The "I'm Ready Now!" Podcast
Ideas to help you when you're ready for change.
The "I'm Ready Now!" Podcast
EP 18: Mastering the Art of Reading for Personal Growth--Your Path to Success! (Hey, you! Read a book!)
Did you know that reading for just six minutes a day can significantly reduce stress? Here, we highlight the profound impact of reading, backed by my 32 years of experience as a high school English teacher. By fostering a love for literature through Sustained Silent Reading (SSR), I've witnessed firsthand the transformative power of reading. We explore how this seemingly small habit enhances empathy, boosts mental focus, and connects to success.
Welcome to the I'm Ready Now podcast ideas to help you when you're ready for change. I'm your host, isaac Sanchez, here. I share my musings on whatever it is I am reading at the moment, as well as any other ideas that I believe will help you break free from a standstill in your thinking in order to get you dreaming again. Thank you for joining me today. Well, I'm ready now. How about you? Excellent, so let's get started. Welcome back to the I'm Ready Now podcast. Thank you for joining me. I'm excited that we are together again. I always look forward to this time and I appreciate you being here. It wouldn't be the same if you were not here, so thank you for that. Here are the standard reminders. First, there are the chapter markers on this podcast. So if you want to get straight to the content and it's going to be good use those markers to skip right ahead. No harm, no foul. I understand. Also, remember that in the description of this episode, there's a link you can tap to text me there. You can leave your feedback on the topics we're addressing as well. You can always email me at IsaacSanchez, at Maccom, and I look forward to hearing from you.
Speaker 1:So what's up in your world For me organization. What's up in your world For me organization? Yep, I'm trying to learn new concrete ways to organize multiple projects and ideas that I'm responsible for that I'm shooting for. For example, one is home details, just finances, general plans here around the house, things that we're doing around here. Another is work responsibilities there's grading to do, planning to do. I'm working with a colleague on trying to come up with the curriculum for our freshman English classes.
Speaker 1:A third is this podcast. I have a vision for it and the idea of just setting time to make it happen is something that takes my time and needs to be organized. A fourth is a business my wife and I are working on together now and that just to kind of get that thing to fly. Exciting, but it's taking some effort. A fifth is a personal curriculum of learning more about photography and video. I need to be really good at these skills so that it doesn't take me as long to do things that I'm going to be doing weekly, and so if I'm going to be doing them every week, I better get good at them, and I know there's a time where you outsource this stuff, but I'm not ready for that now. So, anyways, those are about five things that I'm working on, and you know there are others, but you see why I'm needing to nail down a method to set goals and priorities and work around those goals in order to execute and not become paralyzed and thought over when something's supposed to happen next and how it's going to happen. So I'm making piles of files, paperwork and books for each of these different things, but there's got to be a better way to organize stuff and make things happen.
Speaker 1:Also, I've lined up a few books to get my brain in that space, and this relates to what we're talking about today. But this is a key for me that instead of me just always trying to figure it out on my own, I'm trying to hear from other experts on this. So some of the books that I'm looking at is the Power of One More by Ed Milet. I'm looking at is the Power of One More by Ed Milet. Your Best Year Ever by Michael Hyatt. Today Matters by John Maxwell and, a favorite of mine, seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Dr Stephen Covey. Some of these it's the whole book. Some of these there are sections of the book that focus on goal setting and prioritizing. So I just know that, with time managed properly and that's a whole other area to focus on a lot can get done in these projects, and time blocking is something that I'm working on and that's critical to managing projects in order to reach goals. So I've got work to do in this area, and all I know to do is to immerse myself into what others with experience are saying about this and learn from them by applying best practices that look like they can work for me too. So, anyways, that's what's happening, so wish me luck.
Speaker 1:Well, let's move into this week's talk quite apropos for what I just shared, and that's reading. So do you remember? Last week I told you you should get that library card and speed reading course and play catch up for today's topic. So you had all week to get on that. Well, I hope so. Today, dan Miller calls us out and shouts hey, you read a book. Well, let's find out why he's so adamant about that. So let's open up to chapter one. Dan Miller says that for years, average Americans read less than one book a year, and he makes this point because of the rapid change in learning, college degrees becoming obsolete within five years unless the holder continues to read. So I looked up some new info on this and found the following and this just comes from a Google search. You know they give you the AI overview results and what they say here, and this was just this week the average American reads around 12 books per year, so that's better.
