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Dr. Maryanne Wolf is one of the most recognized and respected international figures in the field of literacy. She is an author, researcher, and educator whose work has had a profound impact on our understanding of the reading brain, dyslexia, and effective reading instruction. She is a passionate advocate for teachers and children, and believes that literacy is a basic human right across every zip code.
This conversation is rich with big ideas on many topics, including multiple literacies, the importance of the printed page, and the miracle of communication. Maryanne underscores and exemplifies the richness of living a literate life, and the joy of curiosity and learning.
Teaching, Reading & Learning: The Podcast elevates important contributions to the educational community, with the goal of inspiring teachers, informing practice, and celebrating people in the community who have influenced teaching and literacy to the betterment of children. The podcast features guests whose life stories are compelling and rich in ways that are instructive to us all. The podcast focuses on literacy as we know it (reading and writing) but will also connect to other “literacies” that impact children’s learning; for example, emotional, physical, and social literacies as they apply to teachers and children.
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Today's sponsor is Reading Horizons, developers of a foundational K three reading program that focuses on decoding and encoding using skills, the critical components of structured literacy. Tier One Reading Horizons programs deliver proven, supplemental core literacy instruction based on the science of reading and put the Reading Horizons Podcast named Podcast on your mustwatch must listen list and take a deep dive into learning focused topics such as structured literacy, socially emotional learning, dyslexia, and Ed tech with host Laura Xtell, an educator and trainer with over 26 years of experience in instructional and administrative settings. The next season of podcast begins Wednesday, June 16, and be sure to listen to past episodes anytime on Apple, Podcasts, Spotify, and most podcasting platforms. Visit Readinghorizons.com Podcast to learn more.
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Hello, everyone. Welcome to Teaching, Reading, and Learning the TRL Podcast. I'm your host, Laura Stewart. The focus of this podcast is to elevate important conversations in the educational community, to inspire and inform and celebrate contributions to our community. Today, my guest is Dr. Mary Anne Wolfe. I mean, pinch me, for those of you who may not know Mary Anne, I'll introduce you to her by reading to you. Her biography, Dr. Marianne Wolfe is a scholar, a teacher, and an advocate for children and literacy around the world. She is the director of the newly created center for Dyslexia, Diverse Learners and Social Justice at the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies. Previously, she was a professor of citizenship and public service and director of the center of Reading and Language Research in the Elliott Pearson Department of Child Study and Human Development at Tufts University. She is the author of Proust in the Squid, The Story, and The Science of the Reading Brain, Dyslexia of Fluency in the Brain, Tales of Literacy for the 21st Century, and most recently, Reader.
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Come Home, The Reading Brain in the Digital World.
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Dr. Wolfe many awards include the highest honors from the International Dyslexia Association and the Dyslexia Foundation Distinguished Researcher of the Year for Learning Disabilities in Australia, Distinguished Teacher of the Year from the American Psychological Association, and the Christopher Columbus Award for Intellectual Innovation for co founding Curious Learning, a global literacy initiative with deployments in Africa, India, Australia, and rural United States. She is also the recipient of the Reading Leeds Bonita Blackman Award in honor of her extraordinary contributions for literacy. And finally, Marianne has been elected to.
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The Vatican Academy of Science.
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Dr. Wolfe is an eminent author and researcher and educator whose work has had worldwide impact, and she's also had personal impact on so many people, including me. This is a real treasure of a podcast. Thanks for tuning in and welcome.
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Welcome.
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Marianne, it's my delight to be speaking with you today. I just am so honored to have you as part of my life, and I'm just so delighted to be speaking to you so that we can share ideas, big ideas today with our listeners. So thank you well, Laura, when I.
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Realized we were going to have this conversation first, I was feeling like, oh, what joy just to have this opportunity to really think out loud with you because we have such shared hopes and we have shared background and we have a shared commitment to putting knowledge into the world so that the world becomes a wiser place. And I kept thinking today of Marilyn Robinson. She usually is known as the novelist who wrote Gilliat and this beautiful set of books, but she also wrote essays called The Givenness of Things. And she said something. And this was only a few years ago. She said there has never been a time when our society needed wisdom and decency more. And so I think that as we talk about literacy, we're also talking about the bridge to and when I say decency, I mean the best of human beings. And the very best is when wisdom and empathy come together. And so I know that's what unites us, Laura, that those shared goals for the next generation.
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Oh, my goodness. Yes. So beautifully said. And I know you and I are both such huge Marilyn Robinson fans. Yeah.
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That's why I began with her. Oh, my goodness.
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You did finish it. Is it just fantastic. It's heart wrenching. You feel it. It's one of those we talk about how much we feel it and that we want that for our children. We want them to have those experiences that expand their passions and compassions in the world. And literacy is a gateway to that.
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It certainly is. And when I think of Maryland, Rob Robinson, actually, Obama called her something like an ambassador of empathy. But each book gives us an opportunity to literally leave ourselves and enter the lives of someone completely different from us. And of all the books, Gilead being still my favorite home housekeeping, they're wonderful, Lila. But Jack was the hardest because he is so unlike us and yet so like a piece of us. And that was what was so, I think, amazing about her ability to make an almost like a Russian Dostaefsky character out of someone we would see on the street and never realized. All the thoughts, the guilt, the pain, the desire that this person had, the desire to be good despite every circumstance that seemed against him. That's who we walk, or at least we used to walk. We will walk again among the Jackson Lil.
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You're still right, because he represented our better Angels and our shadow self.
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We really don't usually see that interiority of the shadow. So well done in novels at the same time hoping for, in her terms, the redemptive. So we usually see the shadow or the aspiration to virtue. And here you have this one. In Hebrew, the term is Shakina, the light that still lived inside this very Calvinist conscience. I mean, never was Calvinism. So I think vividly brought to life, as in Jack in recent times. It's not a typical. Of course, Marilyn Robinson is anything but typical, but it is not a typical portrait.
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No, it's not. So you and I share we share a little of that. But I also think when you talked about our backgrounds, we both came from small Midwestern towns and we both are in love with books. And I know people would just love to hear more about your origin story. Marianne, tell us about that upbringing and you're being a passionate and devoted reader.
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Right? Well, the reality is a very odd one. Since when I have actually heard people after I give a lecture, I've overheard them in the bathroom saying, where is she from? It must be New York, couldn't be.
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Farther from New York.
