Of course, i think you make the same decisions that Mitch Mcconnell did, because the next election is always a chance that youre going to end up being in the minority party. Now, the only hope i have, and thats actually driven by my experience with students here, the change is going to have to be generational. The change is going to have to come from people who havent been typically getting involved in the political process and changing things. Its going to have to come from a new set of leaders who havent been used by the other side in certain ways, that havent been abused by the other side in certain ways. So that they dont feel that, you know, sort of sting that theyre going to do it to them, you know, because its been done in the past to their side. So im hopeful because i teach these tremendous students semester in and semester out, and i see the potential for leadership. But the key is getting these young people involved in politics rather than involved in Investment Banking or law school or something different, to tell them that their involvement in politics is worth doing, that they can change the world, because its going to have to be them who ends up doing it. For more information on booktvs recent visit to nashville and the many other destinations on our cities tour, go to cspan. Org citiestour. When i tune into it on the weekends, usually its authors sharing their new releases. Watching the nonfiction authors on booktv is the best television for serious readers. On cspan they can have a longer conversation and delve into their subjects. Booktv weekends, they bring you author after author after author that spotlight the work of fascinating people. I love booktv and im a cspan fan. [inaudible conversations] good evening, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to barnes noble on the Upper West Side. Tonight i have the distinct pleasure of introducing author david denby. Mr. Denby is the author of great books, an acclaimed account of returning to college and reading the western classics during the curriculum wars. Hes a staff writer and former film critic for the new yorker, and his reviews and essays have appeared in the new republic, the atlantic and new york magazine, among others. He brings us today his new book, lit up one reporter, three schools, 24 books that can change lives. Can todays teenagers be turned on to serious reading . What kinds of teachers can do it and what books . One of those schools is the Beacon School, and were fundraising for them tonight. Mention the Beacon School book fair at the register, and a portion of your purchase will be donated. Dave eggers writes in this nuanced and vivid account of great books taught in three very different schools, denby has proven what teachers have always known, that taught with passion and commitment literature old and new can inspire any and every student. This is a necessary bulwark against kneejerk cynicism about the decline of reading among young people. So without further ado, please join me in welcoming author david denby. [applause] thanks so much. Welcome, all. Glad to see you on a friday night. I set out five years ago to answer a particular question which seemed to me also an enormous question, and that is what in the world could turn 15yearolds on to reading seriously, serious literature, serious magazines, serious anything when so much of their time is absorbed in this . And in screens in general. I chose 15 because it seemed the right time in their teenage lives when their brains were still malleable, their characters and identities were still up in the air, when they were making choices, do they want to go to college, do they want to go into the military, what kind of jobs do they want to get, what kind of work do they want to do, what their sexual identities might be. And i wondered how much are they reading, reading seriously . The book business, as you may have heard, is doing okay, and thank god for this house, may it long survive. As well as all the independents stores in which we manage to survive as writers and readers. As well as online. But the statistical evidence from Pure Research and from Common Sense Media and observation would suggest they werent reading many books. Were in the middle of an enormous transformation in the way we consume print, and perhaps in the way that we relate to one another. Its so pervasive, perhaps so enveloping that we cant even grab hold of it. I mean, my own magazine, the new yorker, has been going through convulsions for the last 15 years or so. The new yorker as a hard copy, as you know, is a kind of artifice. Its very carefully written, its very much fussed over, its to some degree sometimes to a maddening degree. In the editing phase, its laid out very carefully, designed very carefully, and suddenly, you know, were in the middle of this storm of journalism coming from every single angle. Communication of words coming from every single angle. Sherry turk el, speaking of kids in particular, has done a lot of work on how we relate to technology, and she was protech very much. She thought the internet was an extension of our spirituality. Shes jumped the fence in the last two books, alone together and recent book reclaiming conversation. She did a lot of research. Shes a professor at mit, psychology and sociology. Shes done a lot of work with teenagers and discovered, to her dismay, that increasingly they are avoiding facetoface confrontation. They want their relationships to be mediated by text, by cell phone including romantic relationships. Not Just Relationships between teachers and students, but ordinary friendships