James patterson and i thought about it for a second and then i said why does he owes you money. Coming to the Principals Office accept at my office today i came here with another way of looking at things to help you save lives and to turn everybody into more of a missionary not listeners. We are going to listen but the doers and that is a hard thing in life because sometimes we listen and i dedicate and my wife dedicate to what we are doing making sure that we are doing things. So i will talk a little bit more about that. You are in the position to do things and to save lives. I had friends that talk special practice up in westchester for 30 years or so and i met a guy that had been in the class and i mentioned it to him and he said that its just is just impossible. But from his point of view he said mr. Mahoney saved my life. These kids grow up and get a little older but you have to believe that thats what youre going to do. And in terms of reading, better reading produces better thinkers because they are exposed to more things and ultimately better citizens, better spouses. We can see that think god in a weird way for the nfl and it is an American Issue that the better spouses come from others and fathers and reading. On the one hand there are those that are bright and the better thinkers they become. But even more important are those that are at risk and dont become competent readers. Im not even interested in them becoming readers for life but just competent readers because if they are not competent, reading is the foundation of everything. We know that but we dont live it. If you cant read competently you cant do this or you cant do that. You probably arent going to be about to get a job working to be harder. Your chances of life are not great and we all noticed this, the world is getting tougher and it seems to me the world is getting mean. Of course we all kind of know that but we dont act on it as much as we should. Here are a few things you dont know. My mother was a teacher for 45 years. Tough town, tough schools and places to grow up and still is. I was a high school valedictorian. I got 780 on my sat in reading and i had a fellowship at the vanderbilt but i was a reluctant reader. I did read about a million comic books as a kid and its okay up to a point. Then when i was around 19 i started working my way through College College at a Mental Hospital just outside of cambridge massachusetts. A lot of times i worked for 11 to seven shift and most nights there wasnt a lot to do but on the other night i started reading like a mad person and i read John Steinbeck and john irving and i cant read my own handwriting. [laughter] thats just some of the johns. I dont know any others. [laughter] but the important thing suddenly i was reading things i wanted to read. I wanted to read poetry and difficult writers and thats how i fell in love with it because up until that point i was a decent and a good reader but somehow in grade school and high school it just didnt turn out for me. The typical english class you can read the first 40 pages and you will be tested tomorrow. Nobody ever asked us to read that and obviously we have to go through this in common core and other things that help and get in the way in others i didnt get turned on to reading or writing. Let me go back to shakespeare. We are not turned on to it and i in high school had everybody stand up on their seeds and i said we are going to read a little bit from hamlet but i want you to understand what the situation is. First of all everybody was going to the theater. That wasnt happening in any place else in the world but for some reason it caught on in london because they are made out out of what they were all these theaters and more than half the population was going on a weekly basis but they were not. They were loud and noisy and other stuff going on. So they have to get the had to get the attention of the people so thats why we had you upon your seat, standing standing upon standing up on your seat, standing upon your seats and now i want you to read because you have to get attention. You dont like that because he would be shutting me down after about five minutes of these kids screaming at the top of their voices, but they are beginning to get it a little bit. A little frame of reference. Then i said i had to talk history for two minutes here just enough so that you understand the kind of what the scenario is. The other thing you notice as i covered is i covered the walls with all these phrases and words and whatever and i said shakespeare made up all of this. [laughter] all these phrases, everything. He just made it up. Now suddenly people were more interested as opposed to read this and you will be tested. Or the kind of shakespeare is really important and you must love him. Says who . I have to come to that conclusion. You can help me. I have a 16yearold jack and when he decided he wrote his first novel illustrated that the veteran told halfway around the world can he get on a boat, travels, gets on the train and he loves trains, a butterfly catcher catches the butterfly and theres a train going the other way and the butterfly flies away. Excellent. Beginning, middle, great and. But jack wasnt a big reader when he was younger. And the summer when he was eight, we decreed that jack had to read every day. Cruel, i know, inhumane, old school. She didnt have to mow the lawn but he did have to read every day, 40 minutes, whatever. Longer than that if he wanted. But the key is that we went out to help find jack books we know he would like where we thought there was a good chance he would like them. To some extent, and obviously it isnt going to work with everybody, but that is what parents need to do and grandparents need to do and what fans and uncles need to do. Its somewhat important they get some of this people say youve got to do this because and this is a big thing for those that grow up without parents. Its not the schools try to