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This is so funny when I hear people say that it could not be further from New York City. It was the tiniest town. And in proof in the Quit, I said, it is a town where no one visits without intent. And what I meant by that, it's such a small place and you just drive right through it and you would never know that. Actually, just as Marilyn Robinson portrays, there is this wonderful set of people who have the same struggles and the same pains joys as New York City, but in this place that has very little to offer in the terms that we think about as culture. And yet I found there the most beautiful childhood in large part because of my family, my mother and my father, and their hopes to give their children everything they had and everything they didn't have. But the reality was that the only school, the only reason why they moved there from a relatively larger city was because there was a Catholic school and they wanted their children to have as close to an ethical background as they could give them. But the school only had two rules.
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That's what's so funny to be even to this moment, that there I was stuck in the first and second grade roles, and I finished everything the fourth graders had already done. So the origin story is the story of a little girl who got in trouble because she had already finished the fourth grade material. And the poor nun, Sister Rose Margaret, didn't know what to do. And so she actually had a parent meeting and said as much as they appreciated how many times I interrupted the class with my hand up for everything, that it was disruptive. And perhaps if they could have books and there was no library in these two rooms and my parents, who were not at that moment, they were anything but well to do. And they nevertheless gave a library of books to the back of my room. And so from second grade on what the city kids would have called the great Books program. So I read my way through those shelves, and the little librarian was my friend. I mean, she really wasn't my friend. She was my neighbor.
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Everybody knows everybody, right.
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So the librarian was accustomed to letting me just do whatever I wanted. And the books that I read, like the books you read, Laura, formed a platform for the rest of my life. There's no question that I never, ever felt deprived. I never felt like I had a poor underprivileged environment because there was always somewhere to go. Somewhere.
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Yeah. And I just remember as a child just relishing times when I could just be with my books.
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That was a lot of times.
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Yeah, exactly. So this was Sister Rose Margaret.
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Well, there was Sister Rose Margaret, Sister Lisa, and then Sister Ignatius with grades five to eight, and there were only eight of us. But I will have to tell you, Laura, that the philosophy that those non the school Sisters of Notre Dame, this has nothing to do with religion when I'm going to say it has to do with commitment, teaching. And I think you and I have always shared something which you may not have known actually came from my observation of them. They would not rest until everyone knew how to read and knew how to be their best. And there were children who were what we would call neurodiverse. One was a down syndrome little girl, and Shirley was her name. And Shirley learned to read. Nobody had any thoughts that she was different. She just took longer. And the nuns would stay after school with those who didn't read. And by the 8th grade, out of eight kids, three of them have two of them have PhDs. Everybody graduated from high school and most graduated from College. It was just you learned to your potential, and that was philosophy of teaching, which to this moment, you and I, this is what we do.
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Everyone is going to get there.
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Right. So that really they help shape you. First of all, like you said, Rosemarga didn't know what to do with you, but she knew that if she could put a pile of books in front of you. Right. So she shaped you in that way, and they also shaped you with the way they lived, their teaching commitment.
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That actually actually that has stood me in good stead to this moment when I think of teaching, when I think of the role of books. And then, as you know, I went to what was then St. Mary's in Notre Dame and then after that, Northwestern and all that was English literature. But all during that time was this nascent desire, what am I going to do about kids? And so I took a year off, and that was the other part of the origin story that really is the bridge. I took a year off in a peace Corke setting, and it was supposed to be a Native American reservation. And the Dakotas fell through last minute. They sent me and I've said this to some people before and they don't understand it. But, Laura, you will. I was embarrassed to be sent to Hawaii. What political cache, even though it was the most poverty of the world.
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Yeah, but it doesn't sound like that destination. It doesn't sound like the destination for your altruistic heart. Right. But of course, it turned out to be right.
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After being in the midst of them and loving them and knowing them, I know their name. To this moment, Laura, they made me understand that if you do not become literate, you will be in. Most of them were like ten languages, but most of them were Filipino families who were practicing for all purposes in denture servants. They wanted their children to be literate. This is a very odd thing to say, but I had all this desire to give them what we would call authentic literature and story. But I failed at least ten to 20% of the kids. And from that point on, I realized I had truly failed their whole life by not getting them to the point where they could truly read. And that just did something. I will say that it wasn't the case that they didn't love learning. We loved each other. We loved learning. We did everything right in that area. But I have such empathy with people who have the desire to teach through whole language. And in a very real way, I was a whole language teacher. I believed that language and stories would be enough. And what I found out before I knew anything about reading or whether there was a war approaches, I didn't know anything right.
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But I experienced what happens when you do your absolute best at that and you still fail a large group of kids. And that was it. I left English literature. I left the study of the poetrylka. I went to the Harvard reading lab I didn't know anything about. Oh, my God, Jean. I walked into Jean Charles office and told her how much I loved her work on child language. And it went on and on and on. At the end of which she said, you're actually talking about Courtney Casinotin. Oh, my God. It was horrible. I had to overcome some really serious disagreements with Gene Shaw. But she became at the end of my work, there were the great models. The great golden heart of Jean Charles is what still underlies her great contribution to understanding reading development. And then I went into neuroscience across the road, and that was a struggle because I had entered the reading lab as an educator. And yet Carol Chomsky and Norman Geschwin, their work actually transformed my whole way of thinking about reading. And I realized that's when I have to study the reading brain, and it was tough because, Laura, in those days, neuroscience was not o Karl.
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It was not something that everybody wanted. In fact, people really objected to me doing that in the beginning. And then slowly, the realization of how much that can teach us took over. And then by the time I graduated, that was not the case. But it was important to go with both the best of what was there and the best of what I thought could be added to our understanding of reading specific. Yeah.
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So when you talk about, like, Chomsky, what specifically did you learn that changed everything? You said it kind of changed everything around your ideas, around reading. What was it?
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Well, you know, it's so odd that you asked just that question because only two days ago, I was interviewed for a book, a new biography on Chomsky, and they asked me about Carol. And Carol is on my mind right now because of that interview, but also because she understood that if you are really to appreciate the complexity of reading, you must understand linguistics to a certain extent now, not to the extent of understanding a more structural formal linguistics like non taught it. And I did take those courses, too. There were so many amazing people at that time that were involved in linguistics, but especially Carol taught me that understanding the structure of language is absolutely imperative to understanding reading itself. So a lot of people in speech language are studying those processes. And I have always felt an absolute affinity with people in speech and language studies because they have to understand all those processes. I didn't know that. But the study of child linguistics and then the study of syntax and semantics at MIT actually just made me dive into what language is. And then from that understanding, pathology of language, and that was more fascia.