and even romantic friendships. And she sees that as an enormous damage to the self. That when you engage in confrontation with another person, that is when you grow. That is when you come to terms with who you are and who that person is, and theres all that fantastic recognition of the others, selfrecognition, everything that hagel talked about. It happens in facetoface encounter. I feel the same way about reading, and sherry is and i have actually done a kind of dog and pony show together where she talks about the potential loss of self through cell phone interaction, smartphone interaction, and i talk about how, how much you grow as a person when you read seriously. Ive been a moviegoer my whole life, and i adore movies. Particularly soothing and important to me because i have very bad adhd, and when i go to the movies, i particularly like, i like sitting fairly close and perhaps lose the frame altogether so that im surrounded and sensuously bombarded by the image. And its a great sensory stimulant, movies. And even to the point of the arousal of one sense gets the others aroused. And i remember in 1972 when i saw the god father for the first time at a screening how i felt when i came out onto the street. Part of the reason i felt that way when i came out onto the street is that i was sitting at the screening next to faye dunaway. [laughter] so that was a sensory arousal too. But i have always felt after being pleasure my wiped out by a movie that i had to restore myself in some way. And the way i restore myself apart from just reflection or writing about it, you know, in a practical way restoring yourself, is reading and reading and reading and immersing myself in literature. And im sure i dont have to argue here the necessity producing the next generation of great readers. Were talking about the centrality of literacy to our civilization, to citizenship. I think it would not be extravagant to say youre seeing right now the loss of real understanding of character, of person, of rhetoric in the kind of political campaigns that were seeing in which so many voters seem unable to have perceived what anyone would perceive if they had simply read huckleberry finn. And noticed the duke and the king and other conmen who huck has to deal with. In any case, what civilization are we going to have, what kind of literature are we going to have, how are we going to develop threedimensional people . Those are the large issues. The best way to create readers, of course, is to start reading to them when theyre infants, six weeks, eight weeks, first time the baby smiles, put her in your arms, turn pages. You all know this. Theyre not going to remember, of course, anything that they read, but they may have an affective memory of being held and associate that with the pleasure of reading itself. This is one of the big differences which you also know between upper middle class kids and poor kids. They dont often get that kind of treatment. They dont there isnt time. A single mother may have to get food on the table for three and four people. They may not read much themselves. Those conversations, those immersions in the world, what objects are in the world, what forces are playing around the house as the kids get older and you can have conversation with them, thats if you spend some time with working class kids or poor kids as i did in the course of writing this book, you see that the lack of that habit of what id have to call e vidty, a kind of nonstop curiosity to take in everything around you avidity. I dont, i refuse to believe, however, that the game is over at 6. If i did believe that, i obviously would not have written this. I wanted to see what kind of interventions could be made in the normal way of teaching. And so at 15. High School Teachers are temporarily in the position of authority to dictate certain books to the kids which they think will do them some good or change them or get them excited about literature itself. I didnt want to write a handbook, a teaching handbook. Im to not equipped to do that. I dont have the interest to do it. Im not an education researcher. Im a reporter and critic. And i, im sick of the, in education writing, the utter reliance on enumerating everything; statistics, scores, the kind of metric fallacy by which we dont allow ourselves to know anything about education until its been established sawtistically. Statistically. The latest folly in this kind of metric obsession, i mean, youve seen the kind of semicollapse of no child left behind and race to the top which tied School Assessment to how kids scored on tests to the point at which the schools were being denuded of their normal interests in creating threedimensional human beings and were engaged in test prep all the time. But the latest folly is something called grit, and theres a book coming out by Angela Duckworth from the university of pennsylvania that is getting a lot of attention. And what it does is set up a kind of numerical rubrics by which a character can be measured in children. And the rubrics are such things as perseverance, which makes perfect sense, but zest, positiveness. My guess is that mel brooks displayed a great deal of zest, but woody allen and larry david none whatsoever. [laughter] i mean, i find all of this absurd. First of all, you have to find a way of measuring it, of grading it and of teaching it. Now, also i would say, you know, just all of education should be about developing character. And certainly, reading literature is about developing character. But, in other words, what were trying to do is to find some numeric that will alert us to what