| Heya <<First Name>>,
In 2002, a high-schooler named Christopher Williams was one of 58 students (out of 400,000) to get a perfect score on the ACT college assessment test. Williams caught the attention of the national media because he hailed from Russell, Kentucky, population: 3,645.
As Jim Trelease tells the story in “The Read-Aloud Handbook,” the most common question reporters asked Christopher’s parents was what prep course their son had taken.
Their answer? None.
“In responding to inquiries about Christopher’s prep courses, the Williamses simply told people — including the New York Times — that he hadn’t taken any, that he did no prep work. That, of course, wasn’t completely true. His mother and father had been giving him and his younger brother free prep classes all through their childhoods, from infancy into adolescence: They read to them for thirty minutes a night, year after year, even after they learned how to read for themselves.”
I was reminded of Christopher Williams’ story last week when I received the latest email newsletter from Ted Gioia, one of the country’s pre-eminent music critics.
The newsletter is all about how Gioia is famous in his neighborhood — not because of his venture capital work or his acclaimed books on jazz — but because both of his sons went to Harvard.
When people ask him how he did it, he says that he and his wife “kept both children in the local public school system from kindergarten through high school. And we ignored almost every other prevailing rule for success …”
And Gioia did one other thing:
“Above all, I read to my children. I did it every night without fail, except when I had to travel. This is the single most important thing I did for their intellectual development. I enjoyed reading these stories, and they enjoyed hearing them—and everyone in the family came to accept the idea that books were fun.”
Ultimately, the point isn’t to get a perfect score on a standardized test or to get into an Ivy League school. Those are silly metrics. Rather, I think, the point is that …
- learning to let go
- having fun, and
- reading aloud
… are pretty great guidelines for parenting.
Most of the rest will take care of itself.
Happy reading.
Jeff and Bob …
… who believe that reading with kids can change the world for the better |