[00:23:12.170] - Speaker 3
The VA Hospital, Harold Good, Glass, Edith Kaplan, but especially Norman Geschwind, the behavioral neurologist, and his kind of daughter legacy, Martha Dankle, who became my mentor. All of these people provided an understanding of the multiplicity of processes that are necessary for us to read. And that background couldn't have been more meaningful to me to this point. You really had to study all of it, and I am the grateful recipient. That's what I can say. But Carol Chomsky began that she really was an extraordinary person. William, of course, is so well known that Carol was an amazing linguist who was very pragmatic about its application to understanding children's language.
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Yeah. Do you look back at that now and you look at that. Okay. That incident or the experience in Hawaii and how it kind of led you on this path of inquiry, and then how from that you met Chal and Chomsky and Geshwin and all these other people? Do you look at that now and just kind of see that path that has led you to where you are and the kind of the fate of that or the fortune of that.
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Pasture said something. It's translating different ways, chance or invention. But whatever word you use, invention comes to the prepared mind, and I will be forever grateful and want something similar for our teachers because of the preparation that I was given and that I will also have to say I had to build we were bootstrapping. There was no such thing as cognitive neuroscience at that point. The name came later. But those of us who were studying what would be called neuropsychology or neurology and linguistics and Psycholinguistics and of course, in the reading lab. What does all this mean to the teaching of reading? What does it mean to curricular development? All those parts, I believe, will make better teachers.
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Yeah, they all coalesce.
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They all come together. And I wish we could have a version of that. And I'm working on that in California and in a collaborative between UCLA and California State University. How can we better prepare our teachers? Whether we call it the science of reading, the neuroscience of reading, or whether we call it we're working on names here that will pull people together rather than making so we're using terms we're trying to figure out terms like comprehensive, systematic teaching of reading C store, so that you can absolutely dissolve the sense of alienation that some teachers feel because they think, oh, science means only one thing, or science means phonics and not them or not. Their emphasis on vocabulary and story books. And we want very much and you and I are determined on this, Laura. Maybe people in this interview don't know. We meet every three weeks.
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We'll tell you about that in a minute.
[00:27:19.240] - Speaker 3
Yeah. But we're determined to be inclusive at the same time, just as the study of all this was systematic, we need systematic knowledge and we need explicit systematic developmental integration of all these parts in our teaching. So I think if people really understood you're very perspicacious in making me think out loud about what it took for me to devote my life to the reading brain circuit for the teaching of reading. That's very clever, Laura. I never thought of it that way. But the reality is that's what I want for our teachers, they understand each of these processes well and how they have to work together. And it's not at the exclusion of anything, but it is and has to be systematic developmental integration by their explicit attention to each of it.
[00:28:25.330] - Speaker 2
Well, and what we have to provide for our teachers, they have to provide for their children. Right.
[00:28:31.810] - Speaker 3
That's exactly it. And when you do that, it's so odd. Again, all these things you're asking me, there's so many things going on in California right now about people who are teaching and devoting their lives to English language learners. We have so much of our state who are English language learners, and they're worried that the study of dyslexia or the science of reading will actually be detrimental to English language learners in some way. But what it will be incompetent upon people like you and me is to help them understand that this is about learning the English language in all its complexity to teach reading. There was a group of people from Japan, neurologists and educators who once visited a site visit to learn my particular intervention, Ravo, for their kids who have neurodiverse learning situations. But they came away and they said, you know what? We'll use it in Dyslexia, but what we're really going to do is use it for our kids who are learning English. Oh, my gosh.
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Yeah.
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I never thought of it that way. But when we're really teaching all of this, we're teaching English language in all its cognitive, linguistic, rhetoric, affective, social, emotional, complexity.
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It's all the systems that come that coalesce and help. So how do we help our teachers understand that but also understand the science of learning in general? Like, how do we as human beings learn and how does that intersect with the learning of language, with the learning of the written language, with the learning of reading.
[00:30:39.750] - Speaker 3
Right. Emotional and cultural. And you're putting another interesting thought in my head in which whatever we learned as graduate students in my particular program, it had to begin with child development. We had to learn all systems. We had Shep White, Sheldon White, Jeremy Anglin, actually, Helen Toddler Flusberg, who now does all this beautiful work on autism, was my ta. Can't believe I can remember these things, but they were giving us as the planks of the platform, how do we learn in all those domains? And they're all involved in reading. So we probably would be banned from any teaching curriculum, certification process by the end of our talk.
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There's so much to learn. So I think one of the things that you brought up for me that's been kind of an AHA, I do think for a very long time, reading wasn't thought of as a linguistic or a languagebased endeavor. And I do think that took us away from the studies that we needed to do to prepare ourselves to understand the process of reading.
[00:32:19.230] - Speaker 3
It's always been a surprise to me that people don't. When you say what reading is, reading is written language, written language, and the idea that people don't automatically realize they must study how language works in all its Orthographics semantics, syntactic, phonological, mortgage, all.
[00:32:49.880] - Speaker 2
Those all those systems.
[00:32:51.470] - Speaker 3
Right. Not only are they important, they are essential. They are essential to understand. They all contribute to fluent comprehension. And any one of them, when it's not developed sufficiently, will make that child just a little less likely to reach fluent comprehension in the time that we need, which is by the end of third grade.
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Right. Yeah.
[00:33:30.170] - Speaker 3
Okay.
[00:33:30.520] - Speaker 2
So we've talked about kind of your shift from English literature into psychology and neurology and human brain development, et cetera. And I know you've been a professor and a researcher at Brandeis and Harvard and Tufts and UCLA. So what has been that through line of the work that has kind of kept all those pieces together?
[00:34:00.620] - Speaker 3
It's very simple. In a certain level. And this is my second slide in every presentation. Literacy is a basic human right across every zip code, across every state. It costs every country. And as you know, I told you before we start the interview, I decided to wear a dress that's from South Africa and the jacket that is from Asia so that we at some point realize that all our work isn't just for the kids in our country or in our backyard. So that is essential. What we do here, I hope, will always contribute to global literacy. We are in a connected world. And when we make our world healthier and more educated everybody, it benefits everybody, right? Everybody is connected. Now, we wouldn't have this culvert crisis. I see that's, as you call the shadow side of our connectedness. There are sad sides to being connected, and there are gladsome. And I think the work that Laura, you and Maria and everybody in the reading leak are doing for our country is also for our world. And the more we see ourselves as connected to that world, the more hope I have for our plan.
[00:35:40.710] - Speaker 2
I agreed. Speaking of that interconnectedness or that internationalness of this, the Proust in the Squid was truly kind of a game changer for me when I read it. And I know it's been translated into so many languages around the world. What is it about that text, do you think, that has really resonated with people?
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What do you hear?
