What If You Couldn’t Read Well?

11 ways to see to it that our city’s school kids can.

'Like any other part of yoga, only practice will increase your aptitude.’ I read that sentence in a magazine last week. It didn’t surprise me. You either. Of course that would be the case. In every thing we try, even spiritual, graceful yoga, we don’t get good at it without practice.

When you watch a TV football game and the holder on a field goal takes the long-snapped ball and turns the laces away from the kicker’s on-rushing foot while straightening the ball and angling it just so, you wonder how he can do that in such pressure-filled, tight time and space. If he got injured, could just any guy off the bench come out and do it? No, he could not. The any-guy wouldn’t have practiced it enough. Wouldn’t have taken enough reps to do it well, if at all.

Reps are what I believe many of our city school kids don’t get enough of when it comes to reading. Without reps they have no shot of reading well. Here are some things I’d do about that:

1.) I’d look at the syllabus and see if enough time was available for kids to get the reading reps they needed. If there wasn’t enough time, I’d alter the syllabus. Or ignore it. School is the only quiet time most of the poor readers have to get up to snuff. Everything has to take second place to their getting to read well. Everything. All chancellors, principals, teachers must believe that. Because school is where it has to happen. Only place.

2.) The kids’ home environment could no longer be used as an excuse for the kids not learning to read well. Factor in the kids’ upbringing, and go from there. Maybe even more reps are needed for some kids. If so, then those reps must be gotten. There’s no option. For a kid not to learn to read well is not acceptable. It’s hard for me to accept that the old excuse of the kids’ home environment is still being trotted out. It’s a messy world we all live in. It always has been. When it comes to poor kids and their environment and their reading abilities, we luckily have a place to make a difference for them. It’s a classroom where the child has to come every school day. It should make a difference. If a fat guy had to go to Canyon Ranch every day for 10 years, that’d be a gift to him that would make a difference. School is that gift for kids who need to have a sturdy environment to come to every day to learn to read well. It must be made as pleasant and purposeful as the Canyon Ranch is made for the big guy.

3.) For homework, I’d have the kids read 10 pages from the book they’re reading. A book they chose. One they like. Or it could be Sports Illustrated or People magazine. Anything that lets them know that heat rises off a page. That’s the key to liking to read. Feeling that heat. They might think it only comes off a screen or through headphones. Throw a reader a good mag while they’re watching TV, they’ll go to the mag every time.

4.) Kids must see teachers reading. While the kids are reading, the teachers can not be grading papers. They should have a book and be reading it. If the kids aren’t seeing reading at home, how great it is that they can come to a place every day with a desk of their own and something to read they like, and a teacher who likes to read, too. Teachers shouldn’t try to ingratiate themselves by talking about TV very much, if at all. Teachers who don’t read shouldn’t be teachers.

5.) The school should have a good library. If I were a teacher I’d demand it. If I were a parent I would demand it. The librarian would have to be a real reader who would enthuse, not too much though, about the things she has. Kids should want to go to the library. If I were a teacher, I’d suggest to the parents that they take their kids at least once a week to the neighborhood library. (Of course, in all of this, I’m talking about poor kids and poor parents. They’re the ones who the system everywhere is failing.)

6.) If I were a teacher, I’d demand that the school be kept orderly and quiet. If reading was the emphasis of the school day, keeping the halls quiet would be done for that good reason, an understandable one, rather than be quiet because I said so. Big noise can not be tolerated. It ruins everything. (It drives me nuts when people talk in movies or libraries. I got punched in my neighborhood library here for telling a hyper-talkative drug addict to please be quiet. It mostly bent my glasses.)

7.) There should be magazines in the room for the kids to read when they’ve finished other work. There’s heat in the right magazine.

8.) I’d try to find a philanthropy that would underwrite a subscription for each kid to get a magazine of their choice. Sent to their home. It’s nice to get a magazine in the mail. New York publishes so many magazines, someone ought to be able to get them involved in this.