Speaker 1:However, reading habits vary by age, gender and education. Let me read some of this from you a couple of bullets worth of information here. So the distinction by age here it goes Adults over 65 tend to read more books than any other age group. Then you go by gender. They broke it up by that Women tend to read more books than men. In 2021, women read an average of 15.7 books, while men read an average of 9.5. Come on, guys, we got to step that up. And then by education. It says college graduates are more likely to read books than those who have not attended college, and they point out that in 2023, excuse me 73% of US adults with a college degree said they read at least one book, compared to 44% of those without a college degree. They continue by saying that other factors that can affect reading habits include culture, lifestyle, personal interests. For example, they say the rise of social media usage in the US is mostly blamed for young people's lack of interest in reading. They mentioned that setting a goal for how many books to read each year can help increase reading frequency and overall enjoyment. So there you go Having a plan, you know, helps that out. So interesting.
Speaker 1:I also want to read a few more data points to you. This is a website called Above and Beyond ABA Therapy. Aba is Applied Behavior Analysis. This was new to me too. So ABA Applied Behavior Analysis is a behavioral therapy that uses positive reinforcement to help people with developmental and behavioral disorders improve their skills and behaviors. Aba therapy, it continues, is based on the idea that behaviors that are reinforced will increase, while those that are not will decrease. Okay, well, many of us know that. You know what's rewarded gets repeated.
Speaker 1:They go on to give 10 key statistics about reading. I'll go through them pretty quickly. One 32% of the population reads books for pleasure. The average American reads only 12 books per year. 42% of college graduates never read another book after college. Reading for just six minutes a day can reduce stress levels by 68%. I'd do it just for that right there.
Speaker 1:Number five reading can increase empathy and emotional intelligence. Six children who are read to at home have a higher success rate in school. Seven reading can improve sleep quality. There's the number two reason to read right there, you guys. Eight reading can increase vocabulary and improve writing skills. Nine reading can improve mental focus and concentration. Dang, there's number three. Ten reading can reduce the risk of developing Alzheimer's disease. There you go. There's another important one.
Speaker 1:So this is just reinforcing with new numbers, updated numbers, what Dan Miller was pointing out there at the beginning that people aren't reading enough. So he has a great quote. Dan Miller does, and he says reading sweeps the cobwebs away, it increases our power of concentration, it makes us more interesting to be around and it keeps us abreast of new trends and opportunities. I like that a whole lot. Those are great reasons to be reading. He says that reading just 10 minutes a day will give us a book read in one month. Not bad math there.
Speaker 1:So let me share a little bit. There's something called SSR and that's sustained silent reading. I believe I've shared that. I'm a high school English teacher in the past. I've mentioned that here. I've been in education for 32 years. 26 of those years have been as a teacher and so, as I mentioned this idea of SSR, we have 10 minutes of SSR sustained silent reading in my classroom every morning During that SSR time.
Speaker 1:Students get to read whatever it is that they choose to read. Now there are a few days where I have to set the SSR time aside because of other work that needs to get done, particularly during an altered schedule that gives us less time in class than we normally have. Every three weeks we go to the library and students get to select whatever books they would like to read. I don't put any restrictions on that. Also, there's no assignment tied to their reading, no book report, quiz, vocabulary list, nothing. I'm simply trying to get them to build the interest and stamina of reading, because good things are happening with vocabulary learning when they're reading. So reading is critical and I want students to know that by the fact that I give this time daily to their reading practices. Many of them say you know, we don't read this much in our English classes that we've had in the past. We do it maybe on a particular day, but not every day, and so just that helps them understand how important that is for me. So let me tell you what happens before we go into that time of SSR. I try to set it up for them so they have some context and they have some understanding about why we read silently for 10 minutes and why I come down hard on students who might try to disrupt that time or be lazy about it.
Speaker 1:I give a lecture to show students why reading is critical. Now I've taken this from a colleague and friend, author, kelly Gallagher. He's an amazing educator. I first met him at a professional development event the summer before my first year teaching. This was in the Bay Area. I was blown away by his expertise. Then I found out he was a teacher at a high school in Southern California, but further I found out that he taught in the same district where I would be teaching. So I was just really excited and looking forward to developing that relationship with him and using him as a mentor. Now I've been fortunate to be influenced by his teaching ever since.
