Read Like a Champion (with Doug Lemov)

Many students graduate high school today without having read a book cover to cover. Many students struggle to learn to read at all. How did this happen? Listen as educator and author Doug Lemov talks with EconTalk's Russ Roberts about the failed fads in reading education, the mistaken emphasis on vocabulary as a skill, and the importance of background knowledge for thinking and reading comprehension. Lemov and Roberts also discuss their love of difficult-to-read authors, the power of reading in groups, the value of keeping a reading journal, and how even basketball can be more enjoyable when we have the right terminology.

• 0:02Speaker 00

  Welcome to Econ Talk, Conversations for the Curious, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host, Russ Roberts, of Shalem College in Jerusalem and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Go to econTalk.org where you can subscribe, comment on this episode, and find links to other information related to today's conversation. You'll also find our archives with every episode we've done going back to 2006. Our email address is [email protected]. We'd love to hear from you. Today is July 8, 2025, and my guest is author and educational entrepreneur Doug Lemov, the Chief Knowledge Officer of Teach Like a Champion, an organization that does professional

• 0:47Speaker 00

  development for teachers and writes curriculum for them. This is Doug's third appearance on the program. He was last here in November of 2016, talking about reading. We're going to talk about reading again today, specifically based on his new book, co-authored with Colin Driggs and Erica Woolway, The Teach Like a Champion Guide to the Science of Reading. Doug, welcome back to Econ Talk.

• 1:11Speaker 01

  Good to see you, Russ. Thanks for having me.

• 1:14Speaker 00

  This is a handbook for teachers, but it also has deep lessons for anyone who reads, for parents of children who are readers. And I want to start off with how you start off in the book with what went wrong with reading in America, the teaching of reading in America in recent years, and the reporting of Emily Hanford, an investigative journalist who wrote a, did a podcast on this topic, and we will link to that. What did she uncover?

• 1:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it's tragic what she uncovered. I've described her work as the most important piece of educational journalism in the 21st century. What she discovered is that early reading programs in American schools, so this is when students learn to read.

• 2:04Speaker 01

  The most popular programs have been based more on ideology than on science. And we have learned, we have learned a lot about the science of how people learn to read. And they, they really ignored science that was out there. It was, it was in the, you know, it was, it was available to them. And for a variety of reasons that we can get into, the most popular early reading programs, instead of teaching students systematic synthetic phonics, how to decode, how to decode words, what sounds mean, went with a more whole language approach. They often socialized students to guess it were made sense or what the picture said.

• 2:48Speaker 01

  And the result is that many students, millions of students sadly, did not learn to read. Emily's podcast described this in excruciating detail. It was something like the fifth most downloaded podcast in the U.S. in 2023. And one of the results was something like 20 states passed legislation that early reading programs had to be founded in, in science. And so it really created an incredible amount of change. But unfortunately, it really came 20 years too late that we, you know, this is research that we did know for 20 years before the, before the required change happened.

• 3:30Speaker 00

  Why, you just said it was, many programs were based on whole language. What does that mean?

• 3:38Speaker 01

  Yeah. So there were two arguments about how you learn to read. One was frankly, much more compelling if I'm a teacher, which is if I introduce students to words and books and ask them to read, they will learn to read relatively naturally if I encourage them and foster them and I, and expose them to a lot of print. That's the kind of whole language approach. And the alternative to it is something called phonics or systematic synthetic phonics, which argues that the way to teach students to read is to teach them deliberately letter sounds, combinations of letter sounds, how they work, have them practice them. It's a lot of flashcards.

• 4:23Speaker 01

  But it means that when they come across a word that they don't know, they can sound it out. And the science is overwhelmingly, you know, many students will learn to read naturally. But many students won't. Doesn't have to do much with their intelligence. It just, you know, some kids crack the code on their own through exposure. Uh, but some kids don't. Uh, and so the idea is behind system and systematic synthetic conics is that we intentionally teach the code of uh, letter sound correspondence. One of the problems with it is that it requires, can be repetitive. You know, it requires a lot of flashcards and uh, repetition and that doesn't, oh, you drill it and that does not always jive with what teachers imagine themselves doing

• 5:08Speaker 01

  when they take the job. Strangely, I think actually students love phonics activities, phonics activities when they're done well, but that it wasn't what, what adults imagined. And so, um, teachers were perhaps for that reason were receptive to arguments that phonics was, um, either unnecessary or uh, or painful or miserable or and uh, and it really lost the day. And uh, more whole language type approach dominated for 20 years and the result of is that millions of kids did not learn to read or learn to read sub optimally or finally learn to,

• 5:50Speaker 01

  learn to read way too late and associated reading with uh, you know, with unpleasantness. Uh, you know, the costs as Emily had heard described were dizzying, not just for, for families and for kids, but also for teachers who, you know, who gave, you know, spent their professional lives teaching the single most important thing that we do in schools, wrong. And that's a, that's a painful thing to reckon with.

• 6:17Speaker 00

  I, I want to talk about another example of, I consider these things educational fads, fads that run through educational uh, departments in, in graduate schools of education.

• 6:31Speaker 00

  There are many, many reasons for why fads take root. Some are simple, that it's fun to have a new thing and if it, maybe it's the better thing and so we grab it and try it. Sometimes it's ideological, it might align with some other theory of society or human beings that people hold. But sometimes, um, there's just some romance about it that we hope is true that isn't. And I want to quote Dylan William. You say, um, the big mis-, you quote him saying, quote, "The big mistake we have made in the United States is to assume that if we want students to be able to think, then our curriculum should give our students lots of practice thinking. This is a mistake because what our students need is more to think with."

• 7:15Speaker 00

  And, you know, that idea, that if you want to be able to think, you should practice thinking and later we'll talk about, if you want to get good at vocabulary, you should practice acquiring vocabulary. That's a very reasonable idea and it speaks, as you point out in the book, to a utopian ideal that we want to believe about education. So talk about that, that romance and why is it wrong? It seems like, what could be wrong with that? If you want to learn how to do something, you practice it.

• 7:49Speaker 01

  Mark Seidenberg has this really powerful quote that I cite in the book also. He says, you know, "Reading is a complex skill that intuition cannot easily penetrate." We've, you know, sorry, one more quote and then I'll be done. Daniel Willingham said, "We've learned more about the cognitive science about how people learn in the last 25 years than we did in the previous 2,500 combined." That we have been a profession that is enforced by lack of science to fall back on logic and intuition and compelling arguments and ideology. And so, um, that's our, that's our habit.