9.) I’d think of the schools as reading academies. What’s a ‘school’ anyway? All of us at one time or another during our school years thought why couldn’t we just go to the big library downtown every day and let our interests take us where they will. That might have been logistically unrealistic, but each school could be an academy of reading. Filled with good books and the time to read them. No more underlining adverbs. Or weekly vocabulary tests. I was good at all that stuff. Because I was a reader. That’s the only way. The rest is time-filler, time-killer.

10.) I’d do this all until each kid who wasn’t disabled in some way could read well. It might take a year for some. It might take 10 for some others. But they wouldn’t leave my system until they could read well. Not haltingly. Well.

11.) At their high school graduation you should be able to toss any book on the New York Times Best Seller list to any kid up on the stage and say read page 201. They should be able to read it as well as you or I. That would make it a commencement. In New York City.

A Great Writer’s Great Eye

Eudora Welty’s camera told some stories

I could look at photo books for hours. And I do. I’m a guy who’ll sit on the floor or on a windowsill in a bookstore till my butt hurts staring at pages of photographs. That’s how I came upon Eudora Welty’s book a few years ago. I didn’t even know she took pictures.

Her shots are of common Southern themes. Poor farmers. Black people. But there’s something special about them. You can tell she was trying to find out something. Not just show something. She gets you to linger with her while she tries to figure out how people are. She likely stared at the faces and scenes she captured later on when they’d become pictures. They’re worth staring at.

de Kooning Early And Often

If you join MoMA you can get in ahead of the crowd

I joined MoMA recently for 75 bucks. For a whole year. That’s less than 10 pints of Guinness when you figure in tips. You not only get to go anytime you want, you get to enter an hour earlier than non-members to see de Kooning. I’ve often wondered if there aren’t some people who go every day to MoMA. I’ll bet there are. Or who go to some particular museum every day like some people go to the gym every day, or out to their same spot for a Guinness every night .

The biography of de Kooning is 100% rewarding. You learn everything about modern art. All the characters. Great New York stuff too. The physical book, by Knopf, is a masterpiece of design itself. With your membership you can get it at a discount. You should join.

Six times a year it comes out. With very good writers and a good look.

‘Stick To Your Guns!’ the guy said to me

The message really matters to some people, so I stand tall with it.


I can tell by some of the comments people make when they see my sign that they feel like I do. I can also see it in their eyes. I can also now see it in the faces of some of the people who pass me on their way into work at the Dept. of Ed. building I stand in front of with the sign. At first none of those people going in the building knew how to react to me. They didn’t know me. They still don’t really, though I’ve given a few of them a copy of this newsletter. I may have looked like an opponent of some kind. Somebody trashing the work they do. Now they smile more; give me a look that says they agree with the sign.

I liked it when the guy blurted out as he walked by, ‘Stick To Your Guns!’. He was an older guy. That’s an old-guy expression. It was good to hear. Like it was coming from my late-father who I sometimes conjure to reinforce my determination. You wonder as you stand there sometimes what you’re doing, what you hope to accomplish. What can one guy do. Frequently when there’s a lull in the stream of people walking by, I turn the sign toward me and read it. The simplicity of it comforts me and charges me up. I turn it back toward the street, and make sure to stand tall. I know how to stand tall, because I’m imitating someone who stood tall in my eyes.

Sit with me on my couch in 1972 in Lakewood, Ohio. I lived there because I moved to Cleveland after college three years earlier to teach in an inner-city Catholic grade school. I needed a teaching job as a deferment from the draft which would have sent me to Vietnam where I didn’t want to go, especially since when I graduated in 1969 in South Bend, Indiana, I was married with a week-old daughter. So I jumped at the teaching opportunity. A lot of guys jumped at teaching jobs then. Anyway I’m on my couch. I can see myself sitting there looking at the college alumni magazine in front of a big window on the second-floor half of a double house we were renting.

There’s a small article up front in the magazine with a picture of a student. There’s something about the guy I’m drawn to. The way he’s standing, I guess. The way he looks. The solitariness of him. He looks like a guy with a sincere purpose. So I fold the magazine back, probably light a cigarette, and read about this guy. His name is Al. He is a student. He’s quiet-looking. Like maybe he’s a swimmer. Thinning blonde hair. White t shirt. White levis, as we called them then. He’s holding a large juice can in front of his chest. The article says he holds this can every day in front of both dining halls during the lunch and dinner hour. There may have been a sign on the can; I can’t recall. But what he’s got the can for is to collect money for Bangladesh, which at the time was going through political and environmental disasters. It was famous then like Haiti or Sudan are now. This guy Al was moved to find a can and use it to help people who 40 years ago seemed much further away than they seem now.