find books for your kids. Its the parents job. You need to hear that. Its your job, not my job. Im going to help lower move the lawn. But thats my job. Most parents, not all, but most wouldnt send their kids out into the world with the handicap that you could do something about. And sending your kids out into the world, kids who are not competent readers, when you can do something about it, is like breaking their legs and sending them out into the world. Its a dumb thing to do. Im not saying thats the way that you have to because he will get fired and nobody can fire me they need to think about stuff in a way that wakes them up because there is a reason they are so popular. You have to do a better job and as i note this isnt going to work in a lot of situations but it will work in many situations. So what we did is we did some research on books and then we tried to find books we thought that he would love and went with him. At the library they are free so there isnt an excuse. At the library they are free. Or in some cases parents can go to the local bookstore if they have some money. And we went looking for books that we thought he was loved would love and thats important because kids say the number one reason they dont read more is because they cant find books that they like to read. And once again you can help. Its very useful and you can make a judgment in five minutes. There are 500 or 600 bucks. You can go on air with the School Library can go on there and you can find a lot of books that will turn kids on. Its not about my books but other peoples books. [inaudible] its a good site and once again you can make a judgment about five minutes whether you find it useful. So the books we found included the first Percy Jackson which he likes a lot. I hate to give him whatever. But a book from the warrior series, moby dick, no we didnt have him read that when he was eight. But his initial response was to you have to and we said yes unless you want to live in the garage. We told him we said we read in our house. We read in our house and that is a sentenced to hang over the front door of every school in the city. We read in this school. That is a cool thing when you walk in and every day theres a lot of things people put on the monuments. Some of them in something two people and some of them you dont even see them. We need a big banner, thats cool. Thats a great thing parents could put on the Bumper Sticker of the car, my student is an honor student, which is fine im a aware we read in our house. Thats very cool. Shea stadium upon the wall somewhere, new york needs. Yankee stadium, on top of the empire state building. A big flag that says new york leads. We can get a new yorker reading a lot more than they do if we think big. If we dont just us what the problem. And give me a wee read in our house. Some of you probably do but it is a doable thing. By the following summer when he took the sats he got an 800 reading so thats where it can go in some cases with even more important are these kids who are in trouble and we can get them to become competent readers otherwise its too hard, it really is. And there is this notion of the more you read the better you become. This is is the top one given whats going on lately reading can be fun. Reading should be fun. I had this idea for a pilot in hollywood and its about the joy of the art and its comical but its about the joy of visual arts and books and thats the important thing because it has to be presented to kids and reading should be one thing that we realize. Sometimes i give talks in school and i say who likes a talker . How come, because we played a lot. The same with reading. Read a lot and you will get better at it. The congress is talking about getting kids up in front of the school. Get them up every year a couple of times. Its going to be difficult. Make it easy for them to do. I ran an Advertising Agency and i was a shy about standing up to people. I didnt get good at it but im better. The same with kids. Its just that in the assembly in budget times he would get more comfortable. You will always be a little nervous, but if you do it a lot you will get a better attitude to hear is a scary fact there are millions and millions of kids in this country and new york city that have never read a single book they love. We give away books in our county in florida and what has evolved our book clubs that really work well. I do the same thing at vanderbilt we go out into nashville and bring kids in every saturday and all summer and it ultimately goes to reading book clubs and what happens if the school and principle is involved they have to be cool books. They have to be books that kids are going to read. And they talk about it in florida the teachers are amazed. They wouldnt even pick up a book this big and all of a sudden because they are talking about it and one of the towns we were gone it worked there and this is a town with 45 unemployment and all these kids are reading. Its pretty terrific and their scores go up. Even scarier is the fact in some States Government officials plan prison construction based on third and fourth grade reading levels. Which is sad and dragging the country down. If it is the greatest city in the world where we producing so many kids that cant read text that has to be one of secretary and when we are voting. Berlin, stockholm, new york. Somebody told me they are allowing 6 per kid for library books. Kids need to read because there is nowhere kids can meet so many different kinds of people and learn their different stories and begin to understand who these people are and accept who they are as they can and books. Books are presented in compelling ways. The common core has to be stories in my opinion. As they said my writing to rear begins like this. Im in a mental i am in a Mental Hospital outside of cambridge massachusetts. Im working my way through college. I work as a patient. James taylor was a patient when i was there. He wrote