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What do people say to you? What kind of feedback do you get?
[00:36:07.810] - Speaker 3
You know, what is amazing to me is that I certainly get letters weekly from readers, but I still get letters about proustin squared with such regularity and from teachers who take it to the beach. And one of my favorite experiences was on just a remote beach in Martha's Vineyard. And my sister, who's a chatterbox I meet if you think I fuck, fuck my sister care. I truly am trying to relax, and I love people. But that day we were in this. I don't know why we're on the back of a hate. I don't know why we were in this place. We were doing a tour, some kind of nature tour, and these two women were talking about the book they were reading. And my sister started talking to them. And I just leaned back and said, I'm not going to talk to anybody. My sister wrote that book that you're reading. Oh, my God, that some people would take it on their vacation. And they showed me all the underlining. And what they said. This just warmed my heart was that they would underlying passages that could teach them, but that gave them a sense of the beauty of it all.
[00:37:45.930] - Speaker 3
And I was so tired. Every writer wants to find the precise word that will express their thoughts. But you also, as a writer, want to give the beauty of reading, the beauty of written language. And when people write me about that, I want to weep. Because you do not know as an author, you do not know how things will be.
[00:38:27.630] - Speaker 2
You speak so eloquently to that, to the poetry of language, the poetry of the written language, the poetry that we want our students to have access to. And I think that is instilled in your writing, in not just the way that you write, but also in the heart of your writing. And I'm wondering if that's really what it is that is such an attractiveness to that.
[00:38:59.190] - Speaker 3
What I would say, Laura, is that I hope so. It's my goal to find the words that will give them a sense of their own love of language. Because when we teach, if we teach through our own love, we inspire. So there's this great reciprocal between our love of the word and how we can give it away. And when we see whether we're the author or the teacher, when we see the reader or the student light up their own sense of the beauty and the drive within language. There's something Charles Taylor writes about this humble to the 19th century. Actually, Sean does too, that there's no perfect rendition of thought into language. But language is our best vehicle. And so when we find the words that help strive towards conveying that drive to give beauty and thought the clothing of words, that is like a little miracle.
[00:40:28.700] - Speaker 2
Oh, yes.
[00:40:31.970] - Speaker 3
I wish I could remember this language well. Proof said. Written language is that fertile miracle of communication that takes place between two people without ever leaving your chair, more or less. But it's a miracle of communication, and it's a drive, a generative drive that's within us. And when you can find a way to make another person feel like that. That was my hope in truth in the square. It was my hope in reader come home. Especially the last letter in that book.
[00:41:15.130] - Speaker 2
Oh, my goodness.
[00:41:18.810] - Speaker 3
May I have the Grace to give others what I was given? That's it. No.
[00:41:27.150] - Speaker 2
I'm writing down some phrases that they just moved me. Miracle of communication, the generative drive. And I love the word reciprocal. I think what you're doing is you're establishing a reciprocity between you and your reader.
[00:41:46.050] - Speaker 3
It's what you hope for. Laura, I have had an experience recently where I'm writing something that may well and most probably will never be. It may never be published, but will never be known as mine. I don't want it to be. It's fiction. And it says stories. And these stories, one of them just came like I'm sitting here transcribing. That's all I have just transcribing. I'm so happy. Then the second story was the absolute opposite. It was like I had one paragraph and then 100 more pages of being like Jacob wrestling with the angel through the night, wrestling to find the precise words. Writing is like that. It can be transcribing. And it can be wrestling, and both of them are what you are just hoping to give what you want the reader to have.
[00:43:07.800] - Speaker 2
Yes, one of them is like sometimes it's flowing from your heart and sometimes it's being dragged from your heart.
[00:43:20.610] - Speaker 3
And you can imagine what needs more editing.
[00:43:27.670] - Speaker 2
One thing I wanted to touch on is we're talking about your career and just so many accomplishments in your career. But I know that you're really proud of this, becoming a member of the Vatican Academy of Science, and I'd love it if you could tell our listeners about that.
[00:43:47.710] - Speaker 3
So I have had the great good fortune of having one of the best families one could have, and they are the most loving mother and father one could have. But that doesn't mean that my dad had a clue to what I do. Not a clue. He would always say, oh, she's still in school. And it called upon to answer what I did. And he was a very successful businessman. He was a very intelligent person, but he absolutely couldn't and never would read a book I ever wrote. Now, my mother, who's a Steinbeck auto Dick, she really did know, but my dad never did until I was invited to the Vatican for the first time to give a lecture. And when I came home, he said, Marianne, I just want to touch your hand. He said, When I go to my reward, I'll get there because you held the Pope's hand. I didn't hold the Pope's hand, but it meant so much to him and it meant so much to my mother. Now, my mother understood what I did, but she was never, ever boastful. And Laura, you will appreciate this. We come from small towns, right?
[00:45:28.980] - Speaker 3
Everybody puts in their local newspaper what every accomplishments, everything. My mother would never, ever put anything about any of the four children in the paper little tiny paper until the Vatican. And then she said, Marianne, I would like you to write an article for the Elderido Daily Journal.
[00:45:53.700] - Speaker 2
Elderedo Daily Journal.
[00:45:59.930] - Speaker 3
I don't know how they did it, but it's the first time I've ever seen a color photo, frog paint of me going to the Vatican and Africa, too. But at that point, I realized I could never give my family what they gave me, but I could give them what was the sum of their sacrifice. And when I first went to the Vatican and walked up the stairs to meet the Pope anyway with John Paul, Pope Francis is very different, but all I could think of was the school Sisters of Notre Dame and my parents, they're all sacrifices they made, and I just cried. My first picture with a Pope is not just but now it's different. And I've given many lectures and this year asked me to become a permanent member of the Academy of Science. And as you know, Laura, there are very few women who are in the Academy of science. And I believe it's only because Pope Francis is so dedicated to the poor and to their education and to making a life better for them. So I think the head, the Chancellor, saw my election as representing neuroscience and the science, but it's translation into educating the poor.
[00:47:53.410] - Speaker 3
So my parents have both died now, and I can't let them know I'm going to hope very much there's an afterlife. So they know. I mean, there are better reasons for hoping for an afterlife, but that's a good one of mine is mom and dad. Thank you. So it's all about the sacrifice of those who come before us, the shoulders upon whom we stand. I stand on the shoulders of every teacher. And now, Laura, you and Maria and all the people who are working so hard in the Reading League, what you, in my opinion, are doing, you're making your shoulders as broad as possible, like one of those aircraft ships, and you are putting them out so our young teachers can learn and fly off.