• 8:23Speaker 01

  What seems compelling, what seems like it makes sense is how things should work. I was actually, I read an exchange that happened on the internet. Someone was talking about teaching reading and a professor of education emeritus opined that, you know, teaching reading explicitly is silly. If you look at how students learn to speak, they learn to speak naturally. Everyone learns to speak. This is how reading happens also. That is a very logical argument, but it's profoundly unscientific because we've been speaking for, you know, 250,000 years. And so our brains have evolved to speak, right? And there are parts of your brain, Broca's area, Wernicke's area, that are designed

• 9:08Speaker 01

  for language acquisition. And so a baby left to its own devices will begin to mimic and copy its parents and it will, you know, barring, you know, cognitive or perceptive problems, a baby will learn to speak on its own. But we've been reading for 5,000 years. And for most of that time, there are a few of us actually have been reading. So our brains have not had time to evolve for reading. There is no reading part of the brain. There's no Broca's area for reading. And so when we read, we are rewiring parts of our brains that were designed evolutionarily for other things and putting them in purpose, putting them in service of reading. And that, so it's what Dylan William calls biologically secondary as opposed to biologically

• 9:52Speaker 01

  primary, things we can do, we can learn through intuition. It requires deliberate instruction. It requires methodology. And so I can see why someone would make the mistake. It's logical to say, oh, well, you know, reading and language acquisition would happen the same way. But actually, we now know, we now know that they don't happen the same way, that reading involves complex.

• 10:18Speaker 01

  Cognitive processes that don't yield themselves to the mere observation, the mere observation of intelligent people and that we have to respect the science and understand the science. And just to go back briefly to the, you know, our book, interestingly, is not about phonics. It's about trying to extrapolate the lesson. The lesson is that we spent 20 years miseducating young people about how to learn to read in the early elementary years because we ignored the science when it was available to us. If you look at the data right now on how we learn to read in grades three through 12, even through, you know, the data is also terrible. A great school can close the gap between people of, you know, kids who grow up in poverty and kids who grow up in, in privilege in math

• 11:01Speaker 01

  in two to three years. Those same schools often never close the gap in reading. That we, the same lesson, that there's a science of reading that can tell us how to teach reading in grades three to 12 also applies. We have also been slow to respond to it, to recognize it, to see it, and it often causes us to question our intuitions and the way that we've done things for a long time. And that is a big ask and people are resistant to it. And so the change has been tragically slow and the price has been high.

• 11:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, this book is not about how to learn, how to sound out words and then be able to pronounce them correctly. This book is, what I love about it is that it's about how to think about reading when you're teaching people how to understand and assimilate and absorb a text, a written text. And that is a special art.

• 11:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:57Speaker 00

  I, I don't know how scientific it is, but I think there are things we know from studies about it. And we also know from our, a little bit from our own experience, which is understandably somewhat dangerous, but.

• 12:10Speaker 01

  Not, not, experience is not irrelevant. It just needs to be, needs to be combined with, with an understanding of cognitive science.

• 12:16Speaker 00

  But a profound example that you hit on quite repeatedly in the book is the importance of background knowledge.

• 12:27Speaker 00

  Why is it important? What do you mean by background knowledge being crucial for reading fluency? Which is a very different level than just being able to read.

• 12:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:38Speaker 01

  I think for the, one of the fundamental beliefs of American, the American teaching of reading is that reading is made up of a set of transferable skills. For example, making an inference from a text. And so the way that American schools typically approach this is we would practice making inferences and we might talk about what an inference is. And Russ, when you're making an inference and inferences, you're, you're filling in the blanks between what the author said and what the author meant. And so we might like have a little chant that we'd say, we'd practice making, we'd talk about the seven steps to make an inference and we'd talk about making an inference.

• 13:14Speaker 01

  And unfortunately, like that, it's a beautiful idea to imagine that if we taught someone to make an inference or to determine the main idea of a passage, that they would be able to take that skill and apply it to any text that they've read for the rest of their lives. Right? Let's just close our eyes for a minute and imagine how beautiful that would be if I could teach you to make, to make any inference from any text that you ever read. The problem is that making inferences is domain specific based on your background knowledge. I have an example in the, in the, well, the, first of all, the key study on this is really fascinating. It's Racton and Leslie's baseball study. So they have a passage that they give students to read about baseball.

• 13:59Speaker 01

  And this is, by the way, this is great fun to do with audiences in England because if you give them a very simple passage about baseball, you know, like Roberts was on second, Lama bunted him, you know, uh, laid down a sacrifice for the first out in the inning, you know, or. Or let's say I'm the pitcher and something, you know, Lemov walked the number nine hitter on four pitches and Roberts, the manager, signaled to the bullpen without even walking to the mound, right? That's a better example. That's a story that if you have background knowledge about baseball, you know that like you should never walk the number nine hitter and that like signaling to the bullpen without walking out to the mound is a is a gesture of disrespect and frustration to the pitcher. You show that passage to someone in England who knows nothing about baseball and they're like, what? Huh? There's tension between Roberts

• 14:44Speaker 01

  and and you know, and Lemov, there's disrespect. They have no idea because the background knowledge causes you to make an inference. I get like a simpler example of this is every text causes you to have to disambiguate the text and you disambiguate based on your background knowledge. So in the book I get offered this sentence, the wooden box was was heavy. She put her bear down. It was going to be hard to carry. Right? Just let me just tell me about that. Tell me about that story. Who's the main character? What's happening in that story?

• 15:21Speaker 00

  So that's a little girl and she's got to pick up a wooden box. It might not be a big box because she's probably a little girl. And we know she's a little girl because she's carrying a bear and it's probably not a grizzly. It's a stuffed animal. And she is, it's hard, this whole idea of putting something down to pick something up. For you and me, it'd be easy. We just grab the box, but she's small. Her hands are small. So we got a whole visual story from that, those two sentences.

• 15:51Speaker 01

  You created a story, invested it with meaning, made inferences about it based on your background knowledge, right? That like she could not have been carrying a real bear because the weights and sizes of things is impossible.

• 16:02Speaker 00

  And she would die.

• 16:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, if it's a, if it's a, yeah, exactly. If it's a toy bear, we have to be talking about a child. Like that is actually a big inference about this story. Who is she? She is a child. The bear is a toy bear. Even the third sentence is, it was going to be hard to carry. The pronoun it could actually refer to the bear or the box.