fire in the rain at the hospital. The poet checked in regularly when i was working there. Hed been convicted of drug possession, usage, whatever. And the deal is he would come in and play the piano and that was a great. They went pretty much every day. I remember one time one of my best friends and the nurses station was putting plexiglass windows so they could see the hallways and that they were making it plexiglass and she pointed down the hallway and there was a kid that meant they have to be into arms length of him. As we are watching the stories will go he takes off in a dead run about 8 feet from the nurses station and goes to downtown plexiglass windows because theyve already taken out four of the windows in the past weekend thats why they put in new plexiglass windows. He gets knocked out for ten minutes and this is who put those there . They said you did. I decide they have decided i had to start writing this stuff down Malcolm Gladwell was writing this and i remembered my first criticism came at Manhattan School and i was told to wait okay but stay away from fiction which was strategic advice but given that encouragement i wrote a novel. 31 publishers turned it down. Selfless extreme prejudice which is a cool thing to tell kids but the good part was the book was published and then if one as the best american first mystery of the year that got turned down by 31 publishers. They and the names of the editors that rejected the manuscript sometimes they send me books for blurbs and im a nice guy so i give them to them. I was 26 year old and life was pretty good but heres the catch. My first didnt come for the next 15 years. The book was number six and i said this must be a misprint. I went to the local bookstore and what we will do is we go in and count the books. There used to be 12 suffice it to their use used to be 15 and now theres ten. Maybe this is accurate and the other thing that we will do is if we are in the airport store and we stand off and are watching them if you buy the book it makes the day. If you put the book back it breaks our heart so this woman picks up the book along came a spider and shes looking through it and she puts it under her arm she slides it into her pocketbook and all im thinking is sometime i went on this which is where you show up at a bookstore. So they were filled with Richard Patterson novels. Hollywood called at some point and i made the mistake of answering. We write the buck you write the book forget about it. Its the dumbest movie in the world and i swear along came a spider and they are going to ask whether he likes it or not. So i watched the first scene and Morgan Freeman. He said that seems kind of boring and im going to is that. Who is the woman in the second scene of the movie because she never comes back. They were on the set of along came a spider getting the chance to shoot. But that night we went out to dinner with Morgan Freeman and monica and the producers. If you get the chance to do that it is fun. When it was done up came the senator at the time who does commercials for older people and Clint Eastwood and everybody in the restaurant staring because among other things they were all over 6foot three and he comes up for an autograph and he says i need a hit movie bad. So i told you stories and you laughed and thats why once again stories are so important. You will read about scientists who say what turned them on initially with science fiction. So it is so true kids do not nod off as much and when someone is telling them a story they dont pay as much attention to them thats something to look at in terms of kids can read a ten, 15, 20 page story and they can handle that and they are still reading it but once again my best story in my opinion are the stories i write for kids i dont know why and i write about them. Middle school, the worst years of my life. It is just a bunch of middle school books. Im probably a little crazy to be doing this as much as i do, but i am here and i love writing for the kids. One tiny request is that if you havent read one of the books, just to give it a peek yourselves as carman has done. I love that. Before she would let the book go out of the system, she read it herself and that is so cool. And i also love when she gets up as a human being. Nothing gets pr flack. But she is up here as a human and extra thick. So you consider reading some of it or get some of your kids reading it. The books i read to get kids reading. Thats why i get into it initially. They get the kids to turn their pages and thats part of it theyre going to get kids thinking and talking about books which i think is important. Its about kids taking responsibility for their own lives. They band together and have to take responsibility. They have to take responsibility for one another. Its the same thing kids have to take responsibility because their parents disappeared into suddenly they are in a situation. I think that is useful for some of the kids of new york who have to take responsibility for their lives at very early ages and the other thing about the Treasure Hunters is by the end i will have taken the kids i read those books around the world. Weve gone to the kennedy the caribbean and we are going to china and europe. Its cool that they can read a story and learn about the world and tie into history. It drives the kids crazy but its funny and its kind of a tender story but it also gets kids into science because kids are kind of interested in robotics and things like that. I want to repeat myself just one time on this notion and once again coming you know how to do this. But when they come in, its your job, not the schools job to find jobs for your kids. You have to go to the library or figure out your own system. If we are going to go to the movie as a family before we go we are going to the library for an hour. Theres a few those of you that have decent libraries in the schools this is like the best class trip of the year class trips to