[00:48:55.470] - Speaker 2
I hope you are right. When you talked about the Vatican and your parents and what they gave you and how this is a way of you kind of giving back to them that's that reciprocity again, isn't it? And I feel the same way. Like what you just said about how do we bring our young teachers up and up, lift them up and support them in the hard work ahead, the hard work to be done right.
[00:49:25.530] - Speaker 3
Teaching is so beautiful and difficult. And when you said earlier about poetry, I wrote this one article, which is very short for Cappin magazine, but it was called The Science and Poetry of Learning and Teachings to Read. And I want them to have both of those things, the sense of poetry and the knowledge of science.
[00:49:58.570] - Speaker 2
It's the science and the art, right?
[00:50:01.230] - Speaker 3
Yes. May they never feel that those have to be separate.
[00:50:09.110] - Speaker 2
I agreed. That's what we want for our kids, too. I always think about and I probably learned this from you, but it's not enough to be a competent reader. We want our children to enjoy the benefits and the beauty of illiterate life. We want our children to have that experience like you and I had in our little tiny towns. And you know, where Rose Margaret sister Rose Margaret set you back with those books, and you just, you know, that became such a lifeblood for you. We want that for our kids.
[00:50:43.970] - Speaker 3
And you know this, Laura, I have two boys, and both of them have some aspects of neuro diversity. One is dyslexic and has become, I think, one of the most talented. He's very typical from Dyslexia, talented artist whose hand is just amazing. He can do anything. And the other one is a great reader, but can't do anything with his hand in language. Totally. Just graphic. Nobody can read anything. But they teach me that we never give up on our children and illiterate life can have many shapes and forms. And so though my one son, who is dysgraphic but not dyslexic, has a more typical literate life, what my son Ben has is a very selected one. He reads what he most wants to know about, to love. And so he has one of the most beautiful collections of art books that you can imagine. And then he knows how slow the process of reading is for him. So when he reads a book, it is going to be something he really was. I mean, he was reading I think it was Nietzsche last summer, but he chooses books that will really elevate him. And I'll never forget one summer he finished Brother's Car on Mozaf because he knew it was one of my favorite books.
[00:52:22.830] - Speaker 3
And I thought it took him all summer. And I'm so proud of him for many reasons. And I'm so proud of David for all the ways he's become an immersive reader. But Interestingly, Laura, and this is this other generation he will use. He'll go back and forth between print and audio. And I'm so curious about how we our generation, Laura, can provide inspiration for multiple forms of the reading life, multiple forms, and never forgetting that there will be individual differences. But that for those who are able, I will cling with science and personal experience to the idea that the book still possesses one of the most ideal forms of containing and conveying knowledge and wisdom. And the experience of reading a book, especially hardcover, I think is really important for us over time to understand. But I think the real thrust of my message here is that my sons have people platitudinously say, oh, my children teach me more than I teach them. We teach each other different things. Repugnant your word, the reciprocity reciprocity. I cannot tell you how many different things my sons in their different worlds. One is in the Google world and world of strategy.
[00:54:22.010] - Speaker 3
I have no knowledge of it. And the world of art and making things. I can't even imagine how he thinks of it. We're all teaching each other when we are at our best as a human species. Together we're teaching each other and when.
[00:54:45.740] - Speaker 2
We'Re connected and when we're without fear. I love what you talked about, the multiple literacy. It sounds like your son can kind of move seamlessly in and out of text and print and auditory input. But then you came back to this idea that I think you so eloquently stated in Reader Come Home about the importance of a book, the importance of print, the importance of that particular medium.
[00:55:18.790] - Speaker 3
Right. I think during COLVID and after COLVID, I think we've become more sensitive to both the extraordinary contribution and the limitations of the screen. And even though here we are, Laura, if it weren't the screen, you and I couldn't be together. So it is not without gratitude, but it is also not without caution that there are limitations to both the communication between humans among humans and between author and reader. And I have obviously written a book about this. I'm very aware of the changing, expanding science on it. Naomi Barron's, a dear friend, and she just finished a book from Oxypress, how we read now, and I wrote a forward for her, and I'm impressed that the research is really supporting the intuitions that I had improved in the squared and then the summary of research. We knew till 2018 in Redo Home that we comprehend better and more deeply when we have the concreteness of the printed book for the same material. Interestingly, I guess telling study was this huge metaanalysis done by Delgado, the student of Lalo Salmoran in Barcelona. They're part of what's called the Erad Network in Europe, and Naomi Baron is part of that too.
[00:57:12.310] - Speaker 3
And May, and there's many wonderful people in it. But they did this huge meta analysis of study since 2000. Basically to 2000, I think it was 16 or 17. But basically they find that when you're reading the same material on screen or in print, the comprehension of over 171,000 subjects, that's the pool was significantly better with the print. And Rockefeller Ocrman from Israel did a more qualitative study and show that it's because that there's a time millisecond differences in how we process in both mediums. And the students, they're all high school or more College were perceiving themselves better on the screen. And she asked why, and they said, well, we think we're better because we're faster on the screen. Reality is that they are skimming and they're word spotting and they're browsing, and so they're not getting several levels of processing that makes critical analysis and empathy more likely to be used by the circuit. So the big issues for me are, will the medium you use give the same amount of milliseconds to critical analysis, empathy and insight reflection, which doesn't always happen anyway. But those are the three big aspects that if they go missing, we will become ever more susceptible to fake news, false information, and clinging to the familiar silos of information rather than being open and receptive to what democracy demands, which is multiple voices by its citizenry.
[00:59:27.020] - Speaker 3
And I see evermore, especially in the last years, there's polarization across everything. Even in our areas, Laura, we see increased polarization and social media, which can actually both expand. It can also, in fact, in a threatening way, limit us because we've got so much information, we just go to what we know that does not expand, it does not.
[01:00:04.600] - Speaker 2
And that is not what will fuel the heart of a democracy.
[01:00:08.860] - Speaker 3
No. So when we come to the end of the day, when we talk about literacy, we're talking about the link between how our citizenry process information to the fullest or to the narrowest domains of their familiar knowledge and don't go beyond it. So we can either narrow democracy and in that process become ever more polarized, or we can realize what's happening and ensure that we have the plurality of what is really a delicate thing. Democracy is delicate. It's a work in progress.
