how do you get good at reading i'm open and what is it we can't shout out here so you baptists will have to get a grip oh right no shouting out just play catholic for the night raise your hand i will call on you yes what is it what is your you do how many people agree with bro should get better at reading by reading and you're absolutely right all the research overwhelmingly shows the students in all countries in an all languages who read the most read the best that's reading fact of life number one that it's an accrued skill strangely enough the schools that have in the past been giving children time in which to read the the school term for it is s s r sustained silent reading some places call it dear time drop everything and read there's dear time  but basically it comes down to ten fifteen minutes a day in which you would read just for pleasure the kind of thing that you do when you have some spare minutes at lunch breakfast in a coffee shop just having a sandwich rather than stare at the person who's sitting across from you a complete stranger and have them worry that maybe you're a stalker you bring a newspaper and you read well when he places not most but many places give children time in school in which to read just for fun a book a magazine a newspaper and strangely enough this is really bizarre but proves you can appreciate this these students the ones who have the most minutes per week of s s r have the highest reading scores in the world thirty two nations study two hundred ten thousand kids nine year olds and thirteen year olds the ones with the most minutes per week of s s are at the highest rated scores so bruce has given us reading fact of life number one that reading is an accrued skill but many places are now live in aiding the s s r and they take that fifteen minutes a day and devoted to how to take tests special preparation classes for taking the state standardized test in reading there is no research to show taking more tests make sure we're better reader the people who think that you can become a better reader by taking more tests these are the same people who think that if you weigh the cattle more often they will get fatter you know folks it doesn't work that way now reading fact of life number one is tied to reading fact number two that is human beings are pleasure oriented we will only willingly go back again and again and again to the restaurants with the food in the beverages we like driving to work or here this evening if you have the radio on in your car you listen to the stations with the talk or the music you like over the weekend you visit the in laws you like and converse lee we avoid the in laws we avoid the music and we avoid the foods we dislike if a child finds more pleasure than pain in reading they come back to it again and again and again and like bruce said you get better and better and better at reading but if you find more pain than pleasure you withdraw when you withdraw from reading you're not reading much if you don't read much you never get much better at reading you may end up running for governor or even president of the united states but you don't get better at reading so our very first challenge is to build as many pleasure bridges between a child and print  hundred eighty five us department of education the national commission was created by the way this was under the ronald reagan administration they studied the last twenty years of reading research their challenge was very simple find out what the heck works oh yeah and while you're at it city can find anything in the research that shows what doesn't work they look at ten thousand major research projects and at the end of two years of study they issue a report called becoming a nation of readers and they were unable to find a single piece of research in the ten thousand that documented the idea the more worksheets a child does in class the better reader the child becomes no evidence to support it at all what they found was this declarations the very first declaration from the national commission the single most important activity for building the knowledge required for eventual success in reading is reading aloud to children that's the most important thing that's more important than whether the teacher has a masters or a doctorate whether the principal has a doctorate it's more important than homework it's more important than anything else it's the number one thing so a parent says to me where to me when i'm supposed to read that a kid i thought he was supposed to come home from school  tell me how was he going to get better at reading if i'm doing the reading good question simple answer no listening comprehension comes before reading comprehension  it if you've never heard the word enormous you would never say that word enormous if you never heard you never said it it's a doggone foreign word it's going to be very difficult when it's time to read it and write it so just look at your favorite word the word search you're looking at me is the word just started to speak in tongues your favorite word the word that you you know your favorite word you use it more than any other word i know but i'm not talking about a love affair here i'm talking about the number one word the english language to everyone in this room except in this young lady right here but soon she'll be doing it to you just more than any other word they remember the exact minute that you learned the meaning of the words the as a child not only do you not know the exact minute but if pretend for a minute that i'm a russian exchange i been living in your home now for two weeks i'll also tell you there's no equal in word and the russian language for them as we know it they don't have a thought lots of languages don't have articles like the chinese japanese korean persian farsi polish punjabi so i come to you on this something wednesday evening as the russian exchange student and i say to you blue is it wednesday there is wednesday right on these book tours you have no idea what guy were ever i go i always have