THIS MAY BE DIFFICULT TO READ

The author begins with a series of sobering statistics: Over 42 million Americans are defined as functionally illiterate (meaning they can’t follow written directions), 70% of high school graduates end up requiring some kind of remedial reading help, and 1 in 5 college students enrolls in a remedial reading class in their freshman year. As she points out, statistics like these are nothing new; Americans have heard for years that the systems tasked with building children’s literacy skills are failing. Rubman asserts that the goal of this book is to offer solutions to change this. “Together,” she writes, “we can analyze why, as a society, we seem to be failing to educate our nation’s children and why so many parents obsess so unsuccessfully over this process.” A central concept that runs throughout the book is introduced early: Children acquire their knowledge in their own way. “Remember, their brains are different from our brains,” Rubman writes. “They don’t think, speak, or learn like we do.” As the author explains, this is crucial to remember because, despite many parents’ hopes that their children will take to reading very early (before kindergarten), a child’s brain isn’t finished undergoing the process of myelination, in which neural pathways develop their message-bearing abilities. Allowing that process of natural development to work at its own pace is at the core of Rubman's revisionist approach to helping kids get the most out of their reading.

The author’s experience, insight, and, above all, compassion shine through on every page of her book, even when she’s carefully demolishing what she views as the incorrect thinking of earlier theorists on the subject of children’s literacy; for example, she extensively debunks the so-called “Mozart Effect” that was in vogue some years ago. She includes well-made graphics to illustrate concepts such as neural development, and she adds bullet-pointed sections and actual test passages designed to flesh out the intricacies of reading comprehension. Along the way, she clarifies a wide array of reading-related matters in ways that parents and educators will find very helpful: “It is not the size of the word that determines its level of difficulty, per se,” she writes of one such issue, “rather its phonetic friendliness and frequency of use…determine…the ‘ease’ with which it’s read.” Her myth-busting energy never flags, which is extremely helpful, as many adults remain beholden to popular fallacies. Regarding the idea that children learn better when they read to adults than they do when adults read to them, Rubman convincingly contends that the reverse is true. “When you read to children, you allow them the luxury of focusing their attentional energy on the meaning of the story,” she writes. “This is an ideal time to work on comprehension skills.” The author’s calm wisdom is very encouraging, and her main message—that there are no shortcuts and that development takes time—will be much appreciated by parents feeling peer pressure to produce little Einsteins.