Words Come Alive: The Multiple Intelligences of Reading and Writing

Presenter: Thomas Armstrong, Cloverdale, CA

This session is presented in separate parts. Use the buttons at the end of the transcription to navigate between each part.

Part Three

THOMAS ARMSTRONG: I am a writer, and I will tell you that one of the big payoffs for me at the end of a day of writing is that little thing in Microsoft Word called Word Count. And I will tell you, before the computer software kicked in, I used to sit down one, two, three, four, five, et cetera. Of course, there were some assignments where I was being paid by the word and that actually really was a big deal. But still, both my wife and I, my wife is writing her first book and I am working on my twelfth, and we still, at the end of the day, it is like, well, I did 1,300 words. It is like, congratulations, I only did 500. And it may seem kind of crazy, but the quantifying means something for kids.

Knowing what level that they are reading at. There is actually somebody I cite in my book who has worked out a readability formula that kids can work on for themselves. They can it use for themselves. So that any text they go to, they can work out a readability formula so they know they are reading at a seventh-grade level, eighth grade, tenth grade, that kind of thing. That is really good. It empowers. It is part of the empowering process that I will get to in a minute when I come to the social context of learning. In a bit.

First, we are going to do self-smart. And in self-smart, intrapersonal intelligence, I am going to talk particularly about emotions, about the emotional dimension of self-smart. Self-smart involves lots of things. It involves goal setting. It involves assessing yourself, what you are good at, what you are not good at. It involves personal reflection. I am going to focus on the part that involves knowing your emotions. If you want, the “emotional intelligence" of Daniel Goldman, because I think part of that fits into this model very well.

I am going to put some text up on the screen. I am not going to read it out loud. I am just going to put it up, and then I want you to notice any emotions that you have in relationship to this text.

[Pause]

THOMAS ARMSTRONG: How many people noticed an emotion as they read this text?

[A show of hands]

THOMAS ARMSTRONG: I am not asking you what kind of an emotion. Just notice if there is any emotion that comes up. I want to just suggest that the emotional quality of what we read is incredibly important. As we read, we are having emotions. Even if we are having an emotion, "this is crap," "this is the most boring thing I have ever read," that is an emotion.

Maybe there is an experience of deadness that accompanies reading experience. I mean, a total vacuity of emotion, which would be an interesting research study, again, for a master's degree or doctoral dissertation. Because it might be highly prevalent in large sections of our kids. And if it is, we should know about it. And please get back to me. Because we know that, in terms of the brain, that information that we take in through our senses, a lot of that is filtered through our emotional brain first before it gets processed by even the linguistic parts of our neocortex. That means we have feelings about things before we think about them.

I like to sometimes call this area of the brain, or certain parts of it, the Beavis and Butthead brain. Because Beavis and Butthead take everything in the known universe and put it into one of two categories. Either something is cool or it sucks. That is kind of their level. In terms of Bloom's taxonomy of educational objectives, they do not rise very high. Either it is cool or it sucks. But, believe it or not, that is what your students do when they sit down and read text. The first moment, within probably a fifth of second, they have decided either this is cool and I am going to get involved or this sucks and I am going to use my brain for other things.

Now, that is pretty important. Because if we do not get them right at the beginning, we may have lost them for the rest of the lesson, for the rest of the day, for the rest of the year, for the rest of their lives. So, thinking about how emotion relates to reading is incredibly, incredibly important.

There is also, interestingly enough, in terms of semantic processing, there is an area or areas analogous to Wernicke's area in the right hemisphere of the brain that processes loose word associations. The really best example of this is Freud and Freud's whole approach to slips of the tongue, to word associations. They do that word association test. They say a word and then you just say as many words as came into your mind.

A lot of that may be actually sort of a semi-linguistic area in the right hemisphere of the brain that processes. When you read a word, it will process any kinds of emotional association words that you have in relationship to that. There is actually a condition, called deep dyslexia, that may be related to this area of the brain. Deep dyslexia are people who will read the word spirit and they will say whiskey instead of spirit. Now whiskey and spirit, it does not even sound like it. It does not look like it. It does not sound like. So, what is going on here? Well, spirits are another way of referring to whiskey. So, they are making kind of a loose word association here.

