Kelly Gallagher

Veteran teacher and author Kelly Gallagher explains why kids have turned away from reading, and what parents and teachers can do to bring them back.

Kelly taught high school English for 35 years. He's the author of *Readicide: How Schools Are Killing Reading*. His work has earned him the National Council of Teachers of English's Kent Williamson Exemplary Leader Award (2024), the Adolescent Literacy Thought Leader Award (2018) and the California Association of Teachers of English Award for Classroom Excellence.

In this episode, Lee Schneider talks with Kelly about the forces pushing young people away from books. Some of those forces include: test-driven schooling, teaching techniques that make assigned reading a chore, social media that is built to be addictive, the temptation to take AI shortcuts instead of actually reading the book assigned.

Kelly shares that when he was in the classroom90% of his recent 12th graders admitted they had "fake read" their way through school, meaning that they hadn't read a novel in years and only had read excerpts.

Kelly Gallagher website: https://www.kellygallagher.org/

Topics mentioned in this episode:

1. No Child Left Behind and the testing era — 0:15 (covers how testing narrowed reading and the imbalance)
2. Over-teaching books — 1:48 (covers the Readicide concept, the 10-week worksheet, and the movie analogy)
3. Long-form vs. short-form reading — 3:28 (covers biliterate readers and developmental windows)
4. Benefits of fiction: empathy and wellbeing — 5:33
5. Sophie's Choice: why AI summaries can't replace reading — 6:57
6. Self-selected reading and the classroom library — 8:45 (covers book talks, graphic novels, and student choice)
7. 90% of seniors fake-read — 14:57
8. AI reading is not reading — 16:17 (covers the Joan Didion example, windows and mirrors, and the boiling frog)
9. Reading in class: if they're not reading with you, they're not reading without you — 21:26 (covers reigniting reluctant readers)
10. Book banning: then and now — 25:49 (covers the irony of shielding kids and books as imaginative rehearsals

Books mentioned in this episode include:

Readicide: How Schools Are Killing Reading and What You Can Do About It (Stenhouse, 2009) | Kelly Gallagher | Bookshop · Amazon · Author site

Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World | Maryanne Wolf | Bookshop · Amazon · Author site · HarperCollins

Teens Choosing to Read: Fostering Social, Emotional, and Intellectual Growth Through Books (2023) | Gay Ivey & Peter Johnston | Bookshop · Amazon · Teachers College Press

The Year of Magical Thinking | Joan Didion

Sophie's Choice| William Styron

A Lesson Before Dying | Ernest J. Gaines

The House on Mango Street | Sandra Cisneros

Of Mice and Men | John Steinbeck 

Creators and Guests

Host

Lee Schneider

Novelist, Podcast Producer, Working on Many Things

Guest

Kelly Gallagher

Author, educator

What is The Future Lab with Lee Schneider Season 3?

In Season 3, The Future Lab goes after the big questions that authors, parents, and educators are asking about why people are spending less time reading than ever before. And we'll also be checking in with some of our previous guests. Guests include librarians and educators, authors, publishers, agents, YouTube and TikTok reviewers, and audiobook producers. Join Lee Schneider for season three of The Future Lab.