Speaker 1:So here it is abbreviated this lecture I give to students so that they'll understand why reading is so important to me and why it's an integral part of my class and not just, you know, once a month, once a week. We do it daily and I'll share it with you as if you were in my class, so you can experience a bit of the message about why I hope to get them into a habit of reading that they will carry outside of my class and maybe, if you're not a reader yourself very much, maybe this will influence you to jump on and make a habit of reading. So here's how this works. In my classroom I share three columns of numbers side by side with them. You'll have to use your imagination in terms of the columns I'm speaking about, but these three columns are right in front of them and I think it's like seven numbers down. Let me see One, two, three, four, five, six, six numbers down in each column, and so the numbers will be lined up left to right and then the numbers are set up side by side. So there's three columns, but again, each column has six numbers is my point, so you can just kind of roll your finger to the right of the paper that they're taking their notes on and see how they line up all six of them. I hope that makes some sense to you.
Speaker 1:These numbers go from high to low and they're from a fifth grade reading test, and the first column represents scores by percentile ring. So they go from high to low, as I stated, and here are the numbers 98, 90, 70, 50, 20, and 10. Now a percentile score. It's a value that indicates the percentage of a population that scored lower than a specific score, essentially showing how well someone performed compared to others in a group. For example, if you score in the 80th percentile, it means that you scored higher than 80% of the people in the group you were compared to. That's some information I looked up on the Google AI stuff. So in our set of scores, let's assume 100 students took the test, the students scoring at the 98th percentile were the top two scorers. 98 students scored below them. For those that scored at the 10th percentile, that means that 90 students of those fictitious 100 students taking the test scored above them.
Speaker 1:The second column is minutes of text read per day. Column is minutes of text read per day. Those numbers are, remember, going top to bottom, high to low 90.7, 40.4, 21.7, 12.9, 3.1, and 1.6. Again, ranked from high to low. I'll talk more about these in the context of the third column. Then we'll put all three of them together. These in the context of the third column, then we'll put all three of them together. By the way, as I'm going through this I'm, you know, letting students know like is there any connection between these numbers? We don't know. I don't give them the categories yet, I just give them the numbers so they can see patterns, and what you'll find I'll let you know is that the numbers all go from high to low, but there's no pattern about how they're dropping. They all just go from high to low.
Speaker 1:Okay, now back to this second column, which is minutes of text read per day. Text is defined as any text that they had read in that day Serial box, novel, textbook, comics, any reading. All right, let's move on to the third and final column. This one is estimated number of words read per year. Those numbers, again ranked high to low, are 4,733,000. Second number 2,357,000. Third, 1,168,000. Next number is 601,000. Then 134,000. And finally 51,000. Okay, again they go high to low.
Speaker 1:One of the other things I point out to the students is it starts with whole numbers and then it moves to decimals and then we have this massive blowup of whole numbers on the third column. All right, now I begin to analyze these numbers with them. Let's do that together. Now let me remind you of these column titles. Okay, the first one is percentile rank, so the rank of students on this test. Then the second one is the minutes of text read per day, and then the second one is the minutes of text read per day and then the third column is estimated number of words read per year.
Speaker 1:Let's first look at the second and third columns together. So the top number for the minutes of text read per day is 90.7. Okay, that's about an hour and a half. The corresponding number on the third column, which is the estimated number of words read per year, is 4,733,000. In other words, for the students that read about 90 minutes a day, all the reading they did, whether they sat for an hour and a half and read or put all together, their reading for the day in all its forms, was, on average, an hour and a half. After one year of this, their eyes would have scanned 4,733,000 words. These students now, looking at the first column, those test scores they were in the 98th percentile rank of the test. Okay, sometimes it helps to look at extremes in order to get a good picture, so let's do that here. Those students who only read a minute and a half per day that's that middle column, the bottom number, okay, showing a minute and a half, 1.6 minutes their eyes would have scanned 51,000 words a year. That would be the number on the third column, now 51,000,. That sounds like a lot, but that's chump change compared to the other students, those at the top of each column who read an hour and a half a day Remember their eyes would have scanned approximately 4,733,000 words per year. So back to these students who only would have read a minute and a half a day, they scored in the 10th percentile of that test.