There is a part of their brain that works fine. These are people that have actual aphasias and dysphasias in Wernicke's area in the left hemisphere, but in the right hemisphere it is working fine, and so they are making these loose word associations. They are coming up with something that sounds right but is kind of way off. So, there is some interesting neurological support not just for the limbic system but also for this sort of interesting right hemispheric semantic processing area. And that means when kids read, we ought to pay attention not just to what they are reading but what other words do they say.

Bruno Bettelheim was a psychoanalyst that came in Freud's wake, who wrote this wonderful book on reading that I have cited in the resources, where he says look at kid's mistakes and notice if those mistakes are related to sort of subconscious associations that they are making. This is kind of a lame example, but he gives it. He says if a child is reading a word and the word is supposed to be tiger, the child says tigger — please, don't moan on this, because I know psychoanalysis is really not in its heyday right now — but he says maybe the child is trying to make this animal less ferocious, less threatening.

So, what are some strategies? First of all, link phonemes to emotions. I bring my Mad magazine fetish in here. What I love is they used to come up with these great words — "scroinch," "thwark," "stoink." There, you've got all kinds of blends to work with us. On a simple level, you have those Batman "pow," "zam," working with all those consonant sounds.

Even boiling it down on a simpler level, you look at A-Y, "Ay." "Ay, that's the Fonz. Ay." Or "Oy." "Oy, I had a bad day." There are emotional expressions that link up to specific phonemes, that if we can make those connections with kids, then they are learning the phonemes as emotional expressions, they're going to embed it in their limbic system and remember it far longer than they are just by saying "the." Say the phoneme "the." "The, the, the, the." Boy, that's exciting. "The, the, the."

And think of the affect going on. I want you to go back to your reading programs and I want you to look at your reading programs. And I want you to do kind of an affect reading. You might do a little kind of a line, where a straight line would be a flatlander classroom. No affect, dead affect. And where something like this would be, whoa, a lively classroom.

I want you to do some kind of readout like that on these reading programs and find out where the affect level is. Because if kids are not learning with affect — and I have to get a little bit emotional about this — then they're not going to learn. They're not going to learn.

And why is it that reading instruction is often the most boring part of the curriculum, since it is the most important thing we want to teach them? It's crazy. I just don't understand.

Words. Now, this is something you've all used. I use it all the time. But why don't we use it more often, vocabulary words with kids? Mind mapping. Of course, they can't say mind mapping because somebody put a trademark on it, right? I love this. With the whole corporatization and commercialization somebody slaps a trademark on "thinking." So, if you use that word, I have proprietary rights on that word.

This is from Gabriel Lusser Rico's wonderful book on Writing the Natural Way, which I've cited in your resources. And she uses this approach for kids writing, taking the theme and putting it in the middle, mind-mapping. In this case we could take a vocabulary word or any word and just spin out associations. You may be using that Wernicke right hemisphere semantic processing area. And then use those associations to put together a more left hemispheric, linear kind of poem or narrative or understanding of the meaning of the word.

Sentences. Use humor in teaching syntax. Why is it that when we teach syntax we use some of the stupidest, most boring, most innocuous sentences? Why don't we use comedian's one-liners, from Henny Youngman or from Woody Allen? Again, I am going to turn to Shakespeare and his insults. He is wonderful for his insults. "Thou hast not so much brain as earwax," from Troilus and Cressida. From Macbeth, "Thine horrid image doth unfix my hair." These are great. These are great sentences from Shakespeare that we can use for various kinds of sentence structure, parts of speech, et cetera.

Again, we could do this with comedians, with funny stuff, with sad stuff, et cetera.

Text. Select passionate material. I think I have been indicating this. In fact, another thing I want you to do is go to the exhibit area, and there is a lot of text being advertised at the exhibit area. I want you to pick up different texts at random, and I want you to sit there and ask yourself, is this passionate text? Is this text passionate? Is this text going to awaken somebody's emotions and get them thinking?

Now, I'm going to give you an example of what for me was passionate text. I was getting ready to go to Japan. I was reading for about two months beforehand books on Japan, Japanese literature. And one of the books I read was Yukio Mishima's The Sailor who Fell from Grace with the Sea. Has anybody read that book? It like seared the paint off of me. It brought the hairs on the back of my neck sticking out. It's incredible.