[01:00:59.950] - Speaker 2
And I had the pleasure of speaking to Parker Palmer about this, about this very issue, about how if we continue to tighten our sphere, then we become tribal and we don't recognize the beauty of the multiplicity of the world in which we live. And I do want to come back to that multiple voices and that polarization when we talk a little bit about our work with the Peace Knicks. But before I get to that, I do want to say when I read Reader Come Home, the big AHA for me was this the idea of empathy and the way you draw that connection between reading on the printed book, the concreteness of the printed book, and how we process that and how that development of insight and empathy is connected to that. I think we all have to read that and understand that. Mary Anne, that's so important. And I thank you for enlightening us on that. That's just such a valuable insight for us to have.
[01:02:16.390] - Speaker 3
I think one of the greatest contributions from the first books read to a young child to the day we die is when we have the capacity to leave ourselves and understand the thoughts and feelings of another. When you and I began by talking about Jack, Jack is one difficult, complex character, and I would never want to be in his shoes or in his mind, but I feel a privilege by being given a glimpse of that other mind. And that's what I really want for all our children and our adults is to be given glimpses of the multiple minds and feelings out there and to go and leave ourselves behind for that time to do that. Because when we come back and there's a theologian who was one of the best teachers I've ever had, he died not that long ago. His name is John Dunn, not the poet theologian, but he used the term passing over. He used it in theology, he used it in reading, and we would talk about it that for him, the act of reading was passing over into the consciousness of another and coming back enriched, enriched. And that's again, the reciprocal, the great reciprocal of reading.
[01:03:57.520] - Speaker 3
But with empathy, that is, to lose empathy because we're skimming and not really immersing ourselves. What a loss for the individual and for our culture and for our world, our world.
[01:04:18.550] - Speaker 2
I think reciprocity is our word of the day.
[01:04:20.690] - Speaker 3
Here, Mary Anne, I want to show you something that has seemingly nothing to do with our interview, and yet it has so much to do with reciprocity. During COLVID, I found two things that were actually just almost miraculously, my own antidotes. One was writing again, as I said, that probably will never be seen by human or known as mine. It's all fiction. But the other was to begin to watch series from Asia. And my kids made fun of me because I happen to love Korea for many reasons. I went on a book tour there. But they are so interested in education and sometimes fanatically so, and they worry so much about that. I don't want to use the word fanatically, but so intensely they worry about their children, but they also are the rewards. You can see in Pisa, these children are learning so much. And I became so interested in their writing system. So I thought I'll start this Korean series, a TV series, at night. It happened to be about North Korea prejudices against South Korea and South Korea prejudiced against the north. It was a satire, even though it's probably the greatest romantic series, I think on television today.
[01:06:05.150] - Speaker 3
It's called Crash Landing on you.
[01:06:07.480] - Speaker 2
Wait, what's it called?
[01:06:09.080] - Speaker 3
Crash Landing on you. Not the most glorious title. I don't even know if that's the best translator. I don't know, but that's what it's translated as. But the reality was that this writer and I really hope someday to meet this writer and even the cast or the director, because they portrayed empathy for others in the most horrible circumstances. And yet humor was how it was like the Greek version of drama. They would have the Greek chorus of women in poverty in a North Korean village and the soldiers. And the hero was a North Korean whose virtue was understood, even in South Korea, as virtue. But I won't tell you more, but I realized that in this moment, this moment when we have so many people acting out in prejudice against our Asian American populations, if I could do one thing, I would have them watch Crash Landing on you. In a Korean series, there's a Chinese series called Find Yourself, which is about family life. It is hysterical. Again, there's a romantic line through it, and that's great. It's wonderful, but it's more the capturing of the universality of our human Korea, China. And then the novel Resistors by Gizzen about what happens when we lose empathy when we are in these controlled environments and how resisting that, resisting having prejudice against ourselves, whatever group is dominating that we must resist.
[01:08:14.090] - Speaker 3
Well, these three experiences. I hope I can write an essay about this, but understanding what is lost Kiss Jen really shows us what is lost when we don't resist. And these two series and I can't read either Chinese or Korean, but I can understand the attempt to provide glimpses of universal values that we all share, whatever leadership is there. I mean, the United States has leadership that we got all into one without saying anything. All of the countries in the world should not only be judged by the failure of their leaders to be the great virtuous people we all hope our leaders to be, but that people in these cultures share values with us. And that to me, I'm using resistors as one of them. But that's what we want through reading film does it in one way. But books oh, my goodness. Books give us this window. Empathy is truly leaving ourselves behind and becoming something bigger than who we are when we come back.
[01:09:43.570] - Speaker 2
Well, first of all, thank you for everything you just said when you talk about leaving ourselves. And I go back to Jack, and the beauty of a book like that is that as we're reading it, we're not just observing Jack. We're in a relationship with Jack. That's the power of that book. And I cannot imagine reading that book on a screen. I can't imagine listening to that book on audio. I can't imagine anything else than holding those pages as if Marilyn Robinson were writing them in my hand. You know what I mean? There's a tactileness about it that allows me to deeply engage with it rather than observe it from here.
[01:10:40.550] - Speaker 3
Right. And observe it in a medium that rewards the transitory rather than the immersive. And you're capturing one of the things that I really want people to understand, that words also have space. Words can convey space, and book conveys space. Ideas that we read in this book. Oh, I know where in the book that passage is. Maybe I don't know it perfectly, but I know where it is on a screen. I've lost all spatial tactical, and time is different. Time is so critical for critical analysis, but for empathy. And when you're on a screen, you can stop, but you don't. We have a set to move ever forward. And with the book, you can literally just stop and think. And there's no, if you will, reward for moving on. Rather, the reward is entering.
[01:11:59.080] - Speaker 2
Entering. You know, it's interesting. I was reading not too long ago. I can't remember what the book was, but it was so good. And I came to a phrase or a sentence that I wanted to remember, but because I was so enraptured in the flow of the story, I kept reading and I just made a mental note to myself. I wanted to come back, and I just kept reading and reading because I was just so immersed in it. But then when it came time to go back and find that, I could find it because I had a visual, I had a map of where that was. And so I could go back and find it.
[01:12:38.180] - Speaker 3
Yeah. So my son, the artist, has a new he's always doing different things, but his newest genre is to make these huge. I can only call them ERNs because they're up to my waist. They're huge and they're memory maps. And he has his own kiln, and he usually is drawing or painting, but he paints the spatial. Whatever the person is, he's done them for Aspen. What is Aspen like in the summer? What is Aspen, like in the winter. And I just saw yesterday his in laws to be had asked commissioned him to make a memory map of their lives and their place in La. And I was just astonished in a way I had never thought of memory map as a way of thinking about a book's contribution that's unique. That's just what you just said. Memory like we have a memory map, and it's not perfect. It's there.
[01:13:58.010] - Speaker 2
Well, then, first of all, I just have to say that sounds like an amazing project and like a beautiful piece of art. It's almost like an organic or living piece of art.