Kelly Gallagher
Lee Schneider: [00:00:00] Kelly, welcome to the podcast. It's so nice to have you here.
Kelly Gallagher: Lee, thank you. Thank you for the invite. It's a pleasure to be here.
Lee Schneider: What are the factors both inside and outside of school that are causing a decline in reading?
Kelly Gallagher: I was a classroom teacher for 35 years, and I can look back on my career, and I would say much of it started when we started the whole No Child Left Behind era, in which schools were held accountable to these national high-stakes exams that valued a certain kind of reading over all other kinds of reading. And it valued a kind of reading that's not all that pleasurable, right? So schools then became a place where reading was an activity that was done to pass tests. And not only to pass tests, but to pass tests that only valued short passages, [00:01:00] because you can't have a, a, a widespread test that tests a novel, because you can't assume that everybody in California or everybody in the nation has read the same novel. And so what, what it drove was this, this, this world in which reading became very task-oriented, uh, very test-oriented, and really shrunk down, uh, again, into smaller bite-sized pieces of reading. So what this created was a, uh, an imbalance in the reading diet, um, in which, uh, a lot of teachers moved away from teaching whole books or novels or even books of nonfiction and, and became more like teachers of passage reading. But even among those teachers who did, uh, like me, continue to, to have kids read books, in my travels around the country, uh, and visiting a lot of teachers, I noticed [00:02:00] that in the classrooms, uh, there were a lot of examples of teachers who would over-teach a book. Um, and I gotta say, I was probably guilty of that early in my career as well. But I wrote a book called "Readicide: How Schools Are Killing Reading," uh, back in 2009, and one of the things that was true then that's still true today is that, you know, if a teacher spends 10 weeks on Hamlet or 10 weeks on Romeo and Juliet or, or To Kill a Mockingbird, that's not a novel anymore. It's a 10-week worksheet. So there was the issue of over-teaching, of stopping. You know, if, if you went to a movie, uh, and the projectionist stopped the film every three minutes and had you do a Post-it note, uh, I don't, I don't think you'd be going to the movies. So there was the, the issue of over-teaching. And then I would say the last issue in schools is the opposite of that, [00:03:00] and that is this idea of under-teaching. Assigning reading is really easy. Teaching reading's hard, right? And, you know, much of, I think, my craft as a teacher was trying to get to that place where I found that sweet spot in between, where I'm not doing too much for them, but I am doing enough for them that will enable them to, to go on journeys of, of reading, you know, lengthy books.
Lee Schneider: So let's talk about that. Some might argue that reading is reading. Who cares? You know, it's, it's a newspaper, it's a magazine, it's a text. We just want people to read. But it's not really that, is it? Could you make the distinction between what is gained by long-form storytelling, reading that, versus what is gained by short-form passage absorption?
Kelly Gallagher: Yeah, boy, that's a big one. One of the things that I try to do in my classroom, and I've shared with a lot of teachers, comes from Maryanne [00:04:00] Wolf's work. She's a researcher at UCLA. She wrote a book called Reader, Come Home. What Wolf says, which I really like, is that we need to build biliterate readers. And by biliterate, she doesn't mean bilingual. But what she means is if you look at how the human brain develops in adolescence and in young children, the cognitive exercise of reading a short passage or, uh, even outside the classroom, what you might call click-and-go reading, is a very different, uh, mental exercise than holding onto your thinking over 300 pages. Uh, and in an age of distraction addiction, it's very, very important, I think, that kids get that longer experience. Uh, what Wolf argues, and I hope I'm paraphrasing it right, and what I've, you know, what I believe to be true, is that there are key developmental windows. Uh, [00:05:00] one of them is from birth to age three, the other one is in adolescence, in which the brain is way more malleable than it is when we're older. It's much easier to learn a language when you're seven years old—a second language when you're seven years old—than when you're 70 years old, right? And what Wolf argues, and what I argue with some other research, is that if you learn to think critically while you're in those windows, you will grow up to be an adult with the capacity to think critically. But if you do not think critically while you're in those developmental windows, if you're just handed handouts or worksheets, then your ability to become a critical thinker as an adult is, is severely hampered. And so there is a richness, there is a texture. We, we