It's about these 13-year-olds that have this kind of little gang. And one of the things that they do, to begin with, is they smash a baby kitten to death. Part of their ethos is to be hard, to be strong, not to have any emotions, and to despise all adults. It's a little bit of a Japanese version of "Lord of the Flies," only, to me, it goes much more deep.

And here is a piece of text to just give you a sense of this. This is the head of the gang, the 13-year-olds, saying: "Fathers, just think about it for a minute. They're enough to make you puke. Fathers are evil itself, laden with everything ugly in man. They stand in the way of our progress while they try to burden us with their inferiority complexes and their unrealized aspirations and their resentments and their ideals and the weaknesses they've never told anybody about and their sins and their sweeter-than-honey dreams and the maxims they've never had the courage to live by."

And I'm going, oh, my God, I can't take this. This is intense stuff. I'm not necessarily recommending you use this with your 13-year-olds. I'm just saying this is passionate stuff. And Mishima was an incredibly passionate man. In fact, I don't know if you know his story, but he said to the public, I am going to write four books, a tetralogy, called The Fertile Sea, and when I finish with my fourth book, I'm going to kill myself. And he wrote his four books over a series of years. And when he was finished with the last book, he had a bunch of followers who were martial arts — one of his things was to bring back the Samurai tradition in Japan that had been devastated by United States attacks. In fact, Japan, signed this agreement with the U.S. and the allies, said it would not have armed forces. And so they had to call their group peacekeeping forces. And Mishima really resented that. He said, we need to go back to our martial tradition. This is part of our deep cultural identity.

So, he went to the center of where these peacekeeping headquarters were with his followers and he committed what they call seppuku. Seppuku is something that we know as hara-kiri. We call it hara-kiri. It's really hara-kira. Hara is the belly, kira means to slit. So, he slit his belly open. And then, right after he did that, one of his followers chopped his head off.

I'm happy to say it was not filmed. But I just want to say that this is a guy who lived a passionate life his whole writing career, to the extreme. I'm just giving you the extreme example, and I'm suggesting. I'm not giving this out as a role model. I'm not giving this out as an example for everyone to follow. I'm just saying, wow, look, there are writers like this out there in the world, who write with such incredible passion that we ought to wake ourselves up.

I think it was Kafka who said reading is the axe that hacks into the frozen sea which is us, that reading should have that impact. We treat reading in education as this sort of scientific endeavor. I think that's the way that it's promulgated these days, with that whole research-based approach. It's all very scientific, these are what our numbers tell us, this is what we do, and that's all we have to do.

Well, talk to any real writer and that's not what reading and writing is all about. Reading and writing is all about self. It's about communication. It's about passion, et cetera.

Books. Any book having an emotional theme will work here. I'm going to go less for Mishima now and more for Alexander and The Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day. I think you're a little safer here. There is passion. There is emotion. Nobody is getting hurt.

Literacy styles. Journaling, giving kids emotional space. Giving them an emotional space to have feelings. You can't do that during sustained silent reading. Do we have sustained silent crying? Do we have sustained silent laughing? We ought to, because kids ought to feel permission when they read to have reactions to it.

That's another reason why I think kids should own their books and be able to write in them. Because having this relationship, an emotional relationship, with a book, where you can write in something like, geez, why did he do that? Or, boy, that was stupid. I do this all the time when I'm reading. I can't believe a character would act that way, and I get so mad or angry or I get so triumphant. That kind of thing. This is how kids should learn how to read, by having this kind of emotional dialogue and having the emotional space to know that they can have emotions.

They're having emotions all the time out on the playground. They are beating each other up. We're labeling them for it. Wouldn't it be better if they had those emotions in relationship to the text? I think Freud called that sublimation, and I think that's a good thing for education.

Let's go on to people smart. And we have about a half-hour. I'm going to try to leave you about 10 minutes for some comments and questions and answers, but let me just go through the last two as quickly as I can.

People smart. Here we have two phrases: Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation. And: If you act now, you can receive at absolutely no extra cost this special one-time offer.

