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 forc