I can. [applause] [inaudible conversations][inaud] did we will defend american jobs did workers to say no to a bad trade deals like the great tpp an unfair trade practices. Pennsylvania has lost onethird of their manufacturing jobs since the clintons put china into the wto. It includes up look at nafta between the United States and mexico and canada this will have more jobs for our people more exports for the markets and more democracy for our allies. The discussion now Founding Fathers you free trade. United states was not a free trade in asian their most of history the u. S. Is a tariff protected economy this goes back before the constitution. The body that enforces global trade rules. At the time it was negotiated like the smaller sister than there was more pages of regulations the my book would be very different than when they were being negotiated the u. S. Had officials advisers, 500 corporate advisers. [inaudible conversations] and the midevening welcome to bargain did the noble tonight i have the distinct pleasure to introduce our author who is the author of a great book is an account of returning to College Reading the classics during the curriculum or she is a staff writer and former film critic for the new yorker in his reviews and essays have of been reviewed in new York Magazine among others today he has his new book one reporter three schools, 24 books that can change lives kin todays teenagers be turned on to serious reading . What a teacher can do it . What books . One of the schools as the Beacon School in your fundraising for them tonight mentioned the book fair at the register and a portion of your purchase will be donated. In this nuanced account taught in three very different schools that have proven what teachers have always known that of top with pashtuns and commitment literature old age and new can inspire any and every student this is necessary about the decline of readings. So please join me to welcome our author. [applause] glad to see you on a friday night. I set out five years ago to answer a particular question because this seems enormous. And that is what is though world to enter the 15 yearold on to reading seriously . Serious literature, magazines, anyth ing. When so much of their time is absorbed in this and screens in general. Is seen as the right time in their teenage life with their brains were valuable the characters are up in the air when they were making choices and going to college or military and had a kind of jobs what kind of work work, their Sexual Identity identity, and how much are they reading seriously . The Book Business is doing okay and they got me a long survive as well as all independent stores in which we managed to survive as riders a and readers. But the statistical evidence from Pure Research and Common Sense Media and observation suggested there were not reading many books. We in the middle of an enormous transformation the way we consume print perhaps in the way we relate to one another it is so pervasive in developing we cannot even grab ahold of it. My own magazine the yorker goes into convulsions over the last 15 years and has a hard copy is an artifice and very carefully written and to some degree to a maddening degree the editing phase is laid out very carefully suddenly were in the middle of a storm of journalism coming from every angle. Communication of words so sherry has done a lot of work on how we relate to to technology thinking that was an extension of our spirituality she jumped the fence over the last two books alone together and reclaiming conversation she did a lot of research is a professor at m. I. T. And has done a lot of work with teenagers to discover that increasingly they are avoiding facetoface confrontations. They want their relationships to be mediated by text and sell phones including romantic relationships nudges from teachers and students but ordinary friendships in and she cspan has enormous damage to the self when you engage with another person with all that fantastic recognition and it happens with facetoface encounters i feel the same way about breeding and i have done a dog and pony show talking about through a cell phone interaction and i talk about how much you grow as a person. I have been a moviegoer my whole life but particularly soothing and important to me because ive very bad a ph. D. When i go to the movies like sitting fairly close so that i am surrounded and sensuously bombarded by the image. And it is a great sense three stimulant and even to the point where the arousal of 0. 1 gets the other aroused and i remember in 1972 i saw the godfather for the first time at the screening and how i felt when i came out onto the street, part of the reason is that i was sitting next to faye dunaway. [laughter] that was a sensory arousal. [laughter] i have always felt after being pleasurably wiped out by a movie that i have to restore myself that is by reflection or writing about it the most practical ways to read and read and immerse myself in in literature and sure you know, the necessity of producing nextgeneration of great readers talking about the centrality of literacy the citizenship i think it would not be extravagant to say you see right now the loss of real understanding of character of rhetoric of campaigns that we are seeing. So what civilization really have . How do we develop a three dimensional people . Mills are the large issues start reading as they are infants turn pages and you know, this. Of course, there will not remember that they have a defective memory of having held to associate that with the pleasure of reading. It is one of the big differences