know that kids who read a lot of fiction, for example, develop more empathy. We know that they, they [00:06:00] have better relationships with their peers and with their families. I'm thinking of studies that were done by two researchers, Gay Ivey and Peter Johnston, and they have a book called Teens Choosing to Read, in which they followed, uh, kids, uh, for four years, eighth grade through 10th grade. They gave them books that a lot of people are trying to take away from kids today, and those are books that we would deem edgier books. But what they found, and I actually wrote it down here so I would remember it, is that they developed more empathy, they improved their relationships with peers and family, they became more thoughtful. And here's what I thought was really interesting. They became happier people. Uh, they performed better on tests. They were more likely to heal, heal or get better from depression and grief. Uh, and of course, the bottom line is it's a positive cycle. If you begin to read and you like to read, then you're going to read more, and then you're on that positive cycle. Let me give you an example. When I was in college, [00:07:00] one of my favorite books, and this was a long time ago, but one of my favorite books was William Styron's book, Sophie's Choice. It's not a happy book. It's a Holocaust story. But about 300 pages in, after you've gotten to know Sophie very well and very deeply, there's a flashback where she was captured by the Nazis and she had to make an unimaginable decision regarding the welfare of her family. Uh, and you know, after 300 pages, when you get to that, you are devastated. I mean, uh, devastation is the point there, right? Because we're trying to wrap our heads around this thing called the Holocaust. Well, you could have AI summarize Sophie's Choice in two paragraphs for you, and you could read a short passage, but it's not going to have nearly the impact; you're not going to be thinking very deeply about it.
Lee Schneider: One of my sons is in high school. He's [00:08:00] a ninth grader, and he's reading, uh, "A Lesson Before Dying." He's reading "The House on Mango Street," Sandra Cisneros' wonderful book, and he's reading "Of Mice and Men." Now, I was struck by that because those are the books that I read when I was in high school, which was a long time ago. So should we be changing out the books?
Kelly Gallagher: That's a controversial question. My answer's easy. Yes. The answer's yes. First and foremost, you have a generation of kids who are not reading. And when I was teaching seniors in high school, you know, to take a kid who would admit to me, "I haven't read a book in seven or eight years," and for me to say, "Okay, great. Let's start with Hamlet," uh, that's malpractice, right? And so, uh, I'm not— I, I love Hamlet, and I actually still taught it, but I also believe, you know... A famous English teacher, Nancy Atwell, said there are three [00:09:00] kinds of books in the world. There are challenge books, there are just-right books, and there are vacation books. And I think to develop readers, kids should be reading all three. And so in my classroom, I would teach Hamlet, but I would also say that about 80% of the reading they did over the course of the year was self-selected. Sometimes in book clubs where I said, you know, "We're going to read about topic X, and here are eight titles, and you get to pick one." But often it was complete freedom to choose what you wanted to read. And as a classroom teacher, I, I spent 35 years building a classroom library that had about 2,000 books in it. And so I got to the point where I did a book talk every day, because I think in the classroom, a teacher's first job with readers is to reestablish reading momentum. And to take a kid, let's take a 12th [00:10:00] grader who's reading at the seventh-grade or around, you know, middle school level, and to say, "We're going to read '1984' together," is problematic, right? The whole— I think the whole-class novel in itself has become problematic because there's such a wide gap of ability sitting in that room, reading ability sitting in that room. So yes, I think, you know, the way to get kids hooked on reading is to give them books that they are actually interested in reading.
Lee Schneider: There are two things going on here, and a lot more, but let's just isolate two for a moment: the kind of book we're talking about and the kind of teacher we're talking about. They kind of go together to me. You have to have self-assigned books. I'm hearing we need students to pick the books they want. But you need a teacher to have— I'm hearing kind of a more open-ended approach to this, that maybe the class doesn't all have to read the same book, or maybe a student will [00:11:00] come up with an unusual choice. And here's my question: How unusual? If the student comes in with a graphic novel, if the student says, "I want to read an audiobook," what does the, what does the teacher say to that?