the deficiencies are in our children just as the reading and math tests in no child left behind alerted us to what the deficiencies were in their education in those areas but without telling us how to overcome the deficiency. Its a desperation that continues throughout american education, i think, because we dont want to face, we cannot face, we will not face the real problem which is poverty. That is the real problem. Anyway, i was sick of the, what i would call the pornography of educational failure so often tied to this e pneumonia rahtive fallacy. And i wanted to see something that worked, what kind of literary education worked. So i had done Something Like this before, the book that was mentioned in the kind introduction. Great books in which i went back to columbia and read the western classics, required courses at columbia which lasts through two long classes, and it was at the time of the curriculum debate 25 years ago. Should children who descended of latin or african descent be asked to read western classics, you know . The dead white males. You remember that. And i went back through columbia and sat in on the classes and Read Everything and listened to the can kids and wrote it up as a kind of middleaged adventure. So i had a model for what i would do. I would sit in class, i would keep my mouth shut which is not easy and listen and read. Read everything, listen to everything that was said, take notes and then try to shape it into a narrative of the year. Now, i was having all these thoughts in a kind of desultory way, and a guy came up to me on the street on the Upper West Side. It sounds like a joke, a guy comes up to you and tells you about a school. His name is samuel abrams, and he was an exteacher at Beacon School at 61st street behind lincoln center, and he told me about the school which he described as an interesting place. It was a Progressive School but not a soft, feelgood, slack kind of place. Everybody worked hard, they believed in writing and speaking more than testing. The teachers had great freedom to write their own curriculums, to choose their own books with agreement from the principal and that way they were able to attract intellectuallydistinguished teachers and give them free rein. Physically, it was miserable, the school. It was never intended to be a school. An old building, it was cramped, it was crowded, everybody was on top of everyone else. You couldnt get off a jump shot in the vim for more than 10 feet without scraping the ceiling which all proof to sam and to me also as i later observed that you dont need a good Physical Plant in order to have a good school. What you need is teachers, students, computers and a library. It had a good library. They have now left. Theyre now down at 44th street in a much, much larger place, and i even feel kind of nostalgia for the kind of closedin, tight soul fullness, everyone on top of everyone else at the old place. Anyway, i settled into a class taught by a single teacher named sean leon and stayed there for the entire year. I think i went to every actual class of english 10e. And sean leon has an irish mother, American Navy father. He grew up in louisiana near new orleans. He is a lapsed catholic which i mention only because it was an element in the way he taught the class which was that he was in a state of some distress himself about his own life. And he allowed himself the students to see that and made it an element in the way that they read the books. The reading list was unusual. No shakespeare, no mark twain, no toni morrison, although kids read these books in other classes at beacon. They read stories by faulkner and hemingway, dystopian novels by orwell and huxley, hessa and vonnegut, dos toy jeff skys daunting notes from underground, a short narrative that he wrote at the gunning of his great period, 1860, crime and punishment and the other famous books came after it. And some of these books were hard and disturbing, and the kids were flattered by the difficulty, i think, of the assignments. They were i didnt notice anyone buckling under, lets put it that way. And mr. Leon ghei them an enormous gave them an enormous amount of support, and he had all sorts of interesting ways of organizing the classroom. But one of the things he did was to use the issues raised by the text and bring them into the kids lives. I dont mean that it devolved into confessional, sunday afternoon in the Church Basement or around the campfire at summer camp. It was much more rigorous than that. But there would be a degree of personal involvement and confession and discussion, and then it would go back to the text. It always came back to literature. But it had the effect of pulling out of the kids questions that he wanted them to answer which was what do you live for . What does matter in your life . What are your relations to your parents and your friends, to each other . How much time are you spending on screens, and he even forced them into a 48hour digital fast which most of them failed as i would have, in which they were not allowed to go on screens for two days. And i discovered as we went over the results in class and the kids wrote me a lot of letters about what had happened to them. You know, only three out of 32 students, big class, actually filled the down time by reading books. And a lot of them were seriously upset without their daily contact through the internet or with constant music or with the Television Set constantly on or something electronic constantly on. They were seriously upset. They were not just unplugged, they were unstrung, a lot of them. And these were good students. These