• 16:18Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 16:19Speaker 01

  But you knew, you knew intuitively that it had to be the box because the box is heavy and the bear is easy. You know, the bear would not be heavy. So you disambiguated that text based on your background knowledge. It's a very simplistic example of background knowledge. The baseball example is a much more complex example of background knowledge. But essentially, what the science tells us is that our order thinking is domain specific. We make inferences, we think deeply about things that we know a lot about. Quick, Ross, have an, you know, make an inference about particle physics. Uh, or, you know, uh, what is your insight about whether Napoleon should have attacked on the second morning of the Battle of Battle of Waterloo? Go, right? You can't, well, you might not, you might, you might actually know.

• 16:59Speaker 00

  I wrote an incredible study of the Battle of Waterloo when I was eight years old. And I, for a long time I had that study. Um, you know, it's really funny about that, just as an aside, I remember writing that paper. I remember my handwriting for that paper. Uh, and I remember taking it to my dad, who knew history very well, and assuming he would be able to read what I had written and tell me, oh, you know, Grand Marshall Ney, anyway, Grand Marshall Ney, he wasn't on the, the sunken road of O'Hayne, or whatever it was called. And I do my, you know, like, to me, it was just a bunch of facts that my background knowledge was mediocre, but my dad, of course, would know why the Battle of Waterloo was lost, because he's a grown up and he reads history.

• 17:44Speaker 00

  Uh, I didn't understand at the age of eight, that, or I might've been 10. I didn't understand then that history's ambiguous and, and difficult, but, uh, so go ahead, sorry.

• 17:55Speaker 01

  No, it's great. I asked the wrong guy, the Waterloo question, obviously.

• 17:58Speaker 00

  I still understand it, Matt. It's the sunken road was key.

• 18:02Speaker 01

  Did you have any 10-year-old, papers you wrote as a 10-year-old on particle physics to really like, to really blow up my arguments?

• 18:07Speaker 00

  No, you're good.

• 18:09Speaker 01

  Uh, so, but, so this is the, um, you actually demonstrated quite a few things. So first of all, that like, the inference happens because you have the background knowledge. Um, and, uh, there's a curse of knowledge, which is when you know something about the Battle of Waterloo, it's very hard to glimpse and understand the things that someone doesn't understand, to even know the things that they don't understand, never mind why they don't understand them. And so one of the things we, you know, we argue is that it's a tremendous waste of time to spend time practicing making inferences. We make inferences when we have background knowledge. If we want students to learn more from text, we should provide them with.

• 18:47Speaker 01

  Rich and useful and interesting background knowledge while they're reading the book. I um I made a horrible mistake as a as a parent when my son was in seventh grade, I gave him Animal Farm to read. And I didn't give him a lot of background knowledge and I didn't tell him anything about the Russian Revolution and about how this is and this is, you know, an allegory for this. So he, you know, read the book diligently. He was a pretty good reader and he was like, it's a really great story about us about talking animals on a farm.

• 19:15Speaker 01

  And this happens all the time. I I um for some reason, I think this is a funny story. I have an aunt who likes to write letters of complaint to um to product manufacturers. She had a bowl of Campbell's soup, Campbell's Chicken Soup, um which she wrote a letter of complaint and she said, if there was ever a chicken in this soup, it walked through with its boots on. And actually, I think that that is a really good analogy for how students experience the books that we read, especially historical fiction, they walk through with their boots on. Like, we're assuming that they're like, learning about, uh, you know, if it's number the stars, classic canonical, you know, fifth or sixth grade texts set in uh Denmark during World War Two during the Nazi occupation.

• 19:57Speaker 01

  And we assume that kids are learning about, they don't, they don't have enough background knowledge to understand what rationing is and why there's rationing and why people wouldn't, you know, would be constrained from telling the truth and why activities are clandestine and what the, you know, uh, what the risks are to Jewish citizens, right? Like, uh, they're walking through with their boots on because they don't have the background knowledge. And if we want them to think more deeply about the text and want them to make more inferences about the text and want them to remember more about the text, the thing to do is to give them knowledge, often through short nonfiction articles. So let's read an article about rationing and talk about why there was no butter and no sugar and why there's rationing. And let's talk about, you know, let's, let's understand some things.

• 20:40Speaker 01

  The other thing about this is, is it levels the playing field because so often we're, there are some students in the class and we do know a little bit about the occupation and Nazi, you know, World War Two and Nazi Germany. And so they can like, they can engage the text, but half the class doesn't know those things. Uh, and so suddenly we're like, well, what do you, you know, asking them to make inferences about things where they don't have background knowledge. They're, they're not able to play and they very quickly learn that reading is not for me because I can't participate in the conversations about the book.

• 21:09Speaker 00

  I mean, the other powerful insight, and economists call it opportunity cost, the other powerful insight is that I think about my example of Grand Marshal Ney. Now, when you hear Grand Marshal Ney, first of all, Ney is not a normal, modern, say, American name. You might think, "Ney, does that mean negative? Does that mean a horse?" And you don't know what a grand marshal is, and I think that's the correct name for the French Army. I'm not 100% sure. But if I ask the students, "What do you think a grand marshal is?", well, they might think it has something to do with a parade, a marshal parade. They might think it's a sheriff in the West. They might think it's Grand Master, might just do a chess. And you point out in the book that, as you're trying to guess, as students are, you know,

• 21:54Speaker 00

  they're at C, they're desperately trying to grab onto this, the idea that by trying, they will get better at it is false. That's number one. But the second deep insight is that this is the opportunity cost. That takes a lot of time, and it has little benefit. But by taking up a lot of time, you've lost the opportunity to do other things. And the idea of having a brief excerpt or a passage about, say, rationing or what World War II was like in occupied countries is unbelievably powerful, because not only does it shorten the amount of time spent guessing, which has little benefit, it might apply to other readings and other examples that are going to come later.

• 22:39Speaker 01

  I'm building your background knowledge. Both reading the nonfiction builds my background knowledge, but it also causes me to learn more from the fiction. And maybe reading the fiction causes me to be more interested in the nonfiction and more engaged in it. And so I'm building student knowledge as we go. And you also, I just want to draw a line under something that you said that's really profoundly important, which is guessing is not critical thinking. And a lot of people mistake it. And the place where we see this most is in the teaching of vocabulary. I'd say, you know, you gave the example of grand marshal, where you could argue that this is a vocabulary word, like marshal, what does it mean? Vocabulary is the single most important form of background knowledge that we have. You almost can't conceive of an idea unless you have a word for it.