to bring it down a notch to help the guys bring it down to what i call the but a focal level which is not as low as the low end skill level we're just coming down one notch chair gentleman is there a difference between a girlfriend and the girlfriend all right we're all on the same page now the word is not only the most frequently used word in the english language but it's also one of our most complicated it is so complicated that almost one hundred percent of the librarians in this building of the teachers in this community and everyone here tonight would struggle to explain its meaning to a russian immigrant and yet it was our number one word walking in the first grade and we knew when to use it where to use it and how to use it how we learned by hearing it we heard it three ways one we heard it over and over and over second we heard of being used by superheroes mom dad brother sister kids next door and finally third a meaningful context that is the cookie the nap the crayon and the potty that's how you learn the language you have to hear it before you speak it before you read it and write it so the whole time you're reading aloud to a child you are feeding the listening vocabulary the child is going to have to have in order to have a speaking vocabulary than a reading vocabulary finally a writing vocabulary but they all have as the original source the listening vocabulary let me give you something now that amounts to a federal secret it is a secret although it's in public documents it has been available in public documents since one nine hundred ninety six but two successive presidents and a long line of governors across this country have chosen not to talk about this research for fear that some of the people might be offended by the research and if they're offended by the research they might not vote for me and yet this research clearly shows what parents do to hurt children and what parents do to help children none of these parents are doing the stuff that hurts children consciously they don't know they are hurting the child so as long as they don't know this hurts they're going to continue to hurt the child so better they should hurt the child than i should lose a vote that's the way the politician is thinking about this research you make up your own mind but i will tell you this until we change the homes of america you're not change in the school scores at all they can test those kids till the cows come home and the scores aren't going to budge a significant iota because the child is only in school nine hundred hours a year and is in the home seven thousand eight hundred hours a year now you want to hold teachers accountable well which teachers should be held most accountable the teacher who had them for nine hundred hours or the teacher who had them for seven thousand eight hundred hours that's the significance the parent plays in that educational process so it's the johnson lyndon johnson administration they are forming the head start program nationally they want the input from some social scientists among the people they approached were doctors betty hart and todd risley the university of kansas they thought that head start was a terrific idea what are you going to start at what age and the head start people in washington said who are going to start at age four and hearten recently said whoa wait a minute wait a  cannot wait till four and yeah you are you are way late you see the kids that we've got in the lab school in the real preschool program that we've got here at the university the lines are already drawn by the age of earlier but they didn't have hard core research to substantiate their claim so head start went ahead began and for that since dropped down to three but as you'll see that slate what hartung risley began was a program that would eventually become what we called meaningful differences in the everyday experience of young american children what they did was to identify forty two families and the forty two families were very normal traditional families know alcohol abusers drug abuser spouse abusers there were some poverty families there were working class families and they were professional high income high education level parents all levels were represented in the forty two all forty two families had one thing in common a six month old child the forty two families would allow a researcher to come into their home for one hour a month with a little tape recorder and the researcher would simply turn the tape recorder on in the middle of the room and they would record for the next hour every word every sentence said in front of the six month old child they would do that month after month year after year in the end they would have one thousand three hundred hours of recording they would take every word off the tapes matched the words to the individual child who heard them and enter them into a database was it a noun was it a verb was it an adjective they counted the sentences and defined the sentences and then the words as well they had twenty three million bytes of information in the computer the first piece of good news that they had was that all forty two families regardless of their education or income level did and said the same things with their children that surprises people that's good news you don't have to have a college diploma to be a good parent and then the next piece of data that came out of the study was the shocker before i tell you these numbers keep in mind the single greatest predictor of school success is the size of the vocabulary of the incoming kindergarten child for the simple reason that for the first four years of school kindergarten through third grade almost all the instruction is oral so the child who comes to school with the most words in his head understands most of what the teacher is teaching and explaining words and gains whereas the child who comes to school with the fewest words in his head understands the least of what she's saying and teaching struggles falls behind with that in mind here's what they found by the