Speaker 1:Well, the conclusion that one can draw is that the more you read, the better you will do on a reading comprehension exam. The question for students is why and it's important to make the connection instead of just saying because they read more Great. But how does that translate to higher reading comprehension scores? So to answer that, I show them a sentence with about 39 words in it. All the words are known by them, except for one. It's a fake word. Now they don't know that. I lead them to believe it's a real word and I ask them to guess what that word means without looking it up. I ask them to guess what that word means without looking it up. Is it a snake, a mouse, a car or a bird? But I tell them to imagine that this one question is the final question on their last exam of their high school career that will determine whether they graduate or not.
Speaker 1:No dictionary, no outside help at all. You must make, I tell them, you must make a decision with what is in your brain. Now let me share the sentence with you. Here's the sentence toward the unsuspecting mouse who was too busy, with his back against the reptile, working on the crumbs of cheese, left overnight. Now the fake word is zygodoofer, by the way, and the way I spell that is x, y, q, I, t, e, u, f, e, r. I play with them, them not knowing it, but let them know this is one word where there's no u after the q. That's very few words like that. This is one word where there's no U after the Q. That's very few words like that. This is one of them. I just try to hype it up with them to really get them to really start believing in this word. All right, so let me read that sentence one more time.
Speaker 1:After four days in the cage without food, the Zygodoofer silently slithered out of the open door. Toward the unsuspecting mouse who was too busy, with his back against the reptile, working on the crumbs of cheese left overnight. All right. So after a time of copying the sentence and having a moment to think and chat with their elbow partner, students are asked to make their choice car, bird, snake or mouse. I tally the marks on my whiteboard as I pull the class to find out what they believe a zygodoofer is.
Speaker 1:Some students do not register their vote. There's a little bit of hesitancy there. Most students say it is a snake, of course. I then break the news to them. Zygodoofer is a fake word. I just made it up by pushing whatever letters were in close range of my fingers on my keyboard.
Speaker 1:I get strange looks at this point, some chuckles, because I begin to rib them about how confident they were when they chose a word that does not exist. They chose a meaning for this word that does not exist. So we begin to break it down though. Something gave them the confidence to make a decision that had high consequences, yet they had no idea what the word meant. They'd never seen it. There's a lot riding on the outcome of the answer to that question.
Speaker 1:Well, where we go is that there are clues. Now some kids start to volunteer this when they're kind of trying to. They start trying to make their case and they start saying that there were clues that led them to believe a Zygote was a snake. No-transcript. Those are context clues. And then the students begin to call. I asked them. I call on different students and ask them to call out one word at a time. What were the context clues that gave them such confidence? And we start to list these words.
Speaker 1:Okay, so one was this thing was in a cage. It should have been in a cage. Someone left it open, but clearly it should have been in a cage. But clearly it should have been in a cage. Second, this thing moved about silently. The other thing is that it slithered. That specifically gives us movement of something that does not have limbs or legs to move it. There was a mouse and this mouse was so unsuspecting about the snake coming up on it, or this zygodoofer. The fact that it was going towards the mouse lets us know about its diet. Okay, so it's headed towards the mouse. And then, of course, it mentions that it was a reptile.
Speaker 1:The students call these things out and says it's because of those things that we were able to make a decision that this thing was a snake. So these context clues gave them the certainty that a zygoteufer is a snake, and they would have been right if it was a real word. Okay, so go back to our three columns and how a fake word is connected to all of this. Remember there were 39 words in that sentence I gave them and in those 39 words they did not know one of those words. So then I do a little bit of math for them. If our brains just proved to us in real time that, by using context clues, we were able to learn one word from a group of 39, then, going back to the words read per year, how many words could we then learn if we were reading 4,733,000 words a year? So I do some math for them and it turns out to be 121,359 words. By reading an hour and a half a day, we'll be learning a lot of words compared to the students who might have learned 51,000 words a year from reading about a minute and a half a day. That's the key right there.
Speaker 1:On a comprehension test, the more words you know, it's obvious that you will do better. Imagine that you and I are looking at test questions and you have a stronger vocabulary four times stronger than me, and that's pretty much what it works out with those kids that know 51,000 and the other ones that know 121,000. I'm going to miss a lot of answers. So the test results are going to show that you are quote smarter. But what does that mean in this context? Well, it's clear. What that really means is that you read a ton more than I do and by doing so you have given your brain a magnificent opportunity to grow your vocabulary for a moment like this test.