were good kids. So he turned that into a kind of challenging lesson. He did all the english teacher stuff, and we did, you know, elaborate structural discussions of books and metaphor and symbol and so on, and he did a lot of syntax and grammar which i love hearing them talk about it. And i try to have, play with it and have fun with it and taking my cue from mr. Leon, show how sin tactical issues and grammatical issues all play into questions of character, how youre presenting yourself in prose is, in a way, the way youre shaping your soul. Some of this interesting classroom ways of teaching literature was, well, they read from sylvia plath tormented poems, and the kids wrote their own versions anonymously and read them. I dont know who wrote what, but it allowed them to vent in extraordinary ways. When we got to the dostoyevsky text, the hero of the notes from underground is the selfhating, perverse intellectual who screws himself at every possible turn and yet feels superior to the world by means of perceptiveness and insight into what other people live for. And the kids found him fascinating because they had their own problems in fitting in, wondering where theyre going to fit into society. I mean, they have the most negative notions of what grownup society is going to do to them, one are for the incredible success of the hunger games, right . In which theyre all placed in violent opposition with each other for the pleasure of grownups. Thats the text for this period. Anyway, when they got to serious text, they saw what was the kind of narcissism embedded in that degree of pride, but they also saw a certain glory in it which i think is what dostoyevsky intended. And he had them take the role of the underground man one student at a time, and and someone else take the role of interlocutor questioning this guys way of life, and then they would add students on each side of the issue, and sometimes they would switch. So what we had there was a kind of mad russian Musical Chairs which allowed students, so to speak, to by means of using this character to step into their own characters, to step into themselves. I think thats what i was able to do which was, as i say, the point always is not to do a report, but to do a dramatic narrative that i showed some of the students you cant do it with all of them, too many but some of the students coming out of their shell and becoming, is so to speak, themselves. Becoming more of themselves. Now, at the end of the year i knew that this was interesting and i think i can shape it, but it wasnt enough. And i went to two 11th grade classes at beacon just because i wanted to see what would happen to a Representative Group of 10th graders the year after. These were not mr. Leons students, of course, because this was i went at the same time. But i visited a teacher named Mary Whitmore who taught what is now very difficult to teach in american high schools, the Scarlet Letter. Difficult because its, it was written in 1850s and set 200 years earlier, and the language is archaic and formal and the moral issue at the center of the novel, a woman whos married and whose husband is away has an affair with a handsome young minister and, of course, conceives a child. And the whole town is obsessed with her, of course. The kids found it hard to understand why that was so important an issue. Married woman has child out of wedlock. So what . And the way that Mary Hawthorne dealt with this was to dramatize the issues directly; that is, they read a lot. She handed out scripts, and the students took different persons and sometimes different characters. Just reading a bit, for four weeks she alternated the discussion of character, atmosphere and motive with additional performance in the reading theater. After a while, the idiom became more familiar, the difficulty of the prose easier to handle. When ms. Whitmore caught a student reading dimsdale, thats hesters surreptitious lover, when he caught him reading weakly, she said did you know what you just did . Let me think, the reader said shyly. A few minutes later he said i just made a lot of excuses and contradicted myself which caused the confusion. The reader had fallen into the character without realizing it. A tall, pale, intellectual boy read dimsdale a few times and then seemed more like him every time he made a comment; a blustering boy lowered his voice to insinuation as hesters nasty husband. The girl who spoke a great deal realize hesters refusal to relinquish her child. God gave her into my keeping, i will not give her up. She read it with passionate anger, and after that her classroom comments became leaner, more to the point, less selfconscious. Whatever the students initial resistance to the novel, hawthornes defining strength cleared away their adolescent vagueness. As students went on, they admitted that they were surprised by the power of the fable. Ms. Whitmore not only got students to the embody the characters as much as possible, he made them see the fable around certain choices, conditions, changes in character. She kept shifting the classroom routine, rearranging the tables for debate over the character. She kept the apparatus of reading constantly in motion so the students could never settle or allow the book to fall away from them. She made the book possess them so that eventually they would possess the book. So the key here to Successful High School teaching, if i can use the examples of sean leon and Mary Whitmore, is if you want the students to give of themselves, you have to give of yourself. That is, you have to break up the classroom routine. You have to