between the upper middleclass they dont often did get that kind they have to get food on the table they did not read much themselves, those conversation what forces are playing around the house . If you spend some time with workingclass kids you see the lack of the habit of that of stock curiosity to taken everything around you. I refuse to believe that of is that would not have written this. High School Teachers of certain books to the kids so i didnt want to write a hit book and not a researcher bill every reporter id critic and i and sick of the education either reliance of the new rating everything statistics, scores that metric fallacy that we dont allow them to know if the thing about education and telling is established. The latest metric obsession with the collapse of the zero child left behind and then they were possessed to create threedimensional human beings,. But lately there is a book a real idea jilt duckworth getting a lot of attention is this sets up a numerical rubric that the rubric of a character can be measured in children with such as perseverance, assessed positiveness my guess is nil brooks displayed a great deal of zest with woody allen. I find this subserve first to have to measure it in grading is the teaching. All that to be about developing character so were trying to find a numeric sublet those deficiencies of our of no child left behind but without telling us how to overcome. As that continues throughout American Education we cannot face and we will not face the real problem which is poverty. Anyway i was sick of the pornography of educational failure. With and i want to see what worked so i had done done Something Like this before before, i went back to colombia with the required courses of columbia and at the time of the curriculum debate love either children to read western classics of dead white males. But so i went back to colombia to sit on the classs and Read Everything and listened to the kids as a middleaged venture. I have a model for what i would do well would keep my mouth shut which is not easy and listen and read to everything that was said and then to shape that into the narrative. And have killed these thoughts that a guy came up to me on the street on the upper west side, it sounds like a joke. His name is abrams in he was the teacher. Behind Lincoln Center and he told me about the school that is an interesting place. Free rein. Physically, it was miserable, the school. It was never intended to be a school. It was crowded, everyone was on top of everyone else. You couldnt get a jump shot in the gym more than 10 feet without scraping. As i later observed you dont need a good Physical Plant is a good school. You need teachers, students, computers. And they had a good library. Then, theyve now left to 44th street and a much larger place, and i even feel a kind of nostalgia for the sole purpose soulfulness of everyone. A class taught by ed single teacher named sean leon stayed for the entire year and i think i went to every actual class, english ten e. Certainly, an irish mother, grew up in louisiana near new orleans. He is a last catholic which i mentioned in the element of the way that he taught a class in the state of some distress about his own life and he allowed them to see that and made it an element in the way they read the books. Shakespeare, mark twain, and although they read the books that other classes, they read the stories by faulkner and hemingway, orwell and huxley, the notes from underground and the beginning of the great period 1860 and the other famous folks came after it. Some of these books were hard and disturbing and the kids were flattered by the difficulty i think of the assignment. I didnt notice anyone buckling under. We gave an enormous amount of support and its an interesting way of organizing the classroom. Thats one of the things he did was to use the issues raised by the techs and bring the and bro their kids lives. I dont mean into a confessional in the Church Basement around the campfire and summer camp. It was more rigorous than that there would be the personal profession and back to the text it always came back to literature. But it had the effect of pulling out questions that he wanted them to answer which is what do you live for, what does matter in your life, whats the relation to your parents and friends and each other, how much time are you spending to force them into a digital fast which most of them failed and they were not allowed to go on the screen for two days and i discovered as they went over the results in class but there were only three out of 32 students that filled the downtime by reading books and a lot of them were seriously upset without their daily contact through the internet or with constant music over the Television Set or something electronic constantly on. If they were seriously upset. They were not just unplugged, they were unstrung a lot of them. And these were good kids. So, he turned that into a challenge and we did elaborate structural discussions of the buck and metaphors in the symbol and so on. I love hearing them talk about it, and i tried to play with it and have fun with it and taking my cue showing the tactical and grammatical issues play into the character and how you present your self is the way that you are shaping your soul. Some of the interesting classroom ways of teaching is they read from and the kids wrote their own versions of anonymously and i dont know who wrote what, but it allowed them to vent in extraordinary ways. When we got to the text, the hero is a self hating perverse intellectual that screws himself up at every possible