• 23:22Speaker 01

  And often, the way that teachers are socialized to teach vocabulary is to have students... Well, they would call it critical thinking. Guess what? So the boy's hands were tired and raw. When exhilarated, they reached the top of the, they reached the top of the mountain. Right? So, or the, the boys were, you know, the boys' legs were tired, their hands were raw. When exhilarated, they reached the top of the mountain. If I asked you to a typical, a typical American vocabulary lesson, we would then guess what the word exhilarated meant there. And we might, I might ask, say, does anyone know the word exhilarated from their experience? Right? Maybe half the class knows a little bit about it, half the class knows nothing.

• 24:05Speaker 01

  Or I might say, from the context clue in the sentence, what can the context clues tell you about the word exhilarated? If I asked you to come up with a synonym from that for, for what exhilarated means, and you didn't know what exhilarated meant, what would you guess?

• 24:20Speaker 00

  Well, you might be exhausted because it sounds kind of like it. You might get confused and make that error.

• 24:25Speaker 01

  Yeah. And interestingly, like, the context clues are misdirective. Right? They actually tell us the wrong definition of exhilarated. Often, sometimes they're directive. But actually, when the word is most important in the sentence, the context clues are least likely to be useful. In this case, the whole sentence pivots around the idea that you would expect them to be exhausted. They're tired and raw and worn out, but they're exhilarated because something's changed because they've reached the top. Right? And so this idea of inferring word meaning from context clues is flawed. But what teachers think that they're doing is they think they're teaching critical thinking. They think that this, they think that the guessing here, students guessing at the word exhilarated is critical thinking when it's, it's not.

• 25:09Speaker 01

  And a much better strategy would set, would be to say something like exhilarated means excited and made alive by a challenging experience. Why might they feel exhilarated when they've reached the top of the cliff? Go, turn and talk to your partner 15 seconds, go. What's a time when you might feel exhilarated? But not because of physical effort, but for some other reason. 15 seconds, go.

• 25:36Speaker 01

  What's a time in your, what's a time in your life when you felt exhilarated recently? And why was it so important to you 15 seconds ago? There, I'm asking you, I'm starting with the definitions. The first thing I do, I start with the background knowledge and then I ask you to apply it in different situations, in different settings. That really is critical thinking. First, the fact, first the knowledge, then the critical thinking. If I try and do the critical thinking to arrive at the knowledge, what I have is guessing. And the other thing about it is that if I give the knowledge first, everyone in the room can play. Everyone has a definition of exhilarated and now they're trying to use it in different settings and thinking about it and encoding it in their long-term memory. If I ask you to try and guess at the word exhilarated, half the kids in the room are like, I've never heard that word. I don't know what it means. No, thank you on vocabulary.

• 26:21Speaker 00

  And as you point out, often, the whole point of that unusual word is to grab the reader and make them appreciate that even though their hands were raw and they're really tired, they're actually happy, not depressed, say, or whatever other state you might guess at. But the other part that I love, and this is, you know, as someone struggling to learn a foreign language now in Israel, you'd think that when you hear it and you go exhilarated, that's a good word. I'm just gonna, I'm gonna try really hard to remember it. Accelerated means really happy after a challenge, or really happy and feeling exultantly alive. Or, I, I think about it, think about it, think about it.

• 27:04Speaker 00

  And it turns out, the next day, when you see exhilarated, you gotta look it up in the Hebrew English dictionary again. And you think, why can't I remember anything? And the answer is because that technique is not the way we remember things after, other than short term.

• 27:17Speaker 01

  We need lots and lots of retrieval practice, right? We forget almost everything that we learn in life. And, you know, we have to, this is just a basic thing. One of the most established concepts in cognitive science is that learning is defined as a change in long-term memory. And if I want to make a change in long-term memory, I have to think, bring things back into conscious thinking, back into working memory after a period of forgetting. So I have to.

• 27:47Speaker 01

  The next lesson has to start with like, okay, Russ, what do we, what's the word for exhilarated again? Let's just review that, like, have to do that three or four times to encode in long-term memory.

• 27:56Speaker 00

  But even that, repeating the definition is not nearly as powerful as you asking me to come up with an example from my life when I was exhilarated. That's so deep. I mean, it's not, shouldn't be, but it is.

• 28:12Speaker 01

  Well, so there are two reasons why I would say that is true. One is your, the cognitive scientist Hector Ruiz Martin describes encoding, which is learning something, going from understanding it to building it into our long-term memory as thinking hard about the meaning of the learning object and connecting it to other things in your long-term memory. So what interested you about that is like, okay, a time in my life when I've been exhilarated, then I'm both retrieving exhilarated, but then connecting it to an experience that was important to me. And then when I asked you to like, think of like, what's an example? Why might the boys be exhilarated here? Right? You have to like, explain it based on the context of the sentence. And then what's a time when you might be exhilarated when you, that didn't involve physical activity? Oh, I was exhilarated when I achieved, you

• 28:55Speaker 01

  know, I got a high grade in a test in school. That's causing you to engage different applications, different shades of meaning. And so you have, you know, the research on vocabulary is that students who, who have the best vocabulary and have the best reading comprehension, don't just know more words, they know words more deeply, right? The depth of word knowledge and breadth of word knowledge are different things and we have to teach both. And so the sort of model of vocabulary that we propose, which is instead of wasting your time trying to guess the definition and the definition is the endpoint of vocabulary study, the definition is the starting point. And then we can do lots of examples, what we call active practice, which can be playful and fun and funny, but it causes me to think about the word in different ways, in different contexts, in different settings. So I get

• 29:40Speaker 01

  depth of word meaning and I get lots and lots and lots of retrieval, right? If we have a good conversation about this word, I could probably cause you to use the word exhilarated 20 times in the space of, you know, a couple of minutes and then you own it, but you own it deeply, like you understand. You understand it from a reading perspective.

• 29:59Speaker 00

  Well, and the other

• 30:00Speaker 01

  I think, yeah.

• 30:01Speaker 00

  The part I love about it is, well, exhilarated just means happy. So it's just a fancy word for happy. Now, in fact, it's not. It actually has a, it makes, I would say exhilarated means it makes something that makes your heart sing, which is an interesting phrase in and of itself because your heart doesn't sing. But lousy vocabulary and mediocre acquisition of, of reading and vocabulary is, oh, I have a synonym for that. Happy. The depth that you're talking about is starting to think about the nuance of why a great writer might say exhilarated rather than happy or satisfied, because it's more than just happy and it's more than just satisfied.