I want you to take a minute to turn to a partner and discuss what is really fundamentally different about these two sentences.

[Pause]

THOMAS ARMSTRONG: I've been asked to come down to the podium, since this is being recorded, and actually get your direct verbal responses to this.

What is fundamentally different about these two sentences? Yes?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Formal versus informal.

THOMAS ARMSTRONG: Okay, one is formal and one is informal. Moral and informal in what sense?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: The top one seems to have — I don't know — the language just seems more ordered and formal, where the bottom one, it seems more simplistic.

THOMAS ARMSTRONG: All right. Another response?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: The first one makes me want to ponder, and the second one just makes me want to move fast.

THOMAS ARMSTRONG: Interesting. So, a temporal kind of a thing going on.

How about some other comments?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: One has a timeless quality, while the other is highly perishable.

THOMAS ARMSTRONG: Now, which one would be which?

[Laughter]

THOMAS ARMSTRONG: Okay, interesting examples. And they all kind of point to something that I wanted to use here to bring us into the next kind of smart. And that is the social context. I think the social context may be responsible for the formality, for the level of speed. The social and the historical context, too. In terms of speed, one actually happened 150 years ago or so. One could have happened more recently. So, we're looking at historical context, we're looking at social context. We're looking at the Gettysburg Address. We're looking at a President of the United States making an important statement about an incredible event that occurred, maybe the most incredible event that has ever occurred, in United States history.

And in the lower one, we're looking at a context in which somebody, who is unnamed, is attempting to sell some kind of product, perhaps on television, perhaps on the radio, perhaps through the newspaper.

So, these are both sentences of about the same length, and of course there are sort of stylistic differences that reflect the contexts. To point it out even more, I want you to reverse these two sentences. I want you to think about the "Four score and seven years ago" coming out of the radio and I want you to think of Lincoln saying, "If you act now, you can receive," at the Gettysburg Address. Just think about reversing those roles in those two contexts. And it seems ridiculous. It seems maybe, to some of you, unpatriotic perhaps. Who knows what your reactions are. But something doesn't work when we change the social context.

What I want to suggest here is that all language, all words exist in a social context. No reading and no writing occurs in a social vacuum. There is always a social context for it. Even if a child is reading "The cat sat on the mat," there is a social context for that. What is the social context?

There is somebody who wants to teach me how to read. There is somebody who is thinking — I'm not saying the kid is thinking this, but I'm saying we looking at this — somebody, somewhere said we want kids to read, let's create a program. Hey, this is a good such-and-such we could use. There is a researcher who says yes, this supports it. So, there are social networks going on. There is somebody thinking, hey, we can sell this. How much should we sell it for? How should we promote it? We certainly can't talk about it during the ASCD conference. There are all kinds of prohibitions and allowances and things that we can say and not say. That's all social context within that one sentence.

So, we shouldn't make allusions to ourselves in thinking that, oh, yes, this is just for purely pedagogical reasons. That's social context. As opposed to purely advertising reasons. As opposed to purely political reasons. As opposed to et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So, that is a very important context.

Now, in terms of the brain, we're certainly looking at the front lobes here. We are looking at areas of the frontal and prefrontal lobes that are related to what cognitive scientists and neuropsychologists are calling mind reading these days. We're finding increasing articles in brain research using the term "mind reading." And I don't want anybody to think, wow, are they finally discovering the neurological basis for ESP? It doesn't have anything to do with ESP. It has to do with how is it that I know what you might be thinking or what somebody else might be thinking. How do I know what Lincoln might be thinking when I read that text? How are we able to make those different evaluations of those two sentences?

By going into the mind of the writer or by going into the social context and being in the shoes of somebody else and looking back at ourselves. This is, of course, what kids are always doing when they're reading. They are getting into the shoes of another character. They are getting into the shoes of the writer. They are trying to figure out, what does the writer want me to know? They are having to get into the shoes of the teacher. What does the teacher want me to know?

They are having to get into, hopefully — and I'll get into this in a minute — hopefully, they are going to look at text with a broad social consciousness, and they are going to ask really, basically, what is the social context in which I'm reading this? I'll come back to that in a minute.