term and feels superior to the world by means of perceptiveness and insight of what other people find him for. People find him fascinating because he had a problem fitting into society. They have the most negative notions of what the grownup society is going to do for them. One reason for the incredible success they were placed in opposition to each other. Thats the text for this period. They stole the kind of narcissism in that degree of pride, but they also saw a certain glory as intended and they had them take the role one student at a time and someone else took the role of the interlocutor questioning his way of life. And then they would add to students on each side of the issue and sometimes they would switch. What we had was a musical chairs, which allowed students by means of using the character to step into their own characters, to step into themselves. I think thats what i was able to do. As i said the plaintiffs and always to do a report to do a dramatic narrative that i show some of the students. Some of the students coming out of their shell and becoming so to speak themselves becoming more themselves. At the end of the year, i knew that it was just as interesting but it wasnt enough. And i went to the 211th grade classes just because i wanted to see what would happen to the Representative Group of tenth graders the year after. I visited a teacher who taught what is now very difficult to teach in the american high schools the scarlet letter. Very difficult because it is written in 1850 and send 200 years earlier and the language is archaic and formal, and the issue at the center of the novel has an affair with the handsome young minister and conceived child into the whole town is obsessed. The kids found it hard to understand why that was such an important issue. Issue. Mary has a child out of wedlock. So what. The way that mary dealt with this was to dramatize the issue directly. That is, they read a lot. They handed out script the scrid the students took different persons and characters. It was the motive with additional performance in the reading theater. After a while, the idiom became more difficult and the pros easier to handle. But the surreptitious minister said what does that mean, do you know what you just did . A few minutes later they said i needed a excuses and contradicted myself which caused confusion. There was a tall intellectual boy with and in parchment voice and then every time he made a comment, he lowered his voice as a nasty husband. She spoke a great deal into refusal to relinquish her child. God gave her into my keeping. I will not give her up. She read it with anger and after that, the comments became more to the point and less selfconscious. Whatever the students initial resistance, finding strength cleared away. As the students went on, they admitted that they were surprised by the power of the table. They got the students to embody the characters and she made them see the feeble as shaped around certain places, conditions and character. She kept shifting the classroom routine in the shape rearranging the tables for the debate over the character she kept the apparatus constantly in motion so the students could never settle or allow the buc book tol away from them. She made the possessed them so eventually they would possess the book. The key if i can use an example if you want the students to gave of themselves, you have to give up your self and break up the classroom routine. You have to risk and give a lot. Also, at the end of the letter, mary showed up on the last day and sat on the high table and said they would answer any questions the students had about her life and i said wasnt the time the best of your life and she didnt answer that. [laughter] but it was the way they prepared for the exam, which i thought was flawless. I also attended because he was more like a College Teacher and read the books that i pray he never disappeared around Ralph Ellisons invisible man. They did a structural reading and discovered by the degrees the progress of a young black hero of new york in the 30s the great autobiographical novel that by studying it and trying to put together the elements, they had to put together the elements of their own personal realities which was a combined literary analysis and selfanalysis at the same time. I want to tell you very briefly about the two other schools i went to because i felt that there is no royal road to heaven. It works with this particular audience and the kids particularly well, but theres that old question of when you do any kind of writing, does it scale . You describe something that works rather well i that cannote replicated elsewhere . There are comparable schools all over the country. There were aspects of what he does but certainly could be imitated or adapted or used in the same. But i thought where else. I had to get out of new york. I was eager to get out of new york so the next year i went to new haven with another single class and not a good school this time. The principal himself described it as a dumping ground. Mainly low skilled kids, one of two companies have high schools. A lot of Charter Schools and comprehensive high schools. They have to take everybody. Englishlanguage learners, kids that have been incarcerated in a pushed out of Charter Schools. Its a Good Organization and i hope you know that they removedd over performing kids even though youre not supposed to. They remove low performing kids all the time. Those kids that were thrown out of the schools and new haven were at this place and the teacher was a local woman into first the kids didnt want to read at