Kelly Gallagher: My kids had full choice 80% of the time. You know, I had various goals that I would share with the kids. Number one is I'm going to get you up and reading. Number two is that once you're in a reading lane, uh, then I want you to discover other reading lanes. Uh, otherwise, I would have a kid who would, who would wanna read a book about football, then another book about football, then another book about football all through the years, all through the year. But, you know, okay, if I got the kid up and reading, then that's great. But now it's time... And in my classroom, I set up conditions in which, even in a large classroom, I was shoulder to shoulder and conferring with each kid probably about every three weeks. And so, uh, I could nudge, "Hey, if you like this, you might [00:12:00] like that," kind of thing. Because a lot of kids walked into the classroom at the beginning of the year and they recognized, "Oh, he's going to confer with me, so I, I have to read. Where's the easiest thing to read in this class?" You know, because they were so disconnected from the act of reading. And then the, the last goal, of course, is I wanted readers to be able to identify, as they walked out the door on the last day of school... could they tell me somebody they like to read? Because most of them, when they walked in the door: "Who's your favorite author?" Nobody, right? And so the goal, of course, is, is to get words past their eyeballs, because I think it's pretty clear that the kids who read the most read the best. The kids who read the most do best on the state tests, and yet we put kids in conditions for the state tests in which they don't want to read.
Lee Schneider: I'm hearing among my fellow parents that the attitude is [00:13:00] they're reading anything. Anything is fine. There's sort of a desperation almost, or a resignation. But it sounds like we as parents and also educators need to be a bit more proactive. We might have to make some more suggestions. We may not have to stop at what the school assigns, but try to think of other things. Do I have that more or less right?
Kelly Gallagher: Yeah, I, I agree. My, when my daughters were young, they loved reading those Goosebumps books. They, and, you know, they were so formulaic and, ugh, like I'd sit there and go... But what, what we know is that the younger the kids are... For example, if a kid finds a series that he or she likes, the, the, the, I don't have the stat in front of me, but it's, it's remarkable how much more likely you are to be an adult reader if as a young kid you find a series that you like, whether it's Goosebumps or later on, you know, uh, Hunger Games or whatever it might be. The kids who get hooked into [00:14:00] series are much, much more likely to become adult readers. But I think the answer's kind of in between. I think you put things in... Graphic novels are, by the way, a very rich source of unfamiliar words. The best, the best bang for the buck in building a vocabulary is giving kids texts that they can handle, but the texts also have unfamiliar words in them. And you'd be surprised how rich comic books are, graphic novels are, uh, for vocabulary development. But eventually, yeah, I wanna move you up the ladder into other things, 'cause there are kids who will stay in that same lane and that same level of difficulty all year long. But I think, again, to reiterate, I think one of the problems in classrooms is kids walk in the door and automatically we want them to be academic when they haven't been reading. 90% of my 12th graders [00:15:00] in the last three or four years I was in the classroom, 90% of them admitted to me that they fake-read their way to the 12th grade, and the worst offenders were the honors students.
Lee Schneider: Wow. Fake reading meaning they read synopses or...?
Kelly Gallagher: They look it up online, you know, and now with AI in there, it's, it's becoming even more of a task. Uh, which also, if I may just pivot here for a second, you know, we, we started this conversation with what were the factors that got in the way of reading back in the day that are still there, and we talked about the testing and over-teaching and under-teaching. But in writing this new version of Readicide, there are factors outside of class that did not exist when I wrote the first edition of that, primarily algorithmic addiction, AI, and I would say from a teacher's point of view or a librarian's point of view, it's just an, uh, [00:16:00] unprecedented political assault on reading.
Lee Schneider: Those are formidable opponents.
Kelly Gallagher: Yes.
Lee Schneider: Algorithms and politics and just the, the magnetic nature of the devices in our hands. So what is to be done?