sometimes even risk revealing something of yourself. If youre trying to get a lot out of them, you have to give a lot also. At the end of the Scarlet Letter classes, after many kinds of exercises, Mary Whitmore showed up on the last day in a kind of cher fright wig, a big, black wig and sat up on a high table and said she was hester prinn and would answer any questions that the students had about her life. I said mischievously, wasnt your time in the woods with dimsdale the best moment of your life . She didnt answer that. [laughter] but they, i mean, it was the way they prepared for the exam. Which i thought was marvelous. I also attended classes by another 11th grade teacher, daniel, and ill just mention it very quickly because he was more like a college teacher, and they read one of the great books of American Literature which i play never disappears, Ralph Ellisons invisible man. And they did a structural reading, and they discovered by degrees in studying this progress of the young black hero in new york in the 30s, ellisons great autobiographical novel, that by studying it structurally and trying to put together the elements of the novel, they had to put together the elements of their own personality. So it was a combined literary analysis and selfanalysis at the same time. Now, i just want to tell you very briefly about two other schools i went to, because i felt that theres no royal road to heaven. I like the literary education at beacon. It works with this particular audience. I think, kids, particularly well with. And, you know, theres that old question whenever you do any kind of education writing, does it scale . Okay, youve described something that works rather well. Does it scale . Can it be replicated elsewhere . Well, there are comparable schools to beacon all over the country. Theres no one like sean leon, but there are aspects of what he does that certainly could be imitated or adapted, used, same with mary. But i thoughting, where else . Thought, where else . I had to get out of new york. I was very eager to get out of new york. So the next year i went up to new haven, 14 or 15 times and went to maybe 30 or 40 hours of another single 10th grade class. Not a good school this time. The principal himself described it as a dumping ground. Mainly lowskill kids. One of two comprehensive high schools in new haven. There are a lot ott charter and magnet schools in new haven. There are two come pretensive comprehensive high schools. They have to take everybody. English language learners, kids who have been incarcerated, pushed out of Charter Schools. By the way, these Charter Schools which are Public Institutions push kids out all the time. I hope you all know that when you see the higher scores and the increased College Entrance rates for Something Like kip which is a good organization. I hope you know they remove low performing kids even though theyre not supposed to. They remove low performing kids all the time. Anyway, those kinds of kids who were thrown out of the schools in new haven were at this place. And the teacher, jessica so lin sky, was a local woman, white woman, black teacher. And at first the kids didnt want to read at all. What was the point . Novels, poems, essays, how is that going to help me get anywhere . How is that important to my life . Is she started reading in class aloud and then got hem to read aloud them to read a aloud. And they read to kill a mockingbird which may seem like an odd choice because heres a book that, you know, in maycomb, georgia, 1930, and theyre black students reading about a white heroine and also poor white woman who gets beaten and brings an accusation of rape. They studied the book as they read it around the class, they discussed in great detail the physical ailments of that life. What was the structure of money in town . What was the racial relations . Who owned property, who didnt . How did the law work . What did people eat . How did they get around . Now, what is the purpose of all of this indepth story of maycomb, georgia, in 1930 . The purpose of it was to get them to ask the same questions about their own lives. As i said before, poor kids dont have that havent learned and grasped that avid desire for information. And im not talking about race here, im talking about income. To grasp the world and to make ones way through it. They know a lot about their families, about their neighborhoods, about how to be safe in their neighborhoods. What they dont know is what are or the social and Economic Conditions around everything thats happening to me in a poor neighborhood in new haven. So she was trying by using that book to get them to ask those questions about their own lives. As the year went on, they began to read more. She was a very funny, abrupt, loud, joyous woman who mixed it up with them, and she told me several times that white teachers who are polite with working class and ghetto kids and try to, you know, establish decorum in the classroom and shake hands on the way in and out every day, whatever, bomb at a school like this. That you have to, as i say, open yourself up to get them to open themselves up. And mostly they loved her and wanted to perform for her. So it was often very touching. And we read some shakespeare, they read stories by hemingway and vonnegut. They began to read with some real pleasure. And at the end of the year, she asked them to choose one of four books, the one that they liked the best they had to read it and write a report on it. It was ishmael bays long boy gone, a boy warrior in sierra leone who worked for was kidnapped by the rebels and worked for the Government