all. What was the point is a. How about helping get anywhere . She started reading in class out loud and got them to read out loud. And they read to kill a mockingbird. The students are reading about the heroine and also the women that get beaten and to bring an accusation of rape. The study the book and discuss in great detail the physical elements of that life in what waand whatwas the structure of d talent, what was the racial relations. What did people eat and how did they get around flex they ask the same questions about their lives. They have sent laura and our grasp that d. Zaire for information. And i am talking about income. To grasp the world and make ones way through it they know a lot about their families and neighborhoods and how to be safe in the neighborhood but they dont know whether the social and Economic Conditions are around everything thats happening to me and the poor neighborhood in new haven. So she was using that to get them to ask questions about their own lives. As the year went on they began to read more. Its it was a very funny and abt loud joyous woman of mixed it up and she told me several times that teachers that were polite and try to establish the decorum and shake hands bomb at a school like this. As i said you have to open themselves up. They wanted to perform for her so it was very touching and we read some shakespeare. They read stories by hemingway and began to read with some real pleasure and at the end of the year she had to choose one of four books. The one they liked the best they had to read it and write a report on it. He was a warrior in sierra leone in the forces by his own account to kill many people when he was 13, 14 and so on. He was rescued and came to the United States and was adopted by an American Woman that wound up at oberlin where he had a good writing teacher and kids were very alive to that kind of stress in everyones life. Both the violence of it. At the end of the year, a miracle happened. It was just a total coincidence. They taught at the university and new haven and they were able to take the kids to see him and meet him so they read his book and thought for the first time i think the literature seemed real to them. I want to tell you very briefly about a third school in the High School Middle upperclass suburb of the coast of long island sound. Largely wealthy kid. They found out that a lot of the kids particularly the boys were simply not doing the reading. They went on the internet and on the Scarlett Letter sparked notes or some other study guide. Or they were wealthy enough to have tutors who took them through the books and they never did the meeting and they are bracing their way through papers and so what do they do . Instead of the original school g they tried something very different. They allowed them to choose books of their own. They didnt give up on access or robert frost once dickinson at the same time they had to have a time of their ongoing. A book they chose. They could choose from the School Library or the classroom library. They could use it from the garbage can. It didnt matter that it wasnt literature. It might be young adults or a sports biography. Filed, the point here as im sure you can see with grudging readers that get them hooked initially by reading stuff that they enjoyed the teachers would do a hollywood session to describe what was in it and sell the book. Kids didnt have to read that in particular but they had something going and to keep another book going after that and after that. Suppose they are reading the same book over and over again, nothing but horror fiction. They survived because teenage girls kee get it going. They would say thats fine, let me point you towards some books by stephen king whos a pretty good writer. Some of these early books are well written. Let me tell you about this genius of the hairraising stories or robert louis stevenson. The point was allow them their pleasure and passion and try to take those and elevate them and i have a lot of good stories i think about laddering of exercises that worked as well as the few that didnt. The other part of it is that the school tries to establish a whole culture of reading and they have to post it on the outside of their door with your reading at that moment. So, there is a constant conversation of books and school. But i have been trying to describe is how do you forge those links that create a lifetime reader. There are many variations on this, that you have to either appeal to white students need emotionally at that point in their lif life or what gives tha particular kind of pleasure they cant get anywhere else. Those are the two things. I think i will stop at this point and thank you all for listening if there are any questions. We have a microphone here raise your hand and that they will come to you. It seems like a lot of what you are talking about his unusual teaching. How do you separate that out . It sounds like they could do what youre talking about in any subject. We have to raise the pay and the status and the way that we treat them particularly the Union Teachers i think it is disgraceful. Of course there are mediocre teachers and im in favor of the principles having somewhat greater power removed. But to denigrate them in general has been a disaster demoralizing the last ten or 15 years and teachers tenure and so on, while we dont need to talk about finland because it is a small country but i would just say that the teachers are recruited from the top rather than the bottom and they make 115 of the income where in the United States they make 65 to 70 of the income and that is those