[01:14:10.460] - Speaker 3
I'm so shocked my in laws to be, or whatever one calls them. We were celebrating peace off last night together, and I hadn't been in anybody's house, anybody's house for months. So I walk in and I gave them flowers and they said, oh, we'll put the flowers next to and I didn't hear what they said. And then I looked because I had Japanese flowerishment. And then I said, what is this? I said, oh, my God, this is my son's creation. And I want all our children. And remember, Ben is dyslexic, and he had to fight a system that wasn't set up for him. And as you and I know, Laura, it's still not set up for our children who are neurodiverse as much as we will work, you and I and everyone in Reading League towards that goal. When you realize that so many of our children who are dyslexic or neurodiverse have all these talents within them, we have to keep them alive.
[01:15:31.460] - Speaker 2
Yes.
[01:15:33.990] - Speaker 3
We have to keep their spirit alive and well as they endure a system that sometimes is actually even in antagonism to the way they learn. The Reading League is as you know, I feel the Reading League could be called Reading Warriors.
[01:15:56.730] - Speaker 2
Well, we have to hold their dignity close. We have to hold their dignity close.
[01:16:07.460] - Speaker 3
That's right.
[01:16:08.080] - Speaker 2
And honor their dignity.
[01:16:12.170] - Speaker 3
What they're going to become. We all know we have no clue. And it doesn't matter. Whatever we can do to help them reach their potential to be happy, productive and at peace with themselves and not at war with themselves, as you and I probably have. I don't even want to know how many letters I've had from adults who write me because they have finally understood what was different about them, because their children are diagnosed and they have endured so much internal war. Unnecessary.
[01:16:54.170] - Speaker 2
Yeah. Year after year after year. Right. Well, I wanted to when you mentioned you hadn't been out of the house for a while and when you talk about how the system is not set up for everybody, that reminded me of this article that you recently published with Comra Yates and Renee Boynton Jarrett. And I wanted to just lift that up for a minute for our listeners. And I'm going to read a paragraph of this and then have you comment on this? Too many schools haven't been safe for our children or their teachers since long before the current pandemic erected further barriers to children's learning. Therefore, it cannot be an option to return to the same education system that has failed to meet the needs, hopes and potential of the children most harmed by systemic inequities and racism. So this is from an article called The Coming Literacy Crisis. There's no going back to school as we knew it. And you just published it. Actually, it was just published this week in Ed Week. But I wonder if you could just comment for our listeners about what you and the other authors have identified as this two point plan to fix what's fundamentally broken for generations.
[01:18:09.030] - Speaker 3
It is such a hard thing to be a patriotic, loyal citizen of this beautiful experiment of a country and to confront that we're still dealing with problems that are two centuries old. And we have not by and large, we have not faced the fact that our zip codes determine the quality of education in the United States of America. That is not something any of us can really believe. I mean, we still can't believe there can be that much disparity. And yet for Comer Yates, who is the director Rector of the Atlantic Speech School. And Renee is this amazing pediatrician and epidemiologist who has been working on trauma, especially with children of color, for years and years. For each of us in our different ways, we have come to this conclusion that we have had a tale of two cultures for over two centuries and that it is time. And maybe one of the only silver linings or one of the few silver linings of culmin is that we are pressing our face against the window on those two realities. And so when we talk about the crises or the epidemics, we're talking about the dual ones.
[01:20:00.770] - Speaker 3
And we are determined, we're determined to at least describe what exists. And with coma, we looked at, for example, fluency rates in all the cities in the Nape results. And what you saw in Atlanta was how the privileged schools and the Zip codes with the Caucasian privileged families reaching really high levels of fluent proficiency, whereas the children of color especially and underprivileged Zip codes were almost 50% below that. It was staggering. In Atlanta, La was terrible. But you would look at city after city and you would see these disparities, and if you will, they're just right in your face. All you have to do is visit, just visit. But not only you visit the school that has had such a disparity. You visit the schools where they say no to that. We're going to do the best we can for all children. And I think of the Harlem zone. I think of the places that I visited where they are determined. Like my school, Sisters of Notre Dame, everybody reads, everybody reaches their potential. Well, we have to have that kind of philosophical and statistic based reality check. What are the stats? Let's use them.
[01:21:55.070] - Speaker 3
And now that we have this relief package, let's be very intelligent. This is my worry that we will see this money as a way of just throwing money at a problem instead of being very intelligent. Where is it going to do the most good for the children who need it most right now? You know, it is not taking away from any privileged child. I want all children to be privileged, but I'm not talking economic privileged. I'm talking written language, privilege, linguistically privileged, socially, emotionally privileged. I want our children to actually have an experience that my brothers and sister had in this tiny, very poor school. Two rooms wasn't about money. It was about dedication and conviction that every child can reach their potential. That's what I want. And that darn. I mean, the statistics are really terrible, right?
[01:23:17.660] - Speaker 2
Yeah. And the other thing you bring up in this article is the fact that we failed our teachers in many ways, too. And you bring up the statistic that 78% of teachers report mental and physical exhaustion and the importance of equipping our teachers with the tools necessary to fight this cycle of injustice.
[01:23:42.090] - Speaker 3
Yes, Laura, I used to always make it a point, almost to the point of having a note beside my presentation, never neglect how amazing it is to have teachers who keep going despite less money, less status, less resources. And in the places we're talking about really mitigating circumstances that are abersive, some of the environments are as risky for teachers as the students. What do we do about that? And there's a side of me that wants just to embrace teachers everywhere and say thank you. But another side of me says, okay, we are an army. We have to have discipline. And the discipline is the disciplines of knowledge. We have to be armed with knowledge, and we have to have trained teachers. And we have to have trained teachers who are given resources and are given the acknowledgement that I think COVID may have actually given to some teachers that the parents didn't realize what it's like to have to teach their child, their own child. So that's another part of the silver lining to understand what teachers are doing during their days and how tired and exhausting it is. One of the things I always wanted to say to teachers.
[01:25:31.940] - Speaker 3
I know how wary you are. I know how where you are and Lar you and I, through knowledge and through, if you will, inspiration, inspiration, give breathing room to our teachers. They need to be inspired and they need to be acknowledged. And that acknowledgment is financial in some ways in terms of the resources of the school in their classroom, but financially in terms of what their monetary reward is, and also they need to be appreciated. So all of that is one piece of covet that this article was trying to represent and say they are tired and emotionally drained. And worst of all, this is what always kills me. They're blamed for everything society didn't get right. We put on the back to teachers.
