Local Heroes: Michael Winerip

Once upon a time there was a terrific writer on education for the NYTimes, Michael Winerip. Now he's on a different beat. This is from a column he did on 10/14/07
Mission: Making a Love of Reading Happen
By MICHAEL WINERIP
MY youngest of four is now in eighth grade, and recently I attended my final back-to-school night at our middle school. I won’t miss it. I always leave so discouraged.

Each year it seems I hear less and less about what books the students will read and more and more about how they’ll be prepared for the state tests. If my wife or I don’t raise our hands and ask “What novels?” it usually doesn’t come up.

I was not surprised by the recent discouraging results for American students on the national reading tests. Since 2002, when the federal No Child Left Behind law took effect, with its emphasis on standardized testing, student reading scores have made little progress in elementary school and declined in eighth grade.

Several years ago, just as New York’s testing program was being implemented, my twins were in seventh grade and came home with letters saying that a new reading course was being added. I was delighted to see some innovation. I assumed they’d spend the year making their way through the rich selection of middle school and young adult novels and nonfiction books out there. Not until back-to-school night did I realize what was actually going on. The “reading” teacher had a stack of workbooks. They were going to be reading short essays and answering questions: a full year of test prep.

It falls to parents to make a love of reading happen. And though I have labored long and hard at this, I haven’t found it easy, particularly as my kids get older.

From early on, we read together every night. Sometimes Storyman showed up to do the reading — a guy wearing red BVD’s, a beach towel cape and a Zorro mask who appeared to be Dad, but was never confirmed to be. (“We know it’s you, Dad, come on, we really do, admit it.”)

For years I invoked the 20-minutes-a-night reading rule, which was particularly torturous to enforce in the summer. Even into middle school, I’d read aloud to them. When I was given the first Harry Potter book to review for The Times, I read it to them, to get the experts’ opinion.

Mornings, before school, I don’t allow them to watch ESPN “SportsCenter,” so my jock son has developed the habit of reading the sports pages.

On long trips, like the annual 13-hour drive we made for years to Grandma and Grandpa’s cottage in Michigan, we didn’t let them watch movies in the van or listen to music on their portable CD players. We got books on tape from the library, and while they moaned to high heaven, I can still remember driving through the night on Interstate 80 in Pennsylvania and listening to Jerry Spinelli’s novel about an amazing boy named “Maniac McGee,” who could run like the wind, wasn’t afraid to live by himself and somehow had grown up totally oblivious of people’s race. My four sat in the dark Astro van, not making a sound. When I thought they were asleep, I turned it off, but they yelled, “Come on, Dad, we want to keep listening!”

I don’t think it matters so much what they read, as long as they keep at it. I like the droll, macabre, literary quality of the Lemony Snicket series, and I don’t like the bratty, rich Westchester girls of the Clique series, but either way, I’m pleased when my daughter asks to go back to the bookstore because the newest one is out. My own reading tastes weren’t much at her age. I read mostly sports novels, and my favorites were about mediocre athletes who rose up at the crucial moment to win the game.

My wife and I have subscribed to magazines of all sorts for them. Some I like, some I don’t: Teen Vogue, Mad magazine, American Girl, ESPN, Sports Illustrated. The one day each month I can be sure the boys will spend several hours reading is when Surfer and Surfing magazines arrive.

I try to find a book that will match their interests and then drop it in their general vicinity. (This can mean picking it up and dropping it several times.)

At best, my success has been middling. Three of the four read on their own, but it’s not steady; it comes in bursts. Last summer, my least academic child, who was working as a lifeguard six days a week, 10 hours a day, came home and sat for hours, deep into the night, rereading the six Harry Potters in preparation for the seventh. On his own he ordered the new one, picked it up at midnight and devoured it in a few days. Over the summer, my oldest read “Anna Karenina” to get ahead for the Russian lit course that he’s taking this fall at college.

For the last few weeks, before bed, I’ve been reading to my 13-year-old daughter, whose life is way too full of long, exhausting, overprogrammed days. We’re rereading her old picture books: “The Lorax” by Dr. Seuss; “A Bad Case of Stripes” by David Shannon; “The Seven Silly Eaters” by Mary Ann Hoberman. They’re relaxing and fun, and without going too deep into it, I think we’re both pining for a simpler, younger time.

The goal is to make them lifelong readers and therefore lifelong learners. I was a late bloomer and, I’m ashamed to say, didn’t make a fraction of what I should have of my college education. Though I took several history courses, I never understood basic things, like the Civil War. Then, in middle age, I stumbled upon “The Killer Angels,” by Michael Shaara, the Pulitzer Prize-winning historical novel on the Battle of Gettysburg. For the first time I felt what the Civil War was and suddenly had an urgent need to know more, consuming a couple dozen histories, biographies and memoirs over the next few years.

Recently I made a trip south with my twins to look at colleges. We were in Charleston, S.C., on a Friday night. The streets were full of young women from the College of Charleston in summer dresses and young men from the Citadel in their military dress whites and grays. It was something right out of a book.

Two books, actually, both by Pat Conroy. When we got home, I dropped “The Lords of Discipline” near the twin interested in military stuff, and “My Losing Season” near the jock twin.

It’s been weeks and the books sit in their original spots, unopened. But parenting is sometimes a war of attrition, and when it comes to reading, like Colonel Chamberlain at Gettysburg, General Grant at Vicksburg and General Sherman on his march to Atlanta, I believe the cause to be worth the fight, and am determined not to be deterred.