Read Every Day...

As I said before, I work for Scholastic, and last year we got t-shirts at the beginning of the fall season.  On  the front is a small square that says "Read Every Day, Lead a Better Life"; on the back, it reads "Let's Raise Readers!"  I love this shirt.  Aside from being awesomely blue tye-dye, it's a book geek shirt, so I wear it out a lot--not just to work. Anyway, I wore it on Saturday while we were out paying bills and running errands.  As I was turning to leave from paying one bill, the guy behind the counter asked me what my shirt said.  I told him and explained the whole thing...including our stop, drop, and read program at work.  He asked me if reading every day really made your life better, and of course, I told him it does.  Then he asked if anything counted--newspapers, instructions on how to put chairs together, etc.  "But of course!"  He answered that he'd try it.

What's the point?  The point is that all I did was wear a shirt.  All I did was spend a couple of minutes talking about reading to someone, and in that couple of minutes, I may have impacted the rest of his life.  Maybe he will just read chair instructions at first, but then he may move on to reading the news or magazines everyday. After that, who knows?  And this is an adult.  People claim you can't teach old dogs new tricks, but I may have done just that.  If it was that easy to get an adult who might not come into contact with reading stimuli every day to consider reading more, how much easier would it be to get a kid to do it?