age of four the professional child had heard a total of forty five million words the working class child heard a little more than half of that twenty six million and the poverty child heard only thirteen million there's a thirty two million word gap at the start of school between the poverty child and the professional child and what are the politicians in the new found education experts saying in this country if there's a gap between these kids in those kids it's the fault of the classroom teacher that gap was there before the kid ever stepped into the classroom and you're expecting this teacher in nine hundred hours of kindergarten and another nine hundred hours of first grade to make up that gap that was caused by the parent not talking to that child not engaging the child in conversation and not reading to the child and by the way how these kids down here are going to catch the kids up on top you can do it but only if one of two things happen if you get those rich parents to pull their kids out of school for four or five years lock them in a trunk in the closet don't take them on vacation don't read to them don't get them a library card and maybe of the other kids will catch up and pass them and the only other option is if that kid at the bottom the at risk child becomes an insatiable reader so that he can find the words in books that are not being given to him by the parent who doesn't have the words by the way how do we cope with that i did a parent program one night and father came up to me after everyone had left and he said mom i'm one of those parents in that poverty category i dropped out of school my wife dropped out of school we've got a five year old i want the best for my son but i don't have the big words that those doctors and lawyers have how can i give my kid words that i don't have isn't that a great question and i said fortunately for you s there's a great response there's a public agency in your community who comes to your rescue and what they do with this agency is they take all of the now owns and all the verbs and adjectives that you would ever need in a lifetime and they bundle them up and they put them in little packages and they loan nice packages to you for three and four weeks at a time for free it's called the free public library the people's free university the beginning of the one thousand hundreds there was a collection of immigrants who came to the united states who among all the immigrants who were arriving on the show at the at the shores of america one group one specific group discovered better than anyone the value of the public library and the library card when they used the libraries more than any of the other ethnic groups and it was the jewish immigrants and at the end of the twentieth century there was another similar group who discovered that all the jewels of america are buried on those shelves in that public library and all you have to do is to take those t god given shovels on either side of your nose called eyes and go in and start digging in those shelves and you'll dig up the jewels of america and those of the asian immigrants that have come in in the last twenty years we need everybody in america to understand the great jewel heist that is available to us on those library shelves well that's that's basically they argument that i use  half of of reading and reading to kids i want to open it up to some questions that you have and if you don't ask me questions i'm asking you questions and we can get pretty personal here so you know you're better off asking me questions  these days all ok all right now it's never too late by the way to get him to get the apply for that early acceptance right because you know the university of minnesota you can never start to show there's a waiting list ok go ahead  certainly you should talk to the child it fact it's a good idea to talk to the child in utero there is ample research especially at the university of north carolina to show that reading to a child in utero is effective they took children in the last trimester of pregnancy and they were divided into three groups so let's say it's one two and three i thought to be a group of children in this group and then children in this group and children that and their parents were given one paragraph of dr seuss to read to the child every single day in utero after the children were born they took a separate person that the children had never heard that person read on tape the three dr seuss paragraphs one after the other the children were monitored the vital signs of the children were monitored and they had earphones on the children and we're talking infants here like a week old the vital signs reflected a mediately recognition of the paragraph the child for the one that they heard in utero so a certain amount of learning is taking place so the sooner you start these are it's going to be and initially it doesn't make a whole lot of difference although children gravitate to as as my eyes as i see my eyes spread across this room my eyes gravitate most quickly to the people who have patterns in their clothing so that eliminates most of you but the guy over here in the czech plaid and the stripes up there in the stripes right there and the patterns in that and this nondescript group over here although you haven't i have a nice little pattern over here but those people with the patterns in their clothing those patterns attract the eye in the same way the brain research at yale university with very young children shows that their ears gravitate to rhyming words before they learn the other words so dr seuss and mother goose i guess knew what the heck they were doing with all of the rhyming well i will say this about reading to children after they get to a certain age where they're able to grab and to chew and to roam don't expect them to pay attention for a long period of time and second they're going to want to hold the book so how do you get around this at that particular stage i found that reading to them while they're eating so they're in the high