• 30:41Speaker 01

  From a reading comprehension perspective, if two words overlap in meaning, you know, so this is the, the second most common way that vocabulary is taught in American schools is the synonym model, right? Imitate means mimic. And those words, maybe they overlap 80% in their meaning, imitate and mimic. But if I say, um, uh,

• 31:05Speaker 01

  Doug imitated Russ's speaking style versus Doug mimicked Russ's speaking style, right? Like, uh, the differences between those two words, one of them could be respectful and appreciative and one of them is mocking, right? It's the differences between those two words that would create the meaning in a text. If we read that in a text, right? It's the, if I teach a word as a synonym, I teach students to, uh, the, the risk is that we miss the 20% of the words that are different, that create the real nuance and that create the, uh, create the understanding we're reading text. And so I think this is why the research on word depth is that depth of word knowledge is important as breadth of word knowledge.

• 31:46Speaker 01

  But the way that, I think the point here is that the way we teach vocabulary underestimates its importance, treats it mostly as a skill, um, and rather than a critical form of background knowledge and results in students whose reading is, um, isn't what it could be.

• 32:03Speaker 00

  And just to add another footnote about translation, learning a new language. It's very common, you know, you go to Google Translate and you say, what does this word, this Hebrew word mean in English? And of course, it gives you one word usually. If you work at it, you can get 12, but in general, it gives you a word. So you think, well, now I understand it. And you do it at a certain level, but it's why it's hard to be an immigrant, because there's a nuance of the native speaker that you will never acquire, unless, you know, you're extremely gifted or come at a young age. And when we're talking, you and I in this conversation, you're translating what I'm

• 32:41Speaker 00

  saying into your language in your head, and I'm hoping that you're getting my nuance. And I think we're pretty good at it, but it's why miscommunication takes place even when we speak the same language. And reading is an attempt to understand a thoughtful person's nuance and to grasp it. And it's an art.

• 33:08Speaker 01

  For sure. When you were telling that story, I was thinking of, my parents had a friend who was from Italy, who immigrated, married an American woman, moved to the US. And he said the hardest part was, his English was good, but he said it was so hard to be funny in English because his, you know, because he knew the words mostly, but he couldn't choose exactly the right word with a little like sense of irony to drop in there. And so it was like, it's almost like his whole personality changed as a result.

• 33:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's a cliche that humor is hard to translate, but you know that's true when you think about the difference between a great comedian and an okay comedian, or a great punchline and a non-punchline. You can take the greatest punchline to a joke, and if you use a different wording, which means the same thing, I mean, come on, but it doesn't, you don't get the same humor. Let's shift gears. I want to talk about whole books. You emphasize reading for young people, but I would add for adults mostly too, that we should read whole books in a group, in a classroom for students, in the case of students.

• 34:17Speaker 00

  And I would say for adults, something powerful about a book club, where a group of adults read a book together. Why? Why whole books and why in a group?

• 34:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, and this is profoundly important. You wouldn't think this would be an important argument unless you had spent a lot of time in schools and you had seen how rarely students read books anymore and how often they read passages and excerpts and short pieces. But several things happen when we read books that make them the optimal form of learning communication. One is that the medium is the message and a book is a long-form

• 35:01Speaker 01

  process of understanding an idea with complexity and depth.

• 35:06Speaker 01

  In comparison, say, to a tweet, which suggests that the world can be understood in 128-character implements simply and easily via a hot take. I just finished reading Ian McEwan's book Atonement. The first 60 pages of it, like I didn't really, someone recommended to me, I didn't really like it, kind of started slowly. And then over time,

• 35:30Speaker 01

  I started to understand the whole context and milieu of like the argument that was making and what had happened and why the characters did what they did. And I started to understand some, I started to understand some version of truth that was deeper than I would have been able to understand if I hadn't gone through that process. I think that one of the interesting things about a book is that the protagonist never believes at the end what they did at the beginning, right? Their thinking changes and a book takes you through the process of deep understanding and change. And it is beneficial and, and, and so that was a profound part of my reading this book.

• 36:11Speaker 01

  But the struggle of like, I'm not sure I like this, that I had to discipline myself to read 60 pages until I got into the book and then to then to have found in the end that I'm so grateful that I've read it because it changed the way that I thought, learning that over and over again.

• 36:30Speaker 01

  Discipline of thinking the way that thinking responds to sustained inquiry is a really important lesson, especially in an era when

• 36:42Speaker 01

  the message to young people, to all of us, is that I can pretty much understand this deeply complex issue in, in the span of a tweet.

• 36:50Speaker 00

  Well, I can just get ChatGPT to summarize it for me, then I know what's in the book.

• 36:57Speaker 01

  I think there are other reasons. I think the other reason, a couple of other reasons why books are profoundly important. First of all, there's a lot of research that stories are cognitively privileged, that we remember things best when we experience them in a story. I think there are evolutionary reasons for this, right? Like if you think about a early human, it is necessary to our survival to know how to hunt and know how to create a fire. But unlike every other animal, we don't learn how to do this through instincts, right? We have to be taught it and explained it by other humans. And the way that we, for most of our history, communicated this is we sat around campfires, we sat around in groups, and we told the story of the hunt to each other.

• 37:38Speaker 01

  We told the story of like how we built a fire and it was incredibly hard to do, you know, what, how are we ever came up?

• 37:45Speaker 01

  And so the people who listened to those stories, before there was writing, this is how we communicated, our culture, who we were, but also how to survive, cumulative capital. We're the only species on the planet that can communicate complex ideas that are more than you, that are multi-step, that are greater than you can hold in working memory at any given time. So there's a double selection advantage conferred evolutionarily on the people who listen to stories, right? One, you learned how to hunt as a group and you, and how to start a fire. But also by listening to the stories together, like we're bonded and we're connected and there's this like group formation. I think one of the least understood parts of our evolutionary story is that,

• 38:28Speaker 01

  you know, we only survived in groups, that a human by him or herself on the savanna with a big brain and opposable thumb is toast. Uh, and is going to be in some fitter creature's belly by midday because you can't smell your enemies from a mile away and you don't have night vision. And even compared to one of those really cute chimpanzees, you don't have, you don't have claws and you don't have fangs, you don't have a chance in a fight against that, against that animal. Only when we formed groups and learned that we can rely on each other, like interestingly, throwing rocks was one of the critical points of inflection in, in human prehistory. We're the only species on the planet that can attack or defend from a distance by throwing projectiles. And so if we can all rely on each other completely.