Frederick Douglass. I've included his autobiography in the resources because it's a wonderful example of looking at social context in relationship to literacy. First of all, in his autobiography, he talks about how he learned to read. Of course, it was not only illegal but a black person could be killed for teaching another person to read. And so he wasn't allowed to read through that channel. He was a slave in a master's house, who originally the mistress of the house taught him a little bit, but then the master found out and got really angry. And then she tightened up and wouldn't teach him and got angry at him. So, he had no access to books or learning. But he took advantage of the social context.

When he was sent out on errands, he would look for little white boys who had these copy books from school. And he had some bread with him that he had saved. And in fact, the strange thing was a lot of these white boys who had access to educational opportunity did not have access to food. And they were hungry, smart little boys.

So, he traded some of the bread for reading lessons. And he would get these kind of on-the-spot, right there on the street corner, teach me how to do this, do this. And that's how he learned. He learned through what we now would call peer teaching, peer learning. He learned by using an understanding of social context, that little white boys maybe have access to education but they don't have access to bread, and that's something I can give them. So, in terms of working out a relationship there.

Then he learned how to read and write in that way. Then, as he learned to read and write, he became aware of his own status as an enslaved person. He became conscious of who he was, how he was not allowed to read in this context, how he was not allowed to do a lot of things. And he began to use his own reading and writing to emancipate not just himself but his own group of people, his own African Americans, and also other minorities around the world who have been inspired by his autobiography.

So, in this context, literacy is connected to social emancipation. It's connected to freedom. We cannot talk about literacy apart from these kinds of issues. Certainly, in places like South America, Paola Freiere has done a lot of teaching reading by going into the social context of farmers, of workers, of using their language. He has in fact a whole incredible phonics program that doesn't quite work as well in English, because, again, English has such irregularity with its vowels and patterns. In my book I talked a little bit about Freiere’s phonics program and how we might apply it into English and in other ways. The point is he didn't simply teach the mechanics of phonics, he taught it in relationship to being oppressed, being empowered, literacy empowered.

I talked earlier about how words have muscle. Words have power, political power, social power, in terms of people using words in powerful ways to make statements about the conditions that they're under, the conditions that they won't stand for and the conditions that they wish to have.

We look at the impact of books on the social climate. Just look at these four books right here. Look at the Hebrew and Christian Bible. Look at the Koran, which actually originally was more of an oral tradition. For all accuracy to Islam, the Koran is not the book. The Koran is actually the recitation, which is what it means. Koran means recitation. It's actually recitation to Mohammed from the word of God. So, that's really the Koran. This is just sort of a representation of it.

The Communist Manifesto and Charles Darwin's The Origin of the Species. Thing about the credible social impact each of these books has had. The two books on the top, for over 1,000 years and going back 3,000 years in some cases, and the bottom two in the last 100-150 years. Just changing people's minds, moving millions of people towards an objective, towards belief systems. And these were all books. Just like Frames of Mind started the whole multiple intelligences thing, the social context of reading and writing, the social context of kids. What do we ask kids to do? What kind of social context is there when we simply ask kids to write an essay that gets graded and thrown away? What is the social context of that?

Why, instead, don't we help kids created and realize that writing involves making things happen in the social world? So, a program of reading and writing that involves writing letters to politicians, that involves creating Web sites to make statements, that involves social action. I love this one, where the kids use their literacy skills to support their teachers. Pay our teachers. Give them a fair hearing. They cannot live on hot air. We want school. What a strong statement of their own literacy skills.

How different that is from a kid writing, "The bat sat on the mat" or some sort of innocuous thing that is demanded of them in a research-based reading program or writing program.

Sounds. Create sound groups of experts. These are some very simple, not earth-shaking strategies. Take the 44 phonemic sounds and assign one to each child, and they become the expert for that sound. And then any time anybody has any trouble with that sound, hey, go see Eric. Here's the "ra-ra" specialist, or the R specialist, or the "ew." Go see the "ew" person for that. Well, the "e" person can help you with that. So, there is a social context of learning.

Another simple approach. This is really simple, people spelling. I'm just going to pass that without comment.

People sentences is a little bit more fun. You can take the parallel and non-parallel sentences, for example, and give everybody fragments, and then they have to organize themselves. Let's say there are two sentences that they could make from all the slips, and in order to do it right they have to organize themselves into two distinct groups that both are in parallel. If they do it wrong, they will both be a non-parallel structure.