Kelly Gallagher: Well, I think, you know, when you think about AI, for example, I think we have to teach kids that AI reading is not reading. There are different kinds of reading, as you sort of alluded to earlier. One of them, which is more shallow to me, is what I would call extraction reading. Read chapter five, here are the four questions, go back in the text, find them, write them down. There's not a lot of thinking going on with extraction kind of reading. But what I want kids to know—this goes back to a researcher, uh, named Rosenblatt in the 1930s—is that when I read a poem and you read the same poem, the [00:17:00] meaning of that poem comes from my background and your background, or, or the painting or whatever it is. We are not going to read it the same. We bring ourselves. Reading is an interaction between the text and the life experience of the person reading. For example, I was reading Joan Didion recently, a passage about, uh, the unexpected, uh, when her, when her husband died unexpectedly. And I read this short little passage, and reading that passage took me right into, uh, the, the care facility where my mom was, uh, suffering from dementia. I was in the room with her when she died. I was the only one there. Uh, that is the connection to that reading. AI can never do that for you or for me. It can summarize it, but it can't give you that visceral experience of connecting with people and places and, you know, and things. [00:18:00] You know, there's, there's... Books are windows, and they're mirrors. Windows and mirrors, right? They allow you to kinda think about yourself a little bit more. AI can't do that for me. AI can't have that reading experience that I had when I read that about Joan Didion's husband. And the other problem with AI, I would say, is that students are not offloading skills they already possess and having AI do it for them. What they're doing is they're shortcutting their development as readers and having AI do it for them. So it's one thing to already have the skills and, and have it do it for you, but it's another thing when you have not developed the skills and have it do it, do them for you.
Lee Schneider: Definitely. And this brings up a thought that I've often had about AI and our use of AI in this family, which is that it's convenient, and it's always at hand. But sometimes working at [00:19:00] it is better. What I mean by that is, yes, I could look something up instantly all the time about anything, and it might even be right or it might be wrong. But actually going to a library or doing some online research, which takes an hour—to find things, to find people to interview for the podcast, to read books and scripts that I would need for research. You know, I did these things, walking around, you know, legwork, so to speak, in an actual building with books in it or talking to people. But I see that kind of going away for people because the other way is convenient. So what are your thoughts on that?
Kelly Gallagher: I think, uh, if we're talking about reading, I think there's a problem on the writing side too. But if we're talking about reading, I, I think the value of AI might be in preparing the student to enter the novel. Or it might be you've read "1984," now let's go out in the world and do some research on [00:20:00] totalitarianism or euphemisms or, you know, privacy issues. But what we don't want is for the actual reading experience itself to be stripped out of that equation, right? You know, somebody smarter than me once said, "The best teacher of reading is the reading." Right? And the best teacher of writing is the writing. I, I can, I can provide graphic organizers. I can model writing for my kids. But if you're not writing and writing and writing, it, it won't matter. You could cover every reading standard. I could teach every reading standard, but if the kids aren't reading and reading and reading, it will not matter, right? And so I think often we're so hung up— if instead of being hung up on test scores, we instead said, "Your salary as a teacher will, will be contingent on how much your kids like to read when they get out of your grade," you would see both things happen. You would see kids like to read a lot [00:21:00] more, and you would see test scores go up 'cause kids are actually reading.
Lee Schneider: When I think of kids who are pulled in so many directions at once for their time, for their attention, for their friends, for their sports, for their families, they might have jobs, there are so many obligations, and yet here we are, adults saying, "You should be reading more." Well, how do we tell them that in a way that they might be able to hear it?
