | number of words needed to acquire a 9000-word foreign language vocabulary is

01:37:40.860 | about 11 million words. And if you're reading books that have had 120,000 words in them,

01:37:46.860 | then your number is basically something like just under about 100 books. And if you'll do that,

01:37:57.740 | you'll acquire the language. It's not possible that you not do it. Now, in the beginning,

01:38:03.580 | you often have to use some specialized tools to help you with translation. You have to learn some

01:38:08.620 | basic vocabulary. You have to work with very simple beginner texts. But as soon as you can get

01:38:13.420 | into books, and as soon as you can read 10 million words, 11 million words, you'll have that

01:38:21.020 | professional vocabulary that you want in the foreign language. And everything else just kind

01:38:25.100 | of clicks into place. So the point is, this is the process for readers. It's a numerical process.

01:38:31.820 | For me, that became my simple outline. And so today, I track how much I have read, or at least

01:38:37.900 | how much I've read in a tracked way, just to get an idea of how I am doing. Over the last year or

01:38:45.340 | two, I've been learning French. I've read as of today, 1,290,409 words in French. So I know I'm

01:38:53.660 | about 10 to almost 15%, 12% of the way towards my goal. And it may take me seven or eight years to

01:39:01.580 | work my way towards that 10 million words read. But I know that I can already tell by my current

01:39:08.140 | vocabulary, I can already tell that my ability to recognize words is very good. I can pick up at

01:39:13.740 | this point in time. A year ago, I couldn't pick up any text and really understand it other than

01:39:18.140 | the obvious cognates. But there's so few of those, you can't do it. Today, I can pick up almost any

01:39:24.300 | text and I can get the gist of it, at least in terms of recognition. I can't use those words. I

01:39:31.500 | can't use them actively. They don't spill out of me with spoken language. I couldn't write them in

01:39:35.740 | any chance, but I can recognize them. And that's the first stage of learning. So in many ways, I

01:39:40.860 | feel like a kindergartner going through that process. And so you can do this and you can help

01:39:45.020 | your children. And it's a numerical thing. Can you expose your children to 10 million words?

01:39:50.700 | Now, you can go back and you can say, "Well, how long does that take? How long does it take to

01:39:55.020 | actually acquire those words?" Well, here it depends on your reading skill. And I'll just

01:39:59.340 | give you an example from myself where I tracked this stuff to try to figure out and did some

01:40:06.620 | measurements to try to figure out my own numbers. I can read pretty quickly in English. I don't do

01:40:14.620 | much speed reading. I have studied a little bit and I can speed read things if they are in my area

01:40:21.580 | of expertise. I can't speed read anything that's outside of my area of expertise. I can read a

01:40:27.020 | financial book, any book on the shelf at Barnes & Noble, I can read a financial book in 5 to 15

01:40:32.140 | minutes because I'm familiar with the concepts. I can pick it up. I can see the headings. I can

01:40:35.980 | look at the table of contents and I can close the book and pretty much, I won't be able to give you

01:40:41.900 | the stories in it, but just to flip through the pages and I could summarize the book for you

01:40:46.220 | because it's something that I know very, very well. Give me an entry-level medical textbook,

01:40:53.500 | I don't know it. It's not my field. I don't understand it. I can't do it at all. I have

01:40:59.900 | no context. So this is where you see familiarity. But let me just give you an example here.

01:41:06.060 | The first thing you can do to figure out how long it would take to be exposed to these words

01:41:11.900 | is look at the word count and then compare the length of the word count to an audiobook

01:41:18.620 | version of that word count. Let's begin with an audio example and I'll tell you how I did

01:41:26.060 | this with foreign language. The same principle applies to your children. A book that I read

01:41:31.180 | last year, I read the Jason Bourne novel by Robert Ludlam. I read the trilogy, the original trilogy.

01:41:38.940 | It wasn't awesome, it was okay, but I read the original trilogy in French. First thing you can

01:41:44.140 | do is I like to, I use Kobo.com to get, and one of the things that nice thing that Kobo does is

01:41:51.900 | they include a word count on the books. Amazon will include a page count, but they include a

01:41:57.260 | word count. So as an example here, La Vengeance dans la Peau has a word count, it's a 904-page

01:42:04.700 | novel. It has a word count of 262,000 words in it. Now Kobo estimates that that will take 21 to 23

01:42:17.900 | hours to read. We'll come back to those hour estimates in a moment. But for me, what I have

01:42:26.140 | found is that I have my, we can start with the very least with how long it takes to read aloud.