Forces and by his own account killed many people when he was 13 and 14 and so on when he was kept high on cocaine most of the time. He eventually was rescued and came to the United States and was adopted by an American Woman who wound up at oberlin where he had a good writing teacher. He wrote this excellent narrative, and the kids were very alive to that kind of stress in anyones life. Both the violence of it and the release from violence of it. And at the end of year, a sort of mini miracle happened which was that ishmael bay showed up. Not because of me, not because of ms. Zolinski, it just was a total coincidence. He gave a talk at the university in new haven, so she was able to take kids to see him and to meet him and so that they had read his book, and they saw an actual author and for the first time i think literature seemed real to them. Now, i just want to tell you very, very briefly about yet a third school, mare neck high school, upper middle class suburb the up the coast of long island sound. Largely wealthy, white kids. School found out a few years ago that a lot of the kids, particularly the boys, were simply not doing the reading. Not doing it. They went on the internet and read what sometimes amazingly competent copies of the great gatsby, Scarlet Letter of spark notes or some other online study guide. Or their tutor they were wealthy enough families to have tutors who took them through the books, and they never really did the reading and brazened their way through papers and exams and even boasted about it. So what did they do . Instead of the usual kind of scolding or remediation, they tried something very different. And theyre not the only school in the country doing it. But its unusual for a school like this. They allowed them to choose books of their own to read. Not entirely, they didnt give up on the great gatsby and macbeth and robert frost and emily dickenson. But they, at the same time, had to have a book of their own going at all times, a book that they chose. They could choose it from the school library, from the Classroom Library wealthy school, a library in every classroom they could choose it from the garbage can. It doesnt matter, and it didnt matter that it wasnt literature. It might be a young adult romantic novel, a sports biography. Well, the point here, as im sure you can see, is with grudging readers to get them hooked initially by reading stuff that they really enjoy. And the teachers would even do a kind of hollywood pitch session like hold up a book and describe what was in it. The teacher had read some of it and would sell the book. Now, the kids didnt have to read that book in particular. They could read whatever they want, but they had to have something going and keep another book going after that and another after that. And log in every week and so on. Now, thats the first part of the exercise. Suppose theyre reading the same damn book over and over again . Suppose theyre reading nothing but young Adult Fiction or nothing but horror fiction . Well, then you call a kid in, and you say, okay, i see you like horror genre stuff. Teenagers are addicted to horror, a lot of them. The movie horror genre, you know, survives because of teenagers. Often teenage girls, in fact, keep it going. The teacher would say, thats fine. Let me point you towards some books by steven king whos stephen king whos a pretty good writer. Some of these early books, the shining, carrie, theyre well written. Or let me tell you about this guy, edgar poe who wrote these hairraising stories, the fall of the house of usher, or robert louis stephenson. In other words, the point was allow them their pleasures and passions and then try and take those and elevate them. And i have a lot of good stories, i think, about laddering up exercises like that that worked as well as a few that didnt. But its, the other part of it is that the school tries to establish a whole culture of reading. In other words, the teachers have to keep a new book going all the time and have to the post it on the outside of their door, what theyre reading at that moment. So that theres a constant conversation of books in the school. So what ive been trying to describe is how to you forge those links that create a lifetime reader. There are many variations on this, but you have to either appeal to the what students need emotionally at that point in their life or what gives them a particular kind of pleasure they cant get anywhere else. Those are the two things. Now, i think ill stop at this point and thank you all for listening, and if there are any questions questions from the audience . Ive got a q and a mic here. Just raise your hand, and ill come to you. It seems like a lot of what youre talking about is great, unusual teaching. How do you separate that out . Well it sounds like a great teacher could do what youre talking about in any subject. Yes. I think we have to the raise the pay and the the status of teachers in this country, the way we treat them, particularly the way the Republican Party teaches union teachers, i think, is disgraceful. I think of course, there are terrible teachers, and there are mediocre teachers, and im in favor of principals having somewhat greater power to remove mediocre teachers. But to denigrate them in general has been a disaster, demoralizing, the last 10 or 15 years. And to tying these test prep to teacher tenure and so on is a disaster. Well, we dont need to talk about finland because its a small, homogeneous country. But i would just say that, briefly, that the teachers are recruited from the top of the undergraduate class rather than