that go into accounting wil acc, engineering and the other professions. Its a recent failure of the common core because developing the common core which may not be a bad idea but it wasnt built into the teacher training so what we did in new york state is increased for testing difficulty with which resulted in many people getting low scores, disgusting parents and teachers and two tied at experiment whether a teacher is good or not seems completely inane. How do you develop a cadre of Great Teachers is to be invited upgrading their status. I loved your book. It was terrific to read about this with all the teaching going on. I have a question, thought. The books that are being chosen, it seems so much of the same old like those to kill a mockingbi mockingbird. That teacher david great stuff. I would love to see the kids reading more books in their own century like the Pulitzer Prize and national book. Do you have any thoughts about that . To kill a mockingbird is beautifully composed and the landscapes and the different social life and im not going to knock to kill a mockingbird. They do enjoy the short wondrous life of. I know theyve been reading with the 11th graders the essay that is enormous success between the world and me. So, yes i think you are right i dont see anything wrong with to kill a mockingbird but im grudging the readers that were not willing to read at all. I have a followup to that. In terms of broadening the campaign is that not one of the ways to keep kids reading not only for latino kids t kids buto broaden it in that sense as we well. Its a way of the hunge hunger d necessity and then it can be taken in a lot of different directions. I didnt even get into this whole separate issue of the population not just in the School Population around here but in california and the southwest that would be a great book for someone else to write. I dont see why there cant be other reports like mine that is subjective in which someone is writing their own impression of life and i do a lot of writing about the books themselves. Its a kind of introduction and excitement of reading them aga again. That is one book i dont know why there cant be black reporters going into black schools were white schools if that is the power what is it, how does it work and how does it benefit students, i would love to read that book. I may wonder if you have any plans to followup with the students you meant and whether you think there is any risk of having an extraordinary teacher for one year as a temporary phenomena and years later the interest might fade away if it isnt reinforced. I dont know about you but i had have a couple extraordinary teachers and survived. Youre trying to take him strength you get from the teachers to Carry Forward even when its not so good. There were great ones at the same time. There will always be that variability. For following up, i stayed in touch with some of the kids who are now getting their college stuff together. Actually, they were getting it to schools. One of the things is the whole ethos of the places to get everyone into college and the fact that there is no College Office. There isnt a resource from new haven to pay for the College Office. Office. Itoffice. Sooffice. So, be of no help whatsoever. The parents cannot help them get through the maze of applications and loan applications and the whole financial stuff. Yale does pay tuition for those that graduate and go to a local level but what they dont do and what i think would be just as valuable is to staff the College Office schools and keep someone there maybe four days a week and help kids get through this. But yes i keep up with some of the kids, not all of them. One of the things that has been pushed a lot is the idea of nonfiction and the role that it plays in the english classroom. I was wondering the teachers you covered. It was all fiction and so is Mary Whittemore and the book youre going like this because god knows how much of it he made up. Its suspiciously detailed about what people were thinking years before he wrote it. The common core is pushing kids away from fiction towards nonfiction. Who ever had twhoever had to ren the job i said no one except book reviewers. One of those people who think its the way that you know about your self and you are enlarged and overwhelmed and when you are home, the process goes inward and outward if you compare yourself to the characters you are reading about. Theres a complex interaction which brings you back to your self also and how you act in certain ways. So i think it is essential kids read because they can read other people and develop all those qualities of empathy and perceptiveness and understanding about how other societies work and how others work that we dont get from the media necessarily. So im against shifting. The nonfiction that they are reading me be very good. [inaudible] that is a hairraising book that i dont agree with a lot of this is [inaudible] the book shes reading with her 11th graders right now. But yes, because he writes with metaphorical power and returns to certain scenes and figures over again. I have an accidental experience with my son who was terrible in high school and ended up going off with friends and drinking a lot and ended up in a Mental Institution in australia. I said just send him home. When he got home, he was on medication and he was a wreck. Because i love literature, i said read toomey out loud. So we started at the station because it is factual and beautifully written and he doesnt have to understand, just read a toomey out loud and then we can talk. So he read the whole book and said