• 39:13Speaker 01

  To stand and throw rocks, we can drive away a lion or hunt a lion. And so group forming, you know, we survive in groups. And the people who were unable to form groups or assure their membership in the group or meet the norms of the groups, they were exiled and they perished. And we are the heirs to the group formers. So stories are cognitively privileged to us because they confer the double advantage on us, right? We learn things through stories and we were bonded in the experience of like listening to stories together. So we have evolved to like prize stories and give special importance to stories and remember the things that we've learned from stories for a variety of reasons. So a story that especially a story that we're emotionally and psychologically committed

• 39:58Speaker 01

  to is learning optimal. And a book captures that. And a book models the sort of persistence that is needed to master complex ideas. And it suggests that ideas are complex and not simple and require a sustained study to truly understand the world. And lastly, books contain cultural capital, which is profoundly important ideas that reflect the accumulated wisdom of society. Almost everything that's in most important society has been written and captured in books. And if I know those books and I have access to them, then I can connect to people about,

• 40:40Speaker 01

  you know, I can, if you refer to Shakespeare or to 1984, if I don't know anything about George Orwell in 1984, I can't even have a conversation with you about those things. And maybe if I could just say one more thing about particularly reading books that are older than 50 years old.

• 41:00Speaker 01

  So one of the most important forms of diversity that I think is available to us is to hear the voices of the past in their own words as they thought it. And to understand that we have a very presentist way of believing, you know, thinking about human consciousness and to understand.

• 41:19Speaker 01

  The most important form of diversity in economics, the way people thought about things 100, 200 years ago, that they felt much more connected to place, that they had a strong sense of duty, that they, you know, went off and fought and died in wars, that they were much more connected to death and dying, that their family members died with shocking regularity. That, you know, yes, they also probably, they made clearer and, you know, by our perspective, less defensible judgments about, about race and culture. Like, understanding all those things about the way that people thought in the past helps us to understand ourselves in the present. If we don't understand those things and we haven't heard the voices of the past, we have a very simplistic view of our own context

• 42:02Speaker 01

  in the U today. And I think you see this all the time with young people having this very presentist, simplistic views of human nature and human history.

• 42:15Speaker 00

  That's lovely. I just want to add one thing. It's a common theme for listeners of the program, but I want to say it again because it's so important. Summaries are not, we don't read fiction. We don't even read nonfiction for the facts. At one point on this program years ago, a few years ago, we're talking about something, something of Homer, he's at the beginning of the Odyssey, and someone said, I don't need to read it. I read the classic comic. And there is no classic comic for atonement by Ian McEwan. If there were, you would not be changed by that. Knowing what happens in the book is

• 42:59Speaker 00

  not why it's a good book. It's not why it's powerful. And sharing the intellectual journey of a great author. In nonfiction, for example, is more than just, here's a bunch of facts you're going to enjoy knowing. It's, here's my story, even though it's nonfiction, here's my story of how these facts go together and why they matter. And you do that a hundred times with great minds and you become wiser. And that cannot be summarized. It can't be put in a tweet. It can't be put in a AI summary. It can't be put into a classic comic. And

• 43:40Speaker 00

  it can't be put in a movie, although a movie is a different thing and it can be very powerful. The transformative effect of a great book is the struggle and the simulation that you make, as you write about in your book, of putting yourself in the shoes of the different characters and feeling how they change. And that only comes through a sustained and long reading. And that takes work. It's not so popular these days and your defense of it is very eloquent. And I think, I like to think it will have a, the pendulum will swing back. I may be wrong. I didn't say I'd be right. I said, I'd like to think. I hope, I hope I'm right. But, um.

• 44:24Speaker 01

  Can I say one tiny thing about that?

• 44:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, sure.

• 44:26Speaker 01

  Because I agree with you so strongly. And I think that a lot, you know, you mentioned that the book is for educators, but it's also for parents and it's for policy makers, hopefully. And I think that a lot of parents would probably not realize just how few and part between books are in schools and how much they've been cast out or driven out of the student experience. You know, there was a, someone, there's a viral story on social media about a student at Columbia University who, her professor asked her to read several books. And she went to him and was, you know, surprised and felt it was unfair because she'd never had to read a book cover to cover in high school and getting

• 45:09Speaker 01

  to Columbia University. I don't know if you saw this article. This is not, this is not an anomaly, right? Student attention has been changed by the advent of the smartphone and social media. Right? One thing we know about our attention, our ability to sustain states of concentration and focus is that it's malleable. And that if you spend a significant part of your life, five to six hours a day, if you're the average American teenager, in a state where there's constant novel stimulation, you come to require, you know, you don't even need your cellphone anymore to require that state. The state is wired within you. As it gets harder, and so students read less and less outside of school, and it's harder

• 45:51Speaker 01

  and harder to get them to sustain the states of concentration in school. And so, I think a lot of schools have given up on requiring to do, students, requiring students to do things that are hard and challenging, that they no longer have the cognitive wherewithal to do. But ironically, the greatest gift that they can give young people is to cause them to read those books and to actually, we would, we are doing the book to rebuild their attentional capacity. But the, if the cellphone has taught us that attention is malleable, we should get all the screens out of our, out of our classrooms, and we should give kids books. We should ask them to read for five minutes straight, and then eight minutes straight, and then 10 minutes straight.

• 46:33Speaker 01

  Ideally, this would be like reading aloud together, so there's a social factor to it, and then 12 minutes together that we could, we wire how we fire, right? That we read the way, we read the way we practice reading. We will read the way we practice reading. I tell the story of a teenager who required to read for 45 minutes a day at Myrdor Men Up, be my son, when he was a teenager, lying on his back on the couch, reading the same book that I read 30 years beforehand, but when he reads it, every five seconds, "Dude, over at Byron's, you coming over soon? Dude, what's the math homework? Dude, that girl in your math class, when are you gonna ask her out?" Like, his experience with the book is fractured. He doesn't sustain the state of attention.

• 47:18Speaker 01

  He's not as connected to the book because it's constantly, and he's not in the place where the book is. That this is the, it's not just that students read less, it's as they read differently and fractured and disconnectedly, and we can accept that. Or schools can say, we need to rebuild, we can participate in rebuilding your attentional state, and this is one of the greatest gifts we can give you to cause you to read for 10 minutes unbroken, and that that capacity will serve you for the rest of your, of your life. And this is one of the arguments that we make in the book, that changes in attention and changes in reading habits are one of the least acknowledged factors in literacy instruction. Students simply do not read.

• 48:00Speaker 01

  For many of the students in our schools, the books that we assign in school will be the only books that they read remotely in their youth. Sorry, it's sadly, sadly true. The book is in a death struggle against the cellphone, and unless we bring it to life in our classrooms, and unless we make it social, we read together, and I feel connected to people while reading a book together, it's gonna lose.