Speaker 1:So it starts to make sense to students why I would create a daily time of reading, and I just give them the example. Like at the gym, you may not see results in a week or two, but if you work out diligently, you're going to start to see results eventually. So you just have to keep at it, but also by these 10 minutes at a time daily, at least in our class. I hope that they would do it more and more on the outside, but at least with the 10 minutes in class they start to build up the stamina of being able to ignore what's around them and just get lost in a book. During these 10 minutes most students don't look around to see where I am. I always know the students that are struggling because they're looking up to see where I'm at, to see if I'm looking at them fake reading or not reading at all, and so those are just clues. Someone's still struggling, but it's beautiful to see other students just not look up at all because they have that habit of just reading for those 10 minutes. I do this every year because every year I hear from students that tell me Mr Sanchez, I never finished a book before until I started reading in your class, and now I finished and they give me some number of books. It's quite rewarding, so I keep doing this.
Speaker 1:Now let me just give you some closing thoughts about this idea, and just more personal to me. I listen to a ton of books. I love doing so on my walks, where I can focus on what I'm listening to. It's one reason why I love walking in parks and on trails I can really focus on the content I'm listening to and not worry about distracted drivers. So, although I love listening to books, I also love my Kindle app and the mini iPad that allows me to stuff tons of books in there. Yet I'm a sucker for a hard copy of a book where I can mark it up and make all the notes I need and highlight whatever lines I choose. That's exactly what I've done with Dan Miller's book that we're going through right now, the Rudder of the Day. I've gone through it two or three times and I get to see my thoughts from the previous times I've read it, so a hard copy is very rewarding to have for that important reason.
Speaker 1:Well, let's wrap all this up. After all that talk about reading, let's act on the information we've learned by getting out your notes, your journal, whatever method you use to mark down these points of application. All right, so for today, dan Miller asks us this question what are the three great books that you would like to read in the next three months? Now, if you recall, dan encouraged us earlier by saying that if we read 10 minutes a day, we could get through a book a month. So this is doable. He's setting us up to read a book a month, and it's completely doable, all right. So the question again what are three great books that you would like to read in the context of three months? Now?
Speaker 1:In the opening segment of the podcast, the what's Up in your World segment, I mentioned four books I'm reading now, and in my case, they're meant to help me with goal setting. And, as a reminder, those books are the Power of One More by Ed Milet, your Best Year Ever by Michael Hyatt, today Matters by John Maxwell and Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Dr Stephen Covey. So I'll be over here doing my part to get that reading done. Also, if you'll recall from the last podcast, I'll also be sewing up buttonholes by leaning into those books my daughter recommended for me that are out of my typical genre choice. However, I want to stretch myself a bit here. So make your own list of three books that you'll read for your own purposes and set an intention to complete this goal by setting a daily time when you will read and a space where you will read and let your brain begin to understand. This is what we do, when we do it and where we do it. It also helps a lot if you'd get someone to be accountable to that can ask you about what you're reading, or if you did your reading when you said you would do it.
Speaker 1:Okay, now your why is pretty clear after today's episode. Dan Miller gave that to us earlier. It's going to sweep away the cobwebs, increase your power of concentration, it's going to make us more interesting to be around and it's going to keep us abreast of new trends and opportunities. That's a pretty decent list right there. Hey, you look wonderful. Wow, what cologne are you wearing? I like that a lot. Love, you're an amazing wife. Husband, son, daughter. Fill in the blank Compliments. They brighten up our day.
Speaker 1:So next week, dan is going to give us some insight into the power of compliments, so I hope you'll join me for that. Let me send you away with the quote your life does not get better by chance. It gets better by change. That comes to us from Jim Rohn. That's it. That's the quote. Think about it, act on it. Have an amazing week, friends, and thanks for hanging out Again.
Speaker 1:I really do appreciate it. Let's do this again next week. Thank you for listening. If you found this time together useful, please consider following this podcast and leaving an excellent rating. If you feel you can't do that yet, please reach out to me and let me know what I can do to get you to leave a top rating. If you feel you can't do that yet, please reach out to me and let me know what I can do to get you to leave a top rating. If you are already excited about what you've heard. Please consider sharing this podcast with a friend. I really would appreciate it. Also, I'd love your feedback, both on today's topic as well as what you'd like to hear me address in the future. I would really appreciate that input. Again, I'm your host, isaac Sanchez. I hope today's thought serves you the way it has served me. Remember, your next move is just one inside away. Have an amazing rest of your day. I'll see you next time.