01:42:34.300 | And so I also have the audible recording from this book, and the audible recording for this book is

01:42:40.620 | 28 hours and 18 minutes long. So remember the word count is 262,000 words and it's 28 hours and 18

01:42:48.860 | minutes long. So if we divide that, we get 1,690 minutes. The audible reader is reading at a rate

01:42:57.260 | of 155 words per minute. That comes out to 9,300 words per hour. So when I'm reading, if we were to

01:43:07.180 | go back and recognize that I read to you for about an hour and I guess 15 minutes, hour and 20 minutes

01:43:13.020 | from the book that I read to you, you would wind up with probably around 12,000 words that I read to

01:43:21.980 | you. Now go back to that language acquisition, those numbers that I said from the Paul Nation

01:43:27.340 | foreign language study. If your goal is 10 million words in a foreign language, or if your goal for

01:43:33.980 | your child is to read your child over time 10 million words, and you're reading books that are

01:43:40.300 | not a lot of pictures, with a child usually you're starting, you're always starting with pictures

01:43:44.620 | and you're reading slowly and you're talking and you're giggling and you're laughing, you're not

01:43:48.220 | just reading. But if you're just reading, then you probably would be reading at about 9,000 words per

01:43:54.620 | hour. So if you take 9,300 words per hour and your goal is to expose your child to 10 million words,

01:44:04.460 | depending on how long you want to do that, that's 1,075 hours of reading.

01:44:10.380 | So 1,075 hours of reading, let's say you do 30 minutes per day, that would be

01:44:17.980 | 500 and, excuse me, 1,075 hours times two for 35 minutes a day. Then over the course of about

01:44:29.180 | six years at 30 minutes a day, you would wind up reading the 10 million words that you want to,

01:44:35.100 | to give your child the gift of a large vocabulary. You can do it faster. And this is the same thing

01:44:41.980 | with foreign language acquisition. If I need to read and I need to have read to me at the slowest

01:44:46.300 | pace, listening to the audio book, which was how I started learning French, I just put on the audio

01:44:51.900 | book and I listened and I read along and I use link to read and track my word count and then I

01:44:56.780 | listen to the audio book, I know I need 1,075 hours of reading. And so if I were super intense

01:45:04.300 | and I needed to learn French really quickly and I needed to do it really very fast and I had a year,

01:45:11.100 | well, in three hours a day of reading, I can expose myself to the 10 million words.

01:45:16.380 | If I was doing it full time and I really had a motivated reason, I could do eight hours a day

01:45:22.060 | of reading, then in 134 days I could do it and I could have a very broad vocabulary. I don't

01:45:28.940 | do that. It's not my goal, but if 30 minutes a day, right, you could do the math. You can figure

01:45:33.660 | out how long it takes you to read the 10 million words at the slowest pace, which is an audio book.

01:45:40.620 | Now let's go back to the Kobo estimates. The Kobo estimates for that book of 262,000 words are 21

01:45:48.540 | to 23 hours to read it, rather than the over 28 hours that are required for the reader. And so

01:45:58.940 | here you can just simply do a reading test for yourself and you can calculate how long it would

01:46:03.180 | take you to figure out how to read the amount of words that your goal is to read. And your speed

01:46:10.300 | will vary based upon your proficiency. For me as an accomplished English reader, I read at

01:46:18.060 | a significantly faster rate than the estimates are. So for example, I read a book, I did actually

01:46:29.340 | tracked it this past year. I was curious what my English reading speed was. I read an English novel

01:46:36.700 | that was, it was actually Doug Casey's book, Drug Lord, which is part of his trilogy. That was

01:46:42.380 | interesting and great. I really enjoyed it. Great trilogy. But I read an English novel,

01:46:48.540 | it was 150,000 total words, 555 pages. The Kobo estimate on that particular book is 12 to 13 hours

01:46:57.900 | to read it. I tracked, I read, I didn't speed read it. I read it at my enjoyable novel pace.

01:47:04.300 | I read every word, just kind of working my way through it, enjoying front to back. No, just I

01:47:08.860 | was reading it to enjoy it as a simple pleasure novel of an interesting story written by an

01:47:15.660 | interesting guy. It took me 6.9 hours, total of 414 minutes to read it, which was a little under

01:47:22.940 | half, just about half of the 12 to 13 hours that the Kobo estimate gave to it. So my English reading

01:47:31.500 | speed with that novel was 362 words per minute or 21,739 words per hour. So I can accumulate a lot

01:47:43.180 | of English words much more quickly. Now in foreign language, with Spanish, I read a little bit

01:47:50.140 | faster, maybe about 15% faster than the Kobo estimates. I did a speed test, but I don't have

01:47:55.740 | that data in front of me, but I did a speed test for myself on a Spanish book. And then with my

01:48:00.060 | French books, I'm pretty slow, but a little tiny bit faster than the narrator. At this point in

01:48:06.860 | time, I've bumped the narrator up to about 1.1, 1.2 speed on Audible when reading books. And

01:48:14.060 | that's fine. I still have to absorb, even if I know the word, I still have to absorb the meaning.