chair they've got the food that they've you know there were wiping through their hair and in their eyes and face and you're spawning that  food into their mouth and you've got the book out here and you're talking about the book and you're pointing to things and before you know what they understand that this is what it's all about reading and eating that's basically what the world  you're the most comprehensive study and ever done comparing the relative benefits of whole language instruction versus phonics instruction results were so clear cut that they put the results of the finding on the front page of the new york times nine hundred ninety eight i cannot remember another education research project making it to the front page of the new york times in the last ten to fifteen years and basically what they said was the research showed clearly mixing both forms of instruction together works best not either or some children need a little more phonics instruction some kids need a whole language immersion where they're getting text in a meaningful context but most of the time blending it in together works the best so i mean how this this whole idea of phonics became a a political issue is ridiculous and a religious issue that's even more bizarre and i've gone through both the old testament and the new testament trying to find in order to put it into some kind of of context to teach someone how to ride a bicycle it's one thing to make them want to write a bicycle i another thing if you only teach them how and they don't want to write the bike guess what they're not going to write the bike much and if you don't ride the pike much you really don't get terribly good at riding up bike so you have to do both and that whole language plays a large part in the motivation part and the phonics plays a lot to do has a lot to do with the the mechanics the instructions you know  brings people back to twins games other than a wide streak of masochism you know you know you know it brings them back to to twins games go for a games that the that the vikings you know brings them back they have favorite players favorite teams favorite coaches who brings people back to life whereis bookstores it's got favorite authors favorite kinds of books nobody has a favorite foul nobody has a favorite blend no one has a favorite and they phonics can't motivate they are mechanical they teach you how to do something but they don't motivate you need to have the motivation and that's where the whole language that's where literature in the classroom literature in the home comes into play and if you know how hard it's going to be for israel to win the winter olympics in salt lake city do you have any idea how difficult that's going to be you can bet the mortgage they will not win the went through they will even come close is that because of the awful coaches know is that have anything to do with have an awful players or skaters no it has everything to do with the climate in israel too much sand not enough snow if israel were located just north of denmark and sweden we're talking a major hockey powerhouse here just as it's almost impossible to raise an olympic skier in skater in israel or miami it's very difficult to raise an olympic reader in a home that doesn't have very much print where they don't have books magazines and newspapers in the home in the classroom or in the school library so if you really want to change that that reading score well you're going to have to change the print climate that a lot of the lowest scoring kids are being raised and i don't see the federal government helping out on that or the state government helping out on that level at all they just have high expectations tests the more you don't have to test anyone to find out who was failing reading every classroom teacher can tell you who in her class is failing by october not a big surprise there we're going to spend four hundred million dollars on tests if the president ministration has its way and the tests will tell us clearly you're going to fail you're failing you're failing in you're failing what we need is some to help these kids over there failing we don't have any money for that they only have money for tests there's no money allotted for remedial work to help these kids this is like a lodging money that gives everybody a test to find out if they have a particular disease but we're not going to give any put any money aside to cure that disease we just want to know who has it we'll let them die of it but that's all right well we just always been away have it it's bizarre it gets crazy question yes the world the children who have access to the most print in the language that they're trying to learn how the highest scores in that language but it certainly helps if someone reads that material to them both in the initial language their native language and in the second language so they understand now what is in this book but they have to have access to it dr stephen crashing at u s c that a fascinating study with five adults for whom english was the second language one of them a four of the five were asian they were all women in their thirt one of them was latino they were all trying to learn english as their second language they had taken courses but they struggled it wasn't anything that they were doing naturally and one of them a korean woman had actually taught english in korea in high school but still found it difficult to read something like time magazine without getting a headache so he and a graduate student at c came up with this idea they would get some teenage romance novels the sweet valley high novels for these women to hear they dropped it down to the sweet valley kids level which would be about on the reading level of fourth and fifth graders they had all of them this was the best stuff they ever read in english the woman who had taught english on the high school level became a divo t v she read almost thirty of these things she'll fell in love with the characters well this falls right into place with that idea of being