the School Library. We are going to spend half an hour at the library and im just going to tell you the kind of books that are there but thats a very Inexpensive School trips that may be the best that theyve had all year. This kind of Eternal Truth i will call it touches one of the best if not the best is to give them books or find books and when they get done they say i wouldnt mind reading another book. In going to this prison its full of kids that are going to be there for a long time. These are kids that would never read anything. Thats one of the few entertainments that they have. I want to find out. Freedom of choice is the key to get kids motivated and excited about reading it in the sports statistics as long as they are reading. If you want to give it a shot, maybe not. Some schools are on top. The thing if it does we have to believe in the miracles. In the last couple of years. They did to some great stuff and turned up the schools around. As i said id grew up in the capital of the state and his mother was a she cleaned the toilets that was her deal and maybe thats why im doing what i am doing. This whole thing of sharing is key and some people wont do it. When i got thrust into the big job in advertising i dont know if somebody else invented if it is the idea. There are some traffic models around the country and kids in washington, really cool. They require kids to read 20 books but they like to read 20 and kerry a book around. But some kids who stop by and textbooks and use the money to buy childrens trade books. They went up grammatically because they wanted to read. I know theres a librarian in texas so once again you figure out whats going to work in your school that its disgusting and we hate it but they agreed. And ive been thinking about this the last couple of weeks and they are the biggest reluctant readers and i think one of the things we have to bear in mind is we have to accept that they are squirmy. They read the exit sign we just have to figure out ways because a lot of them are getting beat up. But they are angry and get up and they can be a little irritating and they dont sit there like this but so somehow we have to figure out a way to get to these boys and they have to feel that reading the graphic novels and General Information stuff. There is a category like robots and how to build stuff and outer space but with aliens and at least one explosion. But for me just tell you one other story if i can find it. One other thing, people say my god god he coauthors a lot of books. Heres my notion just to get the prescription. Simon and garfunkel. So no big thing but heres here is a story that i want to end with. Its about doing stuff. I gave away the books in chicago to the troops into the schools and the 400 scholarships which is probably more than General Motors has put this was the story about the doing stuff in the San Francisco chronicle and what happened was they got tangled up in all sorts of fishing lines and they literally went up with hundreds of pounds of these tracks all around the torso etc. And they brought in a rescue team and gave up hope as they do sometimes. Its nothing that we can do well and then somebody said we are going to go out and do something differently. Volunteers went out and thats how we fix stuff. They eventually create the whale which is Pretty Amazing and when the whale was free she didnt go out to see. She swam around her rescuers in these kind of circles. Im putting a little interpretation on it but then she came back to every single one of these helpers and she nudged them presumably as some kind of a thank you whatever you want to call it into the rescuers said that it was the most beautiful experience of their lives. Many said that they would never be the same after that experience. Thats why im here. Sometimes we dont even know if it is the greatest experience we are saving. And i know theres a lot of frustration but thats what you do. I love what you do. We are going to try to help in some ways we may be able to help libraries. What do you want to do . Do you want to do qanda . [applause] i hope i wasnt being arrogant just throwing stuff out. Im not suggesting i have any answers. [inaudible] interestingly right thing for boys at a little lower reading level so that some of them will be able to keep up in the subject matter the answer is yes and in edition to the books i am thinking about we have a book next year called a Public School superhero and what happened is coming around to some of the schools in florida there is no books about them. They will print a thousand copies so that kids cant talk about it because theres one copy of the book and they say if i write one its going to get bigger distribution. Its comedic which is the hard part because as you know it isnt always that much fun. Its a little simpler. I rather i was at [inaudible] the audience was about 7 africanamerican women so we just chat and they got comfortable with me after little bit and when i sent them to do autographs and this one woman looks and says are you alex and of the woman behind her went [laughter] any other questions asked you mentioned you begin reading comic books and thats what got you interested. I wonder what your thoughts are on comic books in the classroom and independent libraries. The have to figure out their own thing at school i guess. For me it is just practice especially in elementary and the beginning and middle school just practicing. Youve read 100 comic books you will be a better reader. So unfortunately there are not a lot in the lab. [inaudible] [inaudible] but the issue is they would now have libraries but no books. [inaudible] while thats something we will talk about in terms of whether i can help or we can get other people to help. Its shelving. Its in alphabetical order. Yes, way in the back of. [inaudible] you talk about building readers that love reading and we also want to build some writers. Can you talk about the writing process quite