Or we take clauses and have kids complete the clause. There is all kinds of stuff you can do socially with that.

Text. This is what I wanted to come back to. Help kids decipher the social context of text. Notice the context. Again, we see the word "text" repeating itself, as we did with texture.

"Just do it." Our kids are exposed to that all the time. What is the social context of that sentence? Well, this little cartoon suggests one possible social context for understanding it. "Just do it" was written to promote product, to sell product. What product? Well, sneakers. Where do these sneakers come from? Well, Third World countries. Well, under what conditions were these sneakers made? Well, gee, we don't really want to talk about that. We'll have our public relations specialist get back to you on that.

It's sort of the Michael Moore kind of thing. In fact, Michael Moore, I wish he would do a movie on literacy. I'm sure he would do something really great. He's the guy who did "Bowling for Columbine," and he also did what I even like better, which was "Roger & Me," where he tries to look up the General Motors guy. Because he is interested in social context. All these things that we take for granted, we read them, we read the latest slogans and they go in and out of our ears, but we don't stop and say, what's this all about? Who made it? Who created it? For what purpose? Does this help us get freer or less free? What does it have to do with our economic system? What does it have to do with our political system?

These are all related to issues that have now been given the term "critical literacy." Critical literacy, of course, some people take it to a definite social level. Other people use it at a fairly innocuous level, like saying — and I don't want to minimize this, but they are sort of minimizing it by saying, well, all I have to do to be critically literate is to see whether or not this book favors boys or girls. That's important. I don't want to minimize that. But I'm just suggesting that we have to look larger than simply asking a simple question of whether or not this favors this group or that group. We have to look at the context in which it's written.

There is all too much, for example, tokenism. Make sure we get an African American in the story. Make sure we get a Hispanic in the story. Which has nothing to do with the story. It doesn't enrich the story. The social context is somebody wants to be politically correct so they can sell text. You see what I'm saying?

In another story, there is actually a reason for it. So, be critical about why texts are the way they are. Why they include things and why they don't include things. The whole issue of censorship. Why don't I get to read this? Why did we skip that part, teacher?

I always remember reading Catcher in the Rye, and The Child Buyer. There is a section in The Child Buyer where the kid describes sex. And somehow we skipped that part. It was like eleventh grade. And I said, we skipped that part; why didn't we do that part? And there is this kind of murmuring and all that, and nothing said anything. And we just sort of went on with it.

So, do social context. That's also, of course, the emotions happening or, rather, not happening.

Books. There are some interesting books, like this one, where kids sit around. First, let me say that any book that has social action connected to it. Free Spirit — well, I'm not supposed to promote books. So, I'll just say there are a lot of books out there that help kids develop social action plans, that deal with social issues.

My book has a list of book lists that are related to minorities. I have another book list that is related to gender. There are 500 Books for Girls, 500 Books for Boys. There is a book on sexual orientations, books related to gay, lesbian and transgender issue, book lists, rather, of literature. So, that kind of thing, to expose kids to those sorts of social issues that are real, that aren't being censored.

But also, on just kind of a more pedestrian level, board games, where kids can actually sit down, open the book and gather around it in a social context. So, you're saying that books aren't just individual books to be read, but they can be gathered around and you can actually interact with them on a social level.

And then, finally, this is a no-brainer, reading and writing together. Creating literacy programs where kids are writing for social purposes, I would add to that.

Major smart. I just want you to read this and kind of put yourself in nature and experience the natural quality of this sentence. If you want to close your eyes for a minute, open your senses.

[Pause]

THOMAS ARMSTRONG: This is I guess what we would traditionally call this haiku. It's really not exactly haiku. When I was in Japan, I got really interested in this idea of what I thought was haiku and it turns out to be hokku. And hokku is actually the first part of something called tanka.

And tanka is something that is connected with this thing called renga, which is sort of this linked verse, where poets would gather together and they would create — well, of course, the haiku is the 5-7-5, and then add the 7-7, add two more lines of seven syllables and you get a tanka. And then you take a tanka, and one poet would recite a tanka, and then another poet would come and link with another tanka that would link with it and yet improve on it and keep it moving. And this whole process of linked verse, which would go on sometimes for days, is called renga. And it's like this incredible literacy context that is really interesting to look at in another culture.