immersed in the print you have to have a lot of it and be surrounded by it and to do the reading a lot to get a lot better in that language the research that we've done with graduate students and the grad students that's the major leagues of reading you you can't get any higher than grad school so that's like the yankees the twins would be like the minor leagues and then you have the you then you have the yankees grad school they surveyed for thirty almost thirty years the grad students what are your fondest memories of reading when you were a child what were the books that you loved what with the books you hated and there was almost unanimity on the wrist and the responses the books they hated now keep in mind these are grad students these are not truck drivers these are retail clerks working at the local department store is it a people who are so good at reading they made it to the major leagues guess what they hated the most the assigned text a junior and senior high the classics they were forced to dissect week after week after week for nine months a year and then there were two kinds of favorite books and they turn out to be two kinds you can almost never find in schools and almost never find in many libraries with the exception of ones like this i checked outside they have at reading by reading and it doesn't make an iota is difference what they are reading they get better and better and better by reading more and more and more immerse them in print and comic books count a couple as he was applying to harvard as a high school student the walls of his bedroom were decorated with the cartoons that he had clipped out of the magazines that his family subscribed to he was crazy about the comics and cartoons last year ray bradbury was here had the biggest comic book collection on flash gordon in his neighborhood i had the biggest collection of my neighborhood tutu had the biggest comic book collection in his neighborhood and i got so good at reading comics that i eventually graduated from comics to sports books and then from sports books to sports illustrated before there was a swimsuit issue and then from there to my local newspaper and then from newspapers to harder books and and and i haven't read sports illustrated in a long time but you know hopefully it's a graduation process if you've got a teenager who is hooked on magazines ah and i get this all the time oh my kid he hates to read we did all the right things we read to him we have library cards we bought them books and he just hates to read i said well interests of sports and so i what about sports illustrated all reads a cover to cover don't you tell me hates the read and sports illustrated counts yeah sports illustrated counts  to get another question over here and then i'll come back to i want you to remind me the home run book all right yes fight right into this question right here all right you can turn to the number one reading teacher in america today on the question by the way how do we get our teenagers into reading  the number one reading teacher in america today was described by a professor at stanford the harvard of the west as the one person who has done more to positively affect the reading habits of the english speaking world than anyone since samuel johnson and i'm referring to oprah winfrey oprah winfrey has put almost fifty books on the new york times bestseller list and not one of them was a holocaust romance but one of them was about than five there were nobel laureates there were national book award winners but there was no fluff how did she do it well first of all oprah is a reader she has been a reader an avid reader since the age of five she reached these books this presents a serious problem for many parents and many teachers in america who know how to read but choose not to read if you choose not to read and please don't tell me you don't have time because that's the biggest myth of all no time are you kidding if they're if the people in america didn't have time to do something like read all the malls southdale north dale chippendale clydesdale all of these malls that you've got out here could be all boarded up all those video stores they'd be abandoned whole those cable channels they're out of business nobody has time to pleasure themselves anymore we've never had so much time as we have now oprah reads the book incidentally it's  the research substantially shows that half the teachers in america are illiterate they know how to read but they don't choose to read i'm not i don't believe that that's any different today than it was in the past today's teachers well fifty two percent of today's teachers have a master's or a doctorate forty years ago what was that figure twenty six percent so today's faculty is almost twice as educated as yesterday's faculty which is still have half the faculty who don't read that means they can't the oprah see i don't have a cold today bruce you and i could share the same cup the same pencil the same cell phone and you couldn't catch a cold for me today because i don't know if the teacher or the parent doesn't have the love of reading they can't give it to the kid or the class so oprah reached the book the walks out on to the national stage and what does she do with the book the she make a little die around how about a little puppet show where the characters talk to each other she talks about the book passionately well teachers how many teachers here raise your hands teachers you know you've got a right to work maybe if that it collectively you wrote to work and you explain to or stop talking about the book you've got to write about the book you have to do some kind of an exercise you have to answer fifteen questions we've lost sight of the fact in our schools that we were an oral species we define ourselves first and foremost orally you go to a good movie you go to a good concert you see a good play you read a good book what you want to do take some stationery write down the main idea you know you want to call up your best friend and tell him you've got to see