• 48:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, so that's, that's one of the reasons I recommend book clubs. I'm reading, I'm reading For Whom the Bell Tolls by Hemingway, which I read 50 years ago for the first time, and now I'm rereading it, and I have no interest in rereading, and I should just say for the record, if you had said to me, hey, what do you, what's your next book, next book gonna be, how about, how about For Whom the Bell Tolls, I'd say, no, thank you. But because my son had read it and praised it, I thought, okay, I'm gonna read it again. It's magnificent. I'm thrilled at how much I enjoy it, but I'm reading it differently because I'm both reading it through his eyes, and I'm reading it in a way, I'm ashamed to tell you, Doug, I'm reading it on my phone.

• 49:03Speaker 00

  I have a hard copy over there that I read sometimes, but if I'm out, I read it on my phone, but that allows me to capture a screenshot, share it with my son, and say, notice how he uses this, this, this little detail. And it's really, it's been incredibly, incredibly fun. I want to add one more footnote to our discussion about the power of reading an entire book, and then I want to shift gears to close with a different topic. Middlemarsh is one of my favorite novels. I read it.

• 49:37Speaker 00

  Fifty, forty-five years ago, probably. And the last page of Middlemarch is a masterpiece. Now, if I gave it to you and said, Doug, let me read this out loud, you're gonna like this. Or here it is, you read it to yourself, you'd go, that's good, I like it, that's nice. When it comes after the hours of experience you've had with characters, it's overwhelming. You could weep, and you might, at the ending. And it's just, um, some things are hard and worth it. So, to all listeners out there, continue to read.

• 50:15Speaker 01

  Let's go back for one second.

• 50:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, sure.

• 50:17Speaker 01

  Sorry. You were saying something that I think is really important about book clubs and about sharing the reading, the experience of reading For Him That All Tolls with your son. That I think we underestimate how social reading is or can be. I think it's interesting, in an era when generally, reading is, reading behaviors are diminishing massively, the book club has become more popular than ever.

• 50:41Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 50:42Speaker 01

  That there is something profoundly powerful about reading the story together with other people and sharing your experience. Either talking, having read it on your own and talking about it, or even reading it together live and like we're gasping together or we're laughing together, and suddenly I feel connected. It reminds me of, um, a couple of my kids were home from, from, from school for vacation and we're watching a family movie. All of us in the living room in the semi-dark. And every time there was like a funny scene, I was struck by how often like I would turn to look at them and see, are they laughing too? Are they having the same like experience, like? The, why would I do that? It's a strange, it's a very strange behavior.

• 51:23Speaker 01

  Because the story is more meaningful, for all the reasons I think of like, you know, evolutionarily and how important. The story is more meaningful if I see that you appreciate it too and we're connected by it. And if we read a book aloud in class together, we're laughing and we're experiencing it together in a similar way. One, I can curate the experience so that we read for an extensive period. We read for 10 minutes, maybe we read five minutes together and then you read five minutes on your own. But those moments when we laugh together or we gasp together are actually, they...

• 51:53Speaker 01

  Connect us to other people through the text. They make the text social. And I think that if the book, books are very, very important and that books have a hope in their death struggle against the cellphone. It will be interestingly by making them more social, more by using them as a tool for connection and that like, what should we do with the forty five minutes that we're not going to spend describing the seven steps to making an inference or finding the main idea? We should actually read aloud together in class. We should read for ten minutes. I should give you a little nonfiction article about like within scene that's coming up and how like resistance movements in Denmark, then we should read aloud together and like, I should hear you expressively reading and like, wow, Russ is really into this book. That's so cool. Maybe I'll read it expressively too and

• 52:37Speaker 01

  uh, but we'll have a shared experience. That is where stories started and uh, and I think that your experience of like book clubs and like wanting to send sections of the book to your son

• 52:49Speaker 01

  does tell us that reading is and can be much more social than it is, and it's probably the book's best hope.

• 52:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, I just tell parents, don't, don't say, this is the best part coming up, which I'm prone to do, but I try to restrain myself. Um, what I wanted to shift to is your own personal reading habits. You just said you've been reading Atonement by E. M. Kew, and which I did particularly like, I'll just confess. Um, and I despise the movie just for the record, but um, what do you, what do you read for pleasure? And do you reread? Do you go back and read books like From the Beltols again and?

• 53:26Speaker 01

  I loved, I find I love rereading like, you know, I don't think I've read nineteen eighty-four since I was assigned as a student, but I read it this year and I was like, my God, every student should read this.

• 53:38Speaker 01

  Brilliant. It's incredible. Um, I read a lot. It's interesting. I read mostly nonfiction. I love reading nonfiction. Um, but recently I've kind of like I've forced myself to read some fiction and I'm not forced myself. I've reconnected myself with fiction and I've been stunned by how meaningful it is and how much I take from it. Uh, I try to read voraciously. I notice even in myself, my lack of stamina and my lack of focus and how easily distracted I am and how many fewer books I read and how I sit down to read with a book and my phone is there and suddenly I'm practicing my Spanish or suddenly I'm on Twitter. Um, uh, so I think that that's

• 54:23Speaker 01

  what I fear for our students, I also experience for myself, and I think most people probably do also. The one thing that I would say that I have useful to say about reading habits is that I just, I have a bookshelf in my office, uh, my home office, I'm at the, I'm at work right now, where I keep books that I've read that have been profoundly meaningful to me. So on a little shelf, and I walked by that shelf the other day and I looked at one of the books and I was like, hmm, I remember loving that book. What's the protagonist's name again? Couldn't remember. What happens in the book? Couldn't remember. I can remember the setting. It's set, you know, I can remember the country that it's set in and I can remember one line that I wrote in my journal on the book.

• 55:01Speaker 01

  It's all gone, right? Um, that thinking deeply, understanding is not learning, that, uh, I think it has to be encoded in long-term memories for me to learn. But one of the things that I've done, I keep a little reader's journal now, and when I'm, when I read a book, you know, I'm always underlining, I think it's really important to direct your attention and focus your attention, attention to annotate when you're reading. It's why it's so important, I think. Mostly for students to read in hard copy. But when I finish reading a book, I make myself go back through and all the passages I've starred, I force myself to handwrite them into a little journal. You know, maybe ten or fifteen things. Um.