from the bottom and that they in relation to their peers at college, they make 115 of their peers income whereas in the United States they make 6570 of their peers income; that is, those who go into accounting, law, engineering, any of the other professions. I think the recent failure of the common core has occurred because developing the common core which may not be a bad idea, i think we need raised standards wasnt built into teacher training. So what we did in new york state was to greatly increase the tests difficulty with the result that many people got very low scores, disgusting parents and teachers. To tie that experiment to whether a teachers good or not seems to me completely inane. So the answer to how do you develop a cadre of Great Teachers is to begin by upgrading their status and pay. How about someone else . Whoops. Any other questions . Hi. I loved your book. It was so terrific of to read about all this, all the great teaching going on. Thank you. And i have a question thought about the books that are being chosen for kids to read. It just seems to be so much of the same oldsame old like middle brow books like to kill a mockingbird from half a century ago, that that teacher did really great stuff with that most teachers are going to be, oh, Atticus Finch is a statement. And is a stability. And i would love to see kids reading more books of their own century like pulitzer prize, the National Book long lists and stuff yeah. Do you have any thoughts about why that no, well, i think to kill a mockingbird is very good, actually, and beautifully composed, and theres a real feeling for the south and for landscape and the different aspects of social life in a small town. I mean, im not going to knock to kill a mockingbird. But, well, latino students particularly enjoy junot diaz, the short am i going to get the title right . The short, wonderful life of oscar brief. Brief, wonderful life of oscar or Zora Neale Hur stomp or tony morrison. I know jessica has been reading with her 11th graders ta nasty coats essay, between the world and me. So, yes, i think youre right, but i dont see anything wrong with to kill a mockingbird among grudging readers who at the beginning of the year werent willing to read at all. Yeah. Yes. Actually, i have a followup to that, because i was going to ask something rather similar. Yeah, just in terms of broadening the literary canon, perhaps, is that not one of the ways to keep kids reading . Stuff like coats not only for latino kids but, you know, to broaden it in that sense as well . Sure. You have to get them started first, though. What this book is about could this be a way in . Is beginnings, awakening hunger and necessity. Right. And then it can be taken in a lot of different directions. And, i mean, but its a whole i didnt want even get boo this, its a whole separate issue of an increasingly large latino population not just in School Population not only around here, but, of course, in california and the southwest. And that would be, that would be great book for someone else to write. I think there should i dont see why there cant be other reports like mine; that is, subjective reports in which someone is writing out of his own impressions of life. And i do a lot of writing about the books themselves because i meant this to be for readers. Not, you know, not, as i say, not a handbook for teachers, but as a kind of introduction to these books again and to the excitement of reading them again. But, you know, elderly white guy going into different schools, thats just one book. I dont know why there cant be black reporter going into black schools or white schools, for instance, if thats the power discourse. S what is it . How does it work . How does it benefit students . I would love to read that book. Anyway thank you very much. Yes, sir. Over here . Thank you. I just wonder if you have any plans to follow up with any of the students that you met and whether you think theres any risk that having an extraordinary teacher for one year is a temporary phenomenon and that yearses later they might years later their interest might fade away if its not reinforced . There is that danger always, but i dont know about you, but i had a couple of stroornd teachers and then some mediocre ones after that, and i, you know, survived. You try to take into yourself whatever it is, the strength that you get from the extraordinary teachers and to carry forth even when teaching is not so good. I went dead on a couple of teachers in college, but there were great ones at the same time. Theres always going to be that variability. As for following up, i have stayed in touch with some of the beacon kids and some of the hillhouse kids who are now getting their college tough together. Well, actually, theyre getting into schools. One of the things thats awful about a school like hillhouse is the whole ethos of the place is to get everyone into college. And, in fact, theres no College Office. There isnt the resources from new haven to pay for a College Office. So the kids have no help whatsoever. Their parents, for the most part, cannot help them get through the maze of applications and, you know, loan applications, the whole financial stuff. Yale does pay tuition for those who graduate New Haven High School with a b average and go to a local college. But what yale doesnt do which i think would actually be just as valuable would be to staff a College Office at schools like hillhouse. Send, keep someone there, you know . Maybe four days a week and help kids get through this. So, but i yes, i keep up with some of the kids. Not all of them. Working