this movie get storage fix or all waste your time you know i mean pearl harbor never ends it goes on and on for like twelve hours oprah we can learn from oprah we can learn from harry potter think about this at a time when the educators  experts we're programmed by the way this includes a lot of publishers in new york were proclaiming that thick books are dead children have no attention span anymore they don't read anymore they won't read a book so don't bring a book into this publishing house that's one hundred fifty or one or two hundred pages long because we can't sell them the kids will not read books that are that thick so you get those goosebumps you can learn from those goosebumps you'll have eight words in a sentence look at home are cards that have more words in the sentence than the goosebumps right so don't give us the books at a time when all of that's going on and we've got the internet that al gore invented and we have you know such the cable channels and televisions and fifty percent of the kids bedrooms who comes harry potter and kids are reading four hundred to seven hundred page books that are on the side what can we learn from that well what is what's in the how repotte books that makes them so attractive she'd holler just have a plot and something happens so that you turn the page to find out what happens well they're not like those newbery award winners something actually happens in the book in each chapter so you're turning pages it's make believe it's not real stuff you don't become emotionally involved with harry potter it's kind of the relationship that adults have with the books they take to the beach or on vacation page turners attorney what do we get kids to read in middle school and high school hank page turners focus anybody assign john grisham to the ninth graders at no way you do god bless you in your work of course you can go the other extreme and maybe this i'd like to see somebody try this you want them all to read to kill a mockingbird find the principal gets on the public address system first day of school and i am your attention when you're strong everyone to understand that anyone found reading this book to kill a mockingbird this book will be confiscated and will be brought to the office no one has to bring those book on to the school grounds every kid in the school is going to be reading to kill a mockingbird they're going to be highlighting they're going to be under a underline or they're going to be saying what do you think this is the dirty  the one over here i'll be doing comparative literature for britain fruit is always so when all of these people get all upset about the harry potter books my goodness one who should have been thanking god for harry potter like think about this if if you believe that as i do that god answers prayers think about the prayers that we have been sieging the gates of heaven with for thirty years i'm talking parents teachers librarians and after thirty years god answers the prayers and sends us harry potter's that's the answer to our prayers he's got the kids reading again and maybe best of all he's got the boy he's reading again if they ever read in when i was in chicago a couple of years ago with my three and three of my four brothers were watching batting practice and some home runs were ahead and then the subject of home run books came up and my brother brian says well what are you maybe a home run book and i said well clifton found him and back in one thousand nine hundred forty s was a one of the shining lights of american culture he said that dumb people who were lifetime readers had books in their childhood special books certain books that were like your first home run your first big kiss all of their kisses were compared against that for speaking all home runs compared against that first home run he set for him at age four was the overall boys of formula fiction series and so my brother brian said to me well what was your home run book when you were a kid i said well mine was fourth grade called the wild he said i had to i said i know said what is almost forty years ago how could you know my two home run books i said i'll bet you a dollar he said i'll bet you twenty to one you can't name the two books i said are you whisper the two books the dentist because i knew what that i name the two books and he would change the titles right so he whispered the two books to my other brother and i years older than you we slept in the same room as teenagers we didn't talk a lot but i tossed them onto your bed and i said these are great books and i noticed that as you read them and read the madly in prior to this point i never read i think basically other than sports sports magazines and sports novels after that his whole concept of reading changed today and by the way this was a guy who was a remedial student for the first five years of school who was a c d student junior and senior high but today he has a masters degree is a millionaire and of a racist reader the point here is that oprah has shown us the door and the window is never closed and bolted we can create lifetime readers but we have to do it with other people coming into their lives and enlightening them in a sense you have to keep pitching the books and hopefully the right pitch the right book will come to the right reader batter in the right in the ng and they could hit their home run research that steve kruschen did it to junior highs in california when he heard me tell this anecdote and he got a graduate student slave to go in to do the research and what they found was that the kids who were the avid readers who had the high reading grades they could all name a home run book already in their lives the kids who were struggling with reading or failing and reading not one of them could name a home run book they had no book that had come into their lives that they could say i love that book so the more we play oprah and the better we create the print environment in their lives there is no shortage of printed material in our house and our in our