In Kyoto, when I was at the Imperial Palace, the tour guide there was saying that in old Imperial days, the Imperial people would be on the river. And they would send a glass of sake in a little boat down the river. And as soon as they let it go, people would have to start writing downriver. They would have to start writing these tankas. And by the time the sake came, they would have to say their tanka. And there would be judges there. And if it was good enough, they would get to take the sake and drink it. If it wasn't good enough, they would have to let it alone and let somebody downstream get a crack at it.

So, it was a really wonderful social context in which literacy took place within a natural context. One of the most amazing things about being in Japan was understanding the appreciation they have for nature. They have half the population of the United States and live on 1/25th the land. So, loving what they have, this natural element, it showed up in so many different ways. And it shows up in their literature.

In fact, one of the criteria of a good tanka is having a relationship, something in it, related to nature. In this case we've got the pond and the frog, and all of it is related to nature.

Nature. What does this have to do with the brain and reading? Well, interestingly enough, there are some areas of the parietal lobe that can result in a certain kind of aphasia that results in a person not being able to name things that are found inside a house or inside any kind of dwelling, but they can name things that are outside. There is another kind of aphasia where they can name things that are living but they cannot name things that are not living, suggesting that there are areas of the brain that make those linguistic differentiations.

And I think it's curious that it's not the other way around. In other words, people usually don't have the problem of being able to name things inside but not name things outside, suggesting that the ability to link words with nature has priority. For survival reasons, no doubt.

And if you look at the history of literature — in fact, I found a wonderful study just before my book went to press. My sister e-mailed me a wonderful study that I managed to include in the book which suggests that reading may be traced back to reading animal tracks. That we may have been predisposed neurologically into reading. I mean, reading is a very recent phenomenon. We've been reading, what, for 5,000 years, but we have been speaking for 125,000 years. And we have been hunting animals and reading animal tracks for a lot longer than that.

So, obviously, on some level our neurology is more comprehensive for these earlier tasks, and then became more and more specialized for these. It amazes me that anybody can read, the more and more I study it and think about it, and how specialized it is. But we do have access to all of these neurological antecedents in terms of animal tracks.

In terms of literacy itself, we know that literacy probably came into existence to control nature. For example, the Egyptians had the Nile which would flood on a regular basis. They wanted to make the most of it, so they created these irrigation canals. Once they created all these irrigation canals, they had to communicate with each other about it. They had to figure out some way of communicating. They came up with words. So, this is suggesting a direct link, again, with words and nature.

I can say more about it, but I want to get some questions soon.

Sounds. Link phonemes to nature sounds. I went into the Audubon Book of Birds, and the Bohemian waxwing is our "Zoom, zoom." And our burrowing owl is our "Caroo, Caroo, Caroo."

My wife took some animals and took like the "e" sound and put them in their "i's," the "oo" sound for the owl. She got the visual, spatial and the natural, et cetera. So, it would be interesting to have kids listen to nature sounds and then, what phonemes are those? Or vice-versa. Take the phonemes and see what sounds in nature make those phonemes.

The same thing with words. Use automata poetic nature words, twas brillig, and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe. Have kids go out and listen to nature and write down the sounds that they hear from nature.

"Brack. Brack."

What is that? Put that together. Why can't we translate that into words?

For the child who lives in nature, this is a way of bringing nature directly into the linguistic world.

Sentences. Use nature analogies. Sentences in parallel structure, non-parallel structure, parallel structure, non-parallel structure. So, use nature analogies.

Text. Experience nature through text. There are so many wonderful nature writers. I picked Annie Dillard here as an example, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. How many of you people have read that? It's a wonderful, wonderful book. I think she won the Pulitzer Prize for this.

"By the path I discovered a wonderful tulip tree sapling, three feet talk. From its tip grew two thin slips of green tissue shaped like two tiers. They enclosed like cupped palms sheltering a flame, a tiny tulip leaf that was curled upon itself and bowed neatly at the middle. The leaf was so thin and etiolated."