in the schools, one of the things thats been pushed a lot maybe its going away is the whole idea of nonfiction and its role, the role that it plays in an english classroom. So i was wondering, the teachers you covered didnt seem to be focusing on good, im talking about good nonfiction. Yeah. No, mr. Leons class was all fiction, and so was Mary Whitmores and daniel garelnik read in cold blood. Yeah, youre going like this because god knows how much of it he made up. Suspiciously detailed about what people were thinking years before he wrote it. In the common core, or its pushing you probably know all all pushing kids away from fiction towards nonfiction. The designer of the common core said to me whoever had to read a novel on the job . And i said, well, no one except book reviewers. I mean, that isnt the point. [laughter] i, you know, im one of those people who think that reading fiction is the way you know about yourself. And when youre at a movie, as i said, youre sensuously enlarged and overwhelmed. And when youre home, the process goes inward as well as outward or, and you compare yourself to characters that youre reading about or other historical e epochs. Theres a complex interaction of set is the and extraordinary detail in tolstoy that, you know, is complete immersion which invariably brings you back to yourself also, how you would act in certain ways and so on and so forth. So i think its absolutely essential that kids read fiction because they can read other people by reading fiction. They can develop all those qualities of empathy, perceptive ness, understanding of how other societies work as well as other kinds of people work that that we dont get from the media necessarily. We may get little bits of it, but we dont get it in any detail. So im against shifting. I mean, the nonfiction that theyre reading may be very good. I mean, if its orwells to essays, you know, or someone [inaudible] well, thats a hairraising book thats extraordinarily well written. I dont agree with a lot of it, but this is between the world and me, can book that ms. Zolinsky is reading with her or 11th graders right now. But, yes, because he writes with metaphorical power. Its written with a kind of circular composition where he returns to certain themes and figures over and over again. Its a real literary work. Yes. Okay. 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 where they called me, and i said just send him home. Send him home. And when he got home, he was on medication, and he was a wreck. And i because i love literature, i said, well, read to me out loud. [laughter] so we started with Edmund Wilsons to the finland station mostly because i figured, okay, its very factual and beautifully written, and he doesnt have to understand. Just read to the me out loud, and then we can talk. So he read that whole book, and he kept saying, i cant do this, its too long, its too, you know, too much. He kept doing it. I said it doesnt matter whether we understand, well talk, you know . But he kept doing it. And then the second thing we read was dostoyevsky, was notes from the underground. And then he started talking about himself. We developed the most incredible relationship. Then he read moby dick and, good lord, im trying to think now. He couldnt stop. He just kept reading out loud to me. And then we talked about everything. And then before i knew it, he brought me conrad and said he liked that. And then he brought me celine which i had never read was he not a bigtime reader prior to no. His breakdown . Before that he failed things in high school. He was just awful. [laughter] okay. And it just this is a very happy story. It developed. And then he ended up teaching kids at city college to read and write. They paid him 8 an hour to coach them. Without a he had no college. But all kinds of and then he started writing himself. And now he writes a lot. Well, thats a great story. I know that the two points in my adult life when i was at my lowest, i was saved by reading saul bellow. And i think its because the characters are so egotistical that it gave me strength. [laughter] the first one well, anyway, well let it go at that. [laughter] yeah, bello is great if youre feeling low if youre a man. I dont know if it would help women. His Upper West Side book is bilious and angry and funny all at once. He lived around here a long time ago, in the 50s. Yes. Anybody else . Well, thank you, all, very much for coming. [applause] ladies and gentlemen, big round of applause for author david denby. [applause] do you want to tell them again that this is part of the this is in support of the Beacon School book fair, one of, of course, the three schools weve discussed tonight in the book. If you mention Beacon School at the register, a portion of your proceeds will be donated right to them and, hopefully, the library. So please, ladies and gentlemen, grab a copy of the book if you dont already have one, and line up through the stanchions along the stage. Just give us a minute to set up, and we will be signing books, this 25th very important book we should read. Thank you very much, everyone, youve been fantastic. [inaudible conversations] youre watching booktv on cspan2 with top nonfiction books and authors every weekend. Booktv, television for serious readers. And i often get asked, usually by law students not law students, undergraduates. Thats fun for me. I get to talk to undergraduates. And they want to be lawyers, i mean, there we are, some have to. And there we are. [laughter] they want to be lawyers, and they say what should i study as an undergraduate . They were doing what you were