house the mailman once told my father your wife gets more damn magazines than anybody on my route if i die on the route it's your wife's faul by the way i love your texas accent it's apps it's absolutely wonderful i am a huge fan of books on tape and in fact i listen to them a lot when i'm traveling i've also found them to be very very conducive when i'm trying to get to sleep at night i happen to have one of these minds that it's difficult to turn it off i tend to replay the day or to plan tomorrow when i should be sleeping and this doesn't aid a good night's sleep i find that if i can just get myself to stop thinking about myself to think about something else i relax and fall asleep and so i've got one of these little pillow speakers a plugs into the tape and i put it under the pillow so it doesn't keep my wife awake and i listen to the tape the story for about five minutes and i'm gone for the whole night because you wake up in the morning is where the hell did i leave off  i mean you've got to play the whole tape back again and start over again but i'm a big fan of of books on tape and i've learned so much from listening to the best readers on tape on the the pacing that they have i found that there is one great company in the united states for books on tape and that's the company record books some of the other companies i think they hire either their relatives or their mistresses to do the readings because you do have to wonder why in the world would you pay somebody to read as panteley as this but recorded books absolutely fabulous her name was sonia carson she was one a she herself was one of twenty three children can you imagine the sock problem in that house sonya carrot carson had only a third grade education and as a young adult she could barely write now she was a single parent trying to raise two sons alone in one of the most dangerous places in america inner city detroit she had one son in junior high on a slow boat to nowhere and she had another son in fifth grade in the fifth grade teacher has just told her he's the worst he's the worst reader he's the worst math student and he's among the most violent children in the school so when your carso home that day she buried her head in her hands and she wondered what more can i do all i can barely read or write and all the teachers can do is tell me i got to do more i got of the more what more can i and the more she thought about it the more little things she thought she might be able to do that might help first thing she did was to cross the room and turned the doggone thing off know what the doggone thing was if our viewers a child thirty five will not be offended she turned her television set off but not completely she limited her two sons to three hours of television a week and you talk about child abuse when they got home from school that day she said you don't have library cards do you wear your get going to the library right now you're each getting a library card to go and take out two books because i said you are that's why and you don't take out two books and you're going to read two books you're going to read two books a week and to make sure you read those books you're going to get me written book reports and everything that you read now you notice that she didn't take a vote on that because she was she was raising a family she wasn't running at the ma course she didn't tell them for another twenty years that all the book reports they wrote every week she had never been able to read she also turned to the youngest one benny the fifth grader and she said you know your teacher told me today you don't know your  don't you ever see how many there are take me a whole year to learn them all the way up to the twelve and she said well i'm sorry to hear that so now you come right over here so by the time ben carson was a senior in high school he was third in a senior class with full scholarship offers to yale stanford and west point chose jail for years at yale and on to the university of michigan for graduate school than down  where he lives and works today the age of fifty his older brother is an engineer today and ben carson is dr ben carson number one number one pediatric brain surgeon in the world today when he was thirty two he was the youngest head of neurosurgery in the history of johns hopkins mrs carson played hardball with her children no matter how good the school was if they didn't get the support of the seventy eight hundred hours in the home the nine hundred hours in school wasn't going to be enough for the at risk kids in his case and you know coming back to the books on tape in a in a worst case scenario if the parent didn't speak english or couldn't read english or was an illiterate because of learning disabilities they could still listen to books on tape with the child the family and discuss the book you set that time aside every single night it's a cultural experience you're transmitting to that child a very powerful value message we think this book we think this reading is so important we're not watching t v right now we're not at the mall we're not fixing the car we're not mauling the lawn we're not on the phone we're listening to this book we're reading and if we had more parents doing that kind of thing in the homes teachers jobs would be what you could work half days and accomplish everything you're accomplishing today it's interesting there's a difference between a child's reading level and their listening level connor is entering first grade not quite reading it right on the on the brink elizabeth is in the middle of the gallery paulson francis a series which is written for fifth and sixth graders and she's in the middle of reading that the conner and he is hanging on every word he can hear stories that are on that level but he can't read them yet hearing them he understands that this is what reading is all about and all that and i mean that they know the all the phonics in class if you think that this is the purpose of reading you're in trouble but if you realize that gary paulson and