• 55:40Speaker 01

  Uh. I did this with your book about, um, about Adam Smith, especially, uh, uh, it was, uh, it was great. But now it helps me, like, now I find that I remember, that I remember more than just that I love the book. I remember things, I remember lines from the book, I remember scenes from the book, I remember arguments, and it's helped me to make my reading life much more useful, just understanding the cognitive science myself, which is that learning is a change in long-term memory. As one cognitive science scientist says, if nothing has changed from long-term memory, nothing has been learned. There's a whole chapter in the book about writing and how important writing is to reading, but one of the things that writing does, to write it down, causes us to think hard about the meaning of a learning object, and you're more likely to remember it.

• 56:23Speaker 01

  Um, and that's really changed my life as a reader.

• 56:27Speaker 00

  I just want to tell a story. It's, it fits in with what we're talking about. Uh, when I was in college, as a, before I went to college, I liked Joseph Conrad. And I liked, um, I think I'd read, um, can't remember which I'd read.

• 56:47Speaker 00

  I think it was Lord Jim, not sure. But anyway, I liked Conrad and I, there was an English course on Conrad. And I was excited, but it was Conrad and Faulkner. And I hated Faulkner. I was a snob. My dad didn't like Faulkner because he was obscure and hard to read. And my dad's a very direct writer, which I respect and have learned tremendously from over my career. But in those days, uh, so I was very disparaging of Faulkner's, um, opaque style. Having tried to read, um,

• 57:20Speaker 00

  um, Sound, The Sound of the Fury, and at 16, and not getting very far and thinking, well, this is just a bad book.

• 57:27Speaker 01

  The tough, it's tough sledding right there.

• 57:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, very tough. Uh, it's a great example of ambiguous writing, like who's talking, what's happening, can't figure it out. So I put it down, think, well, he's overrated and that's that. So, but I took the course and one of the, I think the first Faulkner we read was As I Lay Dying. And As I Lay Dying is a book I recommend. I, the spoiler. I love Faulkner, became one of my favorite writers and was so enamored of Conrad by the end of the course. But I read about, I read an immense amount of Faulkner during, in the course and then after. And when people say, how do you get into Faulkner? I say, well, read As I Lay Dying because it's somewhat accessible. But when I read it, I had to read it twice. It's short. It's, uh, it's a plus.

• 58:13Speaker 00

  But I actually know one line, I wish I'd kept a journal, but if I had, there's one line in that book that stuck with me. Which I hope I'm going to get right. "How often I have lain under rain on a strange roof, thinking of home." And it's a book of many characters, but that character, I think, I think it's starle, but I'm not 100%, but it doesn't matter. That line, "How often have I lain under rain on a strange roof, thinking of home?" Obviously, there's a poetry in the rhyming of those three words, "lain," "rain," "strange." But that book, that line captures the alienation of the human experience in a magnificent way.

• 58:57Speaker 00

  And that's what I took from that book. I should reread it, but it's an amazing thing, how those annotations can stick with you. But it's not the only reason. It's not, you don't read just read fiction to, to learn things. You, you learn, read fiction to experience things, to, to understand what other people go through. It's, it's underrated, in my view. Are you a better reader from thinking about it in a systematic way, the way you have for the books you've written on reading? Has it affected your own, your own reading style?

• 59:38Speaker 01

  Certainly affected my reading style. I think the biggest thing is, you know, the sort of keeping a journal and realizing how much of what was meaningful and important to me, I just forgot and lost, you know? And I remember reading, I don't remember who was just talking, you know, of reading the biography of some, you know, someone in the 1920s or 1930s, saying, "I love this book. I've, you know, I've read it three times. I've almost mastered it." You know, like the idea that people used to read and break, try to master a book. I just became profoundly aware of how little I often took from my, these books that I would experience and would know that there was something profoundly important that spoke to me in a way that no other medium thinking did, and that I had lost most of it.

• 1:00:25Speaker 01

  So I do think that the cognitive science helped me there. It's certainly changed the way that I read and approach reading with my own children and how important I think reading aloud with them and to them is. And how important I think vocabulary is. I think that one of the, my mom was an editor, my mom was an editor. So growing up, you know, she would, she probably taught me to write.

• 1:00:51Speaker 01

  Every paper that I wrote for school, she would go through and you'd be like, you called this interesting. You can't use the word interesting. You have to, you know, like, in what way is it interesting? Challenge yourself to, you know, but it taught me to take a pleasure in words and interest in words. That I now see. That words are never just words. Like words encapsulate an idea in a unique way and that you.

• 1:01:15Speaker 01

  Again, you almost can't think of something unless you have a word for it. But when you have a word for it, suddenly it creeps into your consciousness. I have a very strange life for, I spent 20% of my time working with professional sports franchises. I have a book on sports coaching. And in trying to learn basketball, to work with some, some basketball teams, I had to just learn the difference. I suddenly came on the difference between a step back three and a catch and shoot three. These are both three, these are different. Types of three pointers and has to do with whether you, you know, receive a pass and shoot or whether you're taken off the dribble and have to step back and shoot over a defender. And a step back three is much harder to hit than a catch and shoot three. It's much more elite skill.

• 1:01:57Speaker 01

  And just suddenly having the vocabulary where the name for this catch, catch and shoot three versus step back three, I started to see the entire game differently. I would, you know, all three, three pointers were not all three pointers to me. Suddenly.

• 1:02:10Speaker 01

  My entire watching experience, my understanding of the tactics, my understanding of ball movement, my ability to distinguish different types of shot, it totally changed the way that I watched the game of basketball, just by having that slightly different word for things. And so I'd say one other. Takeaway from me is just, I think that that vocabulary is routinely. underestimated and I think it shapes how we perceive the world.

• 1:02:36Speaker 00

  I learned that from you, from your earlier books, that giving things a name allows you to have a conversation about it that you might not otherwise be able to have. It's not, the word I would use is terminology. It's an aspect of vocabulary that enriches your ability to communicate about. I think that's, it's such a small thing and I think it's so undervalued as a way to create a culture in an organization, for example, or in a school. It's a deep insight, which I learned from you.

• 1:03:15Speaker 00

  My guest today has been Doug Lemov. Doug, thanks for being part of Econ Talk.

• 1:03:20Speaker 01

  Enjoyed it, Russ. Thanks for having me on.

• 1:03:29Speaker 00

  This is Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. For more Econ Talk, go to econTalk.org, where you can also comment on today's podcast and find links and readings related to today's conversation. The sound engineer for Econ Talk is Rich Goyette. I'm your host, Russ Roberts. Thanks for listening. Talk to you on Monday.