Kelly Gallagher: Well, there are some prominent people in my field who disagree with me, but, um, I think if they're not reading with you, they're not reading without you. So I, as a high school teacher, I had to carve out classroom time where, while they're reading, I'm conferring with them. But we would spend at least 10 or 15 minutes a day reading in class. Sometimes we're all reading the same book. Sometimes kids are in different book clubs. Sometimes the 30-whatever kids are all reading 30 separate books. [00:22:00] But if you take a kid who's fake-read his way to the 12th grade and hasn't really read a book in four or five years, if you don't get them to start reading in school, then they're not going to read outside of school. We have to kinda connect them back in the classroom. And then there are kids that I had in the 12th grade who worked 30 hours a week after school, or they lived in a crowded apartment, or they had to take care of their siblings after school, or, you know, or they had football, and then they had to go take care of the kids, you know? So to me, it's even more of an argument that more of this reading has to be done in school. Now, having said that, if the only reading kids do is at school, they're never going to become great readers either. So to me, school is the place where we try to relaunch, reignite, and I believe... Every single one of my students likes to read, every one of them. They don't know that, but [00:23:00] if I gave them a book about skateboarding or, or weightlifting or, you know, I, I... That's the way I'm going to get them back in the door. And then we're going to do a book club, and then we're going to have more choice, and then as, as we get deeper into the year, okay, now let's read something hard together. But we had to work them into, uh, that kind of reading shape.
Lee Schneider: Now, when I first contacted you about doing this, you said, "I've just finished the new 'Readicide 2.0' book." So I want to be sure to ask you a few questions about that. I know things have changed since the first one, but what did you discover in the writing of it that may have surprised you or made you say, "Oh, I have to take a different point of view with this"?
Kelly Gallagher: Yeah. It's interesting when you revisit something you wrote almost 20 years ago because, uh, that was pre-pandemic. You know, I think that the, the chapter I wrote on algorithmic addiction was kind of an eye-opener for me because, you know, when I... Even when I wrote, uh, Readicide [00:24:00] 1.0, we had cell phones, but they weren't really smartphones yet, and they weren't really... You know, so it was before that whole thing. I don't know if you remember this, but in, in the beginning days, you'd go online and you'd surf around a little bit, and you'd get to the end. It would say, "Thank you. See you next time." And now, in the history of, of that programming and what they've done, knowing it's addictive and knowing, uh, you know, that, that kids are going to be harmed by this, right? We know that children who are online a lot, you know, over the top, are the most vulnerable. They're lonelier. They don't sleep as much, which is really, really, uh, uh, really... That's a double whammy there. Girls, I, I don't wanna overgeneralize, but girls often have more depression issues and eating disorders, whereas boys become more aggressive or, you know, they, they get gaming addiction, [00:25:00] uh, or radicalization of, of them, you know? One of the ways we're going to try to help kids with that is I think we have to teach them the difference between intentional scrolling and automatic scrolling, right? If the kid's doing her homework and she goes, "I need a break," and then she takes her phone out to, to do other stuff, that's going to lead... There's a whole body of research on digital exhaustion, right? But what that kid needs to do is get away from the computer, get away from the phone, get outside, pet the dog, do something, uh, that's away from the screen. So I think that whole element of trying to teach kids the harm, um, I think they understand it, but I don't think they deeply understand what's happened to them. It's free, but it's not free. There's a very heavy cost there. Then, as I said earlier, there's the fact that, uh, never before in our [00:26:00] lifetime have more books been banned from school libraries and classroom libraries. I've been in schools, I've been in... I, you know, I get a lot of email. I have people who had to throw away classroom libraries they spent years building, or they had to cover them up. And I think the difference there back in the day was, you know, a parent would have a concern. And by the way, I, I, I agree parents can have concerns. If your, if your kid is in my class and you don't want your kid to read a book, fine. I, I'll, I'll be happy to find you an alternative assignment. My concern is when you tell the whole class and you tell other people's children they can't read the book. Well, back in the day, that's kinda what it was. But today, if you look at ALA, the American Library Association's latest stats on it, the coordination of banning books is now a national coordination, and 92% of book bannings in the United States are from larger organizations trying to remove choice from, from that. So, teachers and [00:27:00] librarians have found themselves in a time when it's harder than ever to get kids to read. And we said earlier in this conversation, how do we get them to read? We give them stuff they wanna read. And I cited that Johnston and Ivey study earlier in this conversation. The, the irony is this: in an attempt to shield kids from perhaps bad language or, you know, drug references, you know, what they have found is that it's the exposure to that under the right kind of instruction that strengthens kids. It's when you, when you send kids out in the world and they've never been allowed to read about other people, never been allowed to discuss it, that that often is much more harmful. And as I said, in that Johnston and Ivey study, they found the kids, the kids recognize, "Well, yeah, that guy's an idiot. I'm not going to do that." They, they learn from the bad guys in the books. They don't try to imitate the bad guys in the books. And [00:28:00] so the irony is the shielding is harming kids, in my opinion.