You wouldn’t think that effort of his would seem so important to me. The ‘60s had just ended. Bolder gestures had been made over all sorts of issues of war and peace and poverty. Students had danced, and worn war paint and flowers in their hair, and burned draft cards and hung images of national leaders. Music was involved, drugs were too. Cops got involved. Tear gas sometimes. After all that, what was it about Al that grabbed me as being so radical?

Probably the simplicity of it. The persistence of it. The obviousness of it. The Quaker look of it on a Catholic campus. The way he stood there. By himself. Who knows why we’re drawn to things? All I know is that for 40 years Al has seemed like the way to be. Like Pat Tillman might seem the way to a younger generation.

So I’m there with my sign last week and a guy maybe in his 50s, a white guy in a tie, slows down and says something like, Ain’t that the truth! I look at him and smile. Al probably would have been more stoic. But I smile, and the guy starts telling me he was once in prison, and he was amazed how many of the other prisoners came to him to have him write letters for them. Oh my, I thought, there’s one more example of how not teaching people to read affects their lives. Think about that. Guys in jail came to this guy to have him write letters for them. Not term papers. Not letters to their lawyer. But just plain letters home. By law a young person has to stay in school until they’re 16. So, these guys in jail had been in school from kindergarten or first grade through 10th grade, at least; and could not write well enough to write a letter home. Of course, this is not news, prisoners asking someone else to pen a letter for them. We’ve seen it in movies, and it’s a good scene usually. But I think it’s a scenario that a college professor teaching elementary education prospects could put up on the blackboard at the beginning of the semester and it could be analyzed the whole marking period. How could someone go to public school for 10 years and not know how to read well enough to be able to write well enough to write a basic letter?

If the topic were discussed long enough, some student might say, I wonder if the fact that these men couldn’t read well contributed to the life that landed them in jail. Eureka moment! There you are. That is of course a contributing factor. Imagine being an adult without the skill to write a letter home. That means no emailing either. That means no participating in the common world. How can schools not see that to pass these students on before they can read as well as they should at that grade level is doing a terrible disservice to the kids and their neighborhood and the family they might start some day.

The sign doesn’t say all that. But it implies it. And sometimes people who have to squint and stare a long time to read it, sometimes they’ll say, That’s right, or they’ll just smile sadly as they walk on by.

Message In A Bottle

A woman’s distant family problems wash ashore

Of course I’m excited about this book. Martha Southgate and I worked together 25 years ago on a weekly paper I started in Cleveland. She was interested so much in writing and the arts, she was destined to move here. She’s been here quite a while now. This is her fourth novel. The first three got good praise. The first one won the Coretta Scott King award.

This one’s got Cleveland in it, and it’s got Woods Hole in it, a world away from Lake Erie’s shores. It’s about a woman from a black family with classic books on the shelves. It’s about alcohol and the distance it imposes. it’s about other ways we distance ourselves, too. It’s about the reasons. We read books to see what the reasons might be for how we are. Here’s a graceful, fearless attempt to show us some reasons.

Less Cool By Degrees

A mixed-race young man’s personal culture wars

Thomas Chatterton Williams grew up in the white part of town. In New Jersey. You understand how he is drawn to the black culture he sees in the hip-hop images on the TV in the black barbershop he is driven to every couple weeks. You’re stirred along with him when he finds that new, proud part of his life to identify with. You recognize why he wants to. Part of you wants to too. That’s part of why you’re reading the book.

But he’s not all that. And it doesn’t accommodate all of him. He’s his parents’ kid. Intellectual aspirations are as much a part of him as his basketball and his music. Just hearing that, you can tell it’s a good story. And it’s told well. Williams is lean and truthful. Just like he looks.
Adults and high-school kids will like it. Nothing not to like.