01:48:20.620 | So you can calculate, that's my point, you can calculate how quickly you can get to this goal

01:48:26.940 | if you want to. Now go to your own reader, right, your child. And I want you to calculate how many

01:48:33.020 | words your child would be exposed to if you read to your child three hours a day versus 30 minutes

01:48:40.620 | a day. Think back to how transformative 10 minutes a day is for those classrooms. 10 minutes a day of

01:48:49.580 | silent reading and/or 10 minutes a day of being read to. 30 minutes a day is wonderful, do what

01:48:55.420 | you can do. But imagine if you can read to your child for three hours a day. Imagine the vocabulary

01:49:01.500 | acquisition that is possible for you. Imagine if you can be more. And here where we wind up saying

01:49:09.580 | that childhood is not all about reading. There are other things that are important, right? Free

01:49:13.980 | play, et cetera, is important. Academics are not everything. But you can calculate the reading speed

01:49:19.420 | that you have of reading aloud or your reading speed yourself. And you can put that on a chart

01:49:24.540 | and you can just, it's shocking how big of a return it is. I want you to imagine the difference

01:49:31.900 | for yourself, for your children, et cetera, if you read to them and/or they read to themselves.

01:49:39.340 | If you recognize how you cannot learn something that you cannot understand,

01:49:45.740 | in order for you to understand something, you need vocabulary. And vocabulary can be imparted

01:49:51.660 | so efficiently with reading. There is no better way of acquiring vocabulary than reading. Because

01:49:57.980 | your speed, you can go as fast or as slow as you need to. And it should show you why it's so

01:50:05.340 | powerful and why reading to your children, especially when they're before the age of

01:50:09.980 | reading, why it makes a difference. And of course, you can supplement. You can use audio books. You

01:50:14.460 | can use things like that as well as a supplement. And so there's no supplement for reading to your

01:50:21.660 | child. My children, if I let them, I mean, they wouldn't read all day because of course they need

01:50:26.060 | to play and be active and move. But it's like they can't get enough because we've always read to

01:50:32.220 | them and they just, "Oh, can you read this? Can you read that?" And so if you get good books,

01:50:37.340 | you can pump that into them. And then that enhances their brain and enhances their vocabulary. And it

01:50:42.860 | just, you can see it. It affects them more than virtually anything else. There are many other

01:50:49.020 | things that you can do to help your children, right? Lots of exercise, lots of sunshine,

01:50:53.660 | lots of playing music and lots of love and hugs and snuggles and all that stuff.

01:50:59.980 | But in terms of intellectual development, to prepare your child for academic excellence,

01:51:04.540 | kindergarten, first grade, second grade, third grade, most important thing is simply reading.

01:51:10.060 | There's no way around it. Reading aloud to them, having them read aloud to, right? Use audio books.

01:51:16.220 | We do have an embarrassment of riches. We use a ton of LibriVox books. LibriVox books have

01:51:25.980 | wonderful classic stories, high-quality literature available. And your child will be able to listen

01:51:31.340 | to literature that's several grade levels beyond their reading ability. And in addition, Audible

01:51:38.540 | is wonderful for paid ones, for more current ones. LibriVox is all stuff that's in the public domain.

01:51:43.660 | And then of course, your reading to your child and/or having your child read to by others

01:51:49.100 | is one of the best things that you can possibly do. It's simple. It's inexpensive. It doesn't

01:51:55.340 | take that much time, but it pays off in spades, in massive, massive dividends.

01:52:04.220 | So I hope that this additional information, kind of some of these numbers in my reading from the

01:52:08.140 | book will help you to see why there's really no better investment that you can make into

01:52:14.460 | your children's educational future than simply reading to them and then surrounding them with

01:52:22.460 | books that they love, that they will read themselves. And if you'll do that, 80%

01:52:28.140 | of your work is done. If you will intentionally create and cultivate a reader for a child,

01:52:37.580 | then all you need to do is supply the right books and the educational process is automatic.

01:52:48.940 | The heavy lifting is in the beginning. First, a lot of hours of reading, but that's fun. That's

01:52:53.660 | bonding time. It's snuggling time. Then teaching how to read, how to decode the phonics. Then

01:53:03.180 | continuing to read just for time together, but then supplying the right books.

01:53:09.180 | Once that's done, education is basically done. Talk about mathematics another day.

01:53:16.380 | The evidence is abundant. Read to your children. It's a wonderful investment into them and into

01:53:24.140 | your family life and into their educational future. If you come to me and you say, "I didn't

01:53:30.300 | save a dime for my kids' college, but I read to my children for an hour a day, every day for the

01:53:37.180 | first 10 years of their life," you won't have a thing to worry about with college, I promise.

01:53:44.700 | Absolutely guaranteed. Thanks for listening. Be back with you soon.

2021-12-03_Why_Reading_Aloud_to_Children_is_so_Absurdly_Effective_in_Improving_Academic_Outcomes