Lee Schneider: Yeah, definitely. My definition of a novel would be a character gets into trouble, and sometimes they get themselves out, and sometimes they get into deeper trouble, but I, as the reader, get to experience it, learn from it, despise it, like it. So I'm definitely empathizing and connecting with what you're saying, and I think it's very different in books, by the way. If you're playing a violent first-person shooter video game, you're maybe not learning, except maybe fast-twitch skills, about the character development or anything like that in the video game like you are in a novel, where you— there may be, as you say, a bad character, but we get to see something about that character and understand how we feel about that character.
Kelly Gallagher: Yeah, I mean, it's a tricky line for teachers and librarians too, because I've, I've had books in my library [00:29:00] or books proposed for my classroom library that I did not think were appropriate for my ninth graders. But on the other hand, I, uh, along, uh, the lines of what you just said, I believe very strongly that books are imaginative rehearsals for the real world, right? And if you don't rehearse before you go out there, right? And I, I think, you know, when you read Romeo and Juliet, nobody's going to go home and poison themselves. It's like, it's like, let's talk about the decisions, the bad decisions that people make in this play. That's one of the approaches I always took in teaching that play. Or who makes the worst decision, right, in the play? And by the way, it's the friar who fakes the whole death scene, which is the dumbest decision ever. But, you know, getting them to, to really look at and talk about it, in a place where they can talk about it. I would also add that there's, there's, not to get too political, but there's damage done when you tell an LGBTQ kid you can't have [00:30:00] an LGBTQ book in the classroom. The message you're sending that kid, uh, or, or, you know, other kinds of, uh, subsets, right? The, the message that you're sending there is harmful.
Lee Schneider: Yeah, definitely. If listeners wanna find out more about you or buy your books, where should we send them?
Kelly Gallagher: Uh, well, Readicide 2.0 will be published in the spring. There is not a release date on that. And that is from Stenhouse Publishing. I've written, uh, uh, outside of 2.0, I've written 10 books on teaching reading and writing, from two different publishers, Stenhouse and Heinemann, both easily found online. All my books are on Amazon. Often, however, they're cheaper from the publisher. So you could kinda cross-check if you're interested in following up and, and looking at, at any of those.
Lee Schneider: Awesome. I'll put those links in the show notes. Is there anything that I forgot to [00:31:00] ask that you wanted to cover?
Kelly Gallagher: Nothing comes to mind, um, other than I think this is an issue. I'm, I was glad you raised the issue because I think it's... People have this sense that things aren't working with young readers. We're losing them. Um, and I think, you know, anytime we can read about it, talk about it, share some thinking about what we can do to reestablish reading momentum... And then of course, the second thing is once I've reestablished reading momentum, then, then the second piece that comes in is we want to reestablish reading identity, because most kindergartners and first graders think they're readers. They love books. By the time they get to 12th grade, they do not like books. And so how do we reestablish, you know... A lot of my work is, is... I'm very interested in where the "I suck as a reader" mentality [00:32:00] starts. And believe it or not, it's like third grade, fourth grade. And so I think it's really important for teachers to have these conversations on, on how we can get kids to reestablish that "I am a reader," not just a question answerer. I think YA, or young adult reading, has never been richer than it is today. Never. Uh, the, there's, there's a lot out there. Your field of, uh, I don't know if it's your only field, but you're, you're a fantasy writer. There's a ton of that. There's a lot out there.
Lee Schneider: Yeah, I agree. It's out there.
Kelly Gallagher: Yep.
Lee Schneider: Well, great. Thanks so much for doing this today. I really enjoyed our conversation.
Kelly Gallagher: I did as well. Thanks, Lee.