[01:26:38.920] - Speaker 2
Agreed. Well, I think teaching is not for the faint of heart.
[01:26:43.970] - Speaker 3
No, it's a marathon. It is. I blame all teachers who say can't do it, but I want to uplift those and hold their arms. Hold their arms. We have your back. We as a nation should be like Finland and Korea. We have our teachers back.
[01:27:10.590] - Speaker 2
We acknowledge you. We appreciate you, and we support you. That's so much of your work. That's so much of our work here at the Reading League. So thank you for that. Thank you. And I'll put this article linked this article in our show notes as well. And I do want to mention our little group of people we get together. I just need to tell our listeners that Jan Hasbro, Janine Haron, Margaret Goldberg, Mary Anne, myself, Margie Gillis, Januise. We get together, call ourselves a peace Knicks, and we are literacy warriors, to use your word, Maryanne. And really what we're trying to do is recognize the multiple voices and try to end the polarization so that we can all come together for the betterment of teachers and children and for the advancement of this idea of reading as a necessary skill for leading a rich life of reciprocity. And the reason I wanted to mention that is I just have to thank you for the gift of being with you and these other wonderful people to be able to have these kinds of conversations. And it feels to me like the conversation you and I have been able to have today is one that we've been able to have as part of our little piecenix groups.
[01:29:02.490] - Speaker 2
But now we're going to elevate this to our Reading Lead community in hopes that everybody in that Reading Lead community is enriched by this conversation, as I have been.
[01:29:12.380] - Speaker 3
Mary Anne Laura, I knew, as I said in the beginning, that this is one of those occasions when a responsibility to try to talk about these issues is a joy because of you and the Reading Lead and all the people who are part of it. It just makes me happy not to have left English literature behind, but to have incorporated it with science so that we together have something for that next generation to aspire to be elevated and uplifted by and have fun, too.
[01:29:54.610] - Speaker 2
Exactly. I feel like we could talk for another hour. So let us make a date to have a part two at some point. But I do want to close out our discussion today with what I call our rapid fire questions, Mary Anne, which are the questions that I ask everybody on our podcast. You may have already answered some of these. So the first question is, who was your favorite teacher? Growing up and why.
[01:30:28.510] - Speaker 3
Oh, gosh, I really have to say I want to give all so many teachers my love because they inspired me. So every single one of those school Sisters of Notre Dame, my teachers in high school, there were several who just absolutely helped me so much. But in College, I would say my favorite teacher was Father John Dunn, the theologian who taught me that our God is not to be found only in churches and temples and synagogues, but our God is a wild God who lives within us, and that has all together changed my life. So that it's the search for God rather than anything else that actually helps me with every day of my life. So I guess my favorite teacher will always be John Done, literature, poetry, theology, history, and just the love of one human for the transcendent goodness. Okay.
[01:31:51.170] - Speaker 2
Thank you, Father John Done for that. Thank you. Now this one I know you're not going to be able to answer one book, but I'll ask you anyway, what is a favorite book, either as a child or as an adult? And we've already talked a lot about our mutual love of Marilyn Robinson. But what are some other one other book that you think you really comes to mind?
[01:32:15.080] - Speaker 3
I think the book and I wrote about this improved in The Squid. The book that I keep coming back to over and over is Middle March by George Elliott. And I come back to it because Dorothea Brooke, the character, is like us, Laura. She is in a small town and she makes mistakes, but she never gives up trying to find the good and do the good for others. And in so doing, she is she will be both never remembered and never forgotten at that one level. So Middle March.
[01:33:08.010] - Speaker 2
Beautiful. What are you reading right now?
[01:33:15.070] - Speaker 3
You will die when you see what I'm reading right now is horrible. Noel Chomsky, who was a deer who became a real friend. He has bookstacks, and I have bookstacks now. These are the ones that I have every day. Here's a new one on creativity, but there's also one that this Dieter Sh bonhaw for a book of this was someone just gave me between heaven and Mirth. Now you see now these stacks are all if you look their philosophy and theology with a little bit of Wendell Barry and Gifts Jin in there. Herman hasn't. So these are the stacks. I won't take you upstairs, but upstairs are the stacks of novels. Each room has its own. Actually, they're all categorized by and then alphabetized. Stats aren't alphabetized, but the shells are all alphabetized by cats.
[01:34:34.470] - Speaker 2
You've got a multiplicity of books going on simultaneously.
[01:34:40.850] - Speaker 3
I find that helpful.
[01:34:44.730] - Speaker 2
You never know where you need to go. You don't know what's going to call to you.
[01:34:50.320] - Speaker 3
I never know. But I love them all.
[01:34:55.630] - Speaker 2
What are your greatest hopes for today's children? And I think you've probably answered that. But if you could just share with us one last beautiful, beautiful nugget of language for Mary Anne Wolf.
[01:35:07.270] - Speaker 3
My desire for children is that they may, through their great efforts and through ours reach their potential for contributing to their small world, our larger worlds, our planet, and in so doing help our species become something of beauty in its evolution. I don't know. That's just my first thought.
[01:35:45.350] - Speaker 2
Beautiful. And that was beautiful. Mary Anne, this whole conversation has been a beautiful experience for me. Thank you so much. I can't wait to share this with everybody out there.
[01:36:02.870] - Speaker 3
But Laura, it's so reciprocal. So I want to end with what John done. I said my favorite teacher always. He said when you're with someone who's thinking elevates your own, you can't help but actually grow and expand. So I think the reciprocal in our conversation was because you actually elicited my best thoughts, which then elicited your best thoughts, which you elicited us. I love it. And I want to also thank Steve and Mike, those wonderful men who are helping with behind the scenes. We are always behind the scenes people.
[01:36:54.770] - Speaker 2
And we thank we thank them all. Well, thank you so much for this. And again, just gratitude.
[01:37:04.120] - Speaker 3
Me too. And blessings on everyone during this very Holy week across all religions. And unbelief doubting is an important part of me.
[01:37:16.940] - Speaker 2
Important part. It elevates us all. Yes. Thank you. After that, I really don't know what to say. I mean, my admiration for Marianne is deep and wide and I know many of you feel the same way. I hope you enjoyed today's podcast and maybe you'll listen to it more than once. I know I will because of all the wonderful and beautiful words of wisdom and thoughtfulness that she brought to this conversation. So I hope you enjoyed this. If you do enjoy this podcast, please make sure to rate us and also share with your friends and colleagues. We thank you for being our guests today and for joining us on this podcast. Please make sure to check out the Reading League at www.thereadingleg.org and see many of the other ways that we support you in your important work again. Thank you.