There's a vocabulary word. Go out and look it up.

"It was translucent but at the same time it was limpid" -- there's another one; I had to look this one up — "minutely, with a kind of pale, insufficient light."

Just beautiful, beautiful, beautiful descriptions of nature. Minute descriptions of nature. If kids are exposed to this kind of beautiful nature writing, they go out into nature and write about nature from this kind of role modeling, from this inspiration, especially for kids who are nature oriented. But there are parts of our brain that are more naturally predisposed towards words and nature words, rather than sitting inside kind of words. It's going to be a real nice addition to a literacy program.

Books. Again, I'm going to look at Klutz here. They have a gardening book that comes with its own seeds and its own digger. I think Workman has some books like that.

Literacy styles. Well, let kids read and write in natural settings, obviously. And here is something I like. There is actually a program in Colorado, called READ, and please don't ask me what it is. Just look it up on the Internet. It helps kids read by having them read to pets, having them read to animals. And they're doing the standardized tests and everything and they're finding kids' reading abilities go up when they're reading to pets.

Hey, why are you reading to pets? Well, maybe pets aren't going to judge them. "Say it this way." "Say it that way." "You didn't get the main idea." The pet is just listening. Isn't it wonderful to have a non-judgmental being there, just kind of there? Maybe it'll even lick you afterwards if you're lucky.

[Laughter]

THOMAS ARMSTRONG: I've mentioned the resources here, Freiere, et cetera, et cetera. Again, this book will be out next month. I can mention my ASCD books at an ASCD convention. And so, in case you're not aware of them, they are in fact Multiple Intelligences in the Classroom, which is now in its second edition. It includes natural intelligence and has a chapter on existential ADD/ADHD alternatives in the classroom, and "Awakening Venus in the Classroom."

And let me take some questions or comments.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Can you link through references to your Web site, because we can't read them.

THOMAS ARMSTRONG: You can't read them?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: No.

THOMAS ARMSTRONG: Oh, my gosh. That reminds me of the Oxford English Dictionary. I've got the one-volume edition that has the magnifying glass, but I did not provide the magnifying glass. So, yes, I will do that. I'll make a linkage to those references when I get back home.

Actually, also, they are going to stream this whole workshop on the Internet. So, if you go to ASCD and just look up audio-streamed workshops, they're going to have this. They are also going to have a tape of it, but I think they will have the video. I've given all the slides to the guy who is going to do the visual streaming. But I will go back and try to do it myself. I am my own Web master. If you don't see it, e-mail me and I'll send it to you.

Also, just in terms of ASCD connections, if you go to ASCD after the book comes out, they will probably have one or two chapters that you can read online for free. Just as they have two chapters of my other three books that I just showed you, you can go online and I think download two whole chapters of each of those books. Also, there is an interview with me on the ASCD site on this new book coming out, and there may be some information I didn't get into here.

Other questions? We still have a whole three minutes left. There is so much information.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Can you cite the source again for the contact in Colorado for having pet therapy dogs?

THOMAS ARMSTRONG: Look it up under R.E.A.D. It's part of this animal therapeutics program. And I'm sorry that I didn't include it in the references. I was just rushing and I'm jetlagged from Japan. But I know excuses are no excuse. Again, if you want that and you don't get it, just e-mail me.

The fourth page of your handouts is the way you can contact me. It's the front page of my Web site. So, I've got the e-mail address there and the Web site address. Anything that you have, any questions, comments, resources you didn't get, wanted to get, just e-mail me and I'll send them to you.

Any other substantial questions about the material, content related, complaints? I did a lot of grandstanding here. A two-minute passionate outburst would be fine.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: No, no passionate outburst. I think that the whole topic, it would have been nice if you would have had a little bit more time to slow it down. You know, non-intelligences, if you just don't think as fast as other people.

THOMAS ARMSTRONG: I agree with you. They don't give us a lot of time. I just wanted to share it all. And we live in a short attention span culture, so I'm sorry. Well, we will have more time.

Thank you.

[Applause]

THOMAS ARMSTRONG: By the way, if you want to stop, I'll be here for a while. If you want to have some one-to-one kind of stuff, I'll stay here for a few minutes. So, thanks for coming.

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