Yesterday, I asked you to share how you would donate millions of dollars if you had those millions of dollars to donate. Your answers are so deeply thought and inspiring.

This is my answer. And this is something that I have thought about for a very, very long time.

Let me begin with a little background. I love to read. I cannot remember a time in my life that a book wasn’t an extention of my hands… and especially my mind. I remember as a small child sitting next to my Mom each night while she read books to my brothers and me. It was a calm time. A miraculous time. A perfect time. I remember my Mom taking us kids to the library once a week to pick out new books… and especially the summer trips to our library when we participated in summer reading programs. My Mom was my great influencer and participant in my love of reading.

I became an English teacher. Go figure! And when I thought about earning a Master’s Degree, it was my Dad who encouraged me to not only pursue my love of reading, but to pass it along to kids who might need that influence and participation. I took a Reading Education course at Rhode Island College, and I loved it. My Dad passed away suddenly during the time I was taking that class, but I always felt his presence and it comforted me. I was accepted to the Boston University School of Education in the summer of 1976, the summer Barry and I were married, and I began an intense one-year study of Reading Education… while teaching full-time.

It was a busy, busy year. I drove from Rhode Island to Boston 4 afternoons per week and took a 4:15 class, a 7:15 class, and sometimes both classes, both semesters, and participated in the mandatory Summer Reading Clinic at Boston University’s School of Education during the summer of 1977. I drove this little old Volkswagon Bug that had no reverse (I’m not kidding), there were no such things as the internet for research or cell phones, and I was squashing 36 credit hours of Reading into one year. And I did it.

It is the best thing I’ve ever done. If I loved reading before… well, the process of reading became my life. I was able to approach my students in my English classes in a whole new way. I understood the hesitation, the fear, and even the hatred that some of these high school kids had for the concept of reading. Reading wasn’t that wonderful sit-in-your-mom’s-arms-happy-miraculous memory for most of them. Rather, it was hell. Reading was something complicated and terrorizing and often humiliating… something that eluded them and something they would fight. Of course, the fighting was often with the teachers who forced them to do this thing that they couldn’t do. Add to this the hormones of adolescence and you have yourself a pretty volatile situation.

So… I developed this sort-of way to “get” to my students at the very beginning of each school year. I would ask them not what their goals were, but their goals for their future children. But I would ask them to place as #1 on their lists: I want my children to be excellent students and excellent readers. Please know that these kids were not your traditional students, all sitting there with their pencils and notebooks and binders, hanging on my every syllable. They were all good people… great people… but with disadvantages that had brought them to my classes in combined English and Reading.

Immediately, the kids would talk about how they didn’t want their kids to be “geeks” and all the other words associated with kids who do well in school. But further discussion would reveal that these kids… all of them… always wanted their children to know how to read, and to read well. Then we would talk about reading at home, and reading to younger brothers and sisters and perhaps nieces and nephews and even little neighborhood kids. We talked about how important reading is and how it sets you free to pursue any dream you want. We talked about humiliating experiences where they were forced to read aloud and how everyone taunted them. Even teachers. I had more than one student burst into tears at the memories. And we talked about how they could improve their reading… if they approached it as a gift. Not a punishment.

And now I’m finished circling the airport of my original question and I will land my plane!

I had many, many students during my career, both young women and men, who became parents in high school. This is the way it was. I never gave these kids clothing or booties or cute little things… but I always bought them books. I wrote messages in the books to read to their babies while they were still tucked safely inside their mommies… and to read to them always. Many of these students visited years later and said that they had continued reading to their children. These are priceless teaching moments…

I have had this idea for decades to provide books… millions and millions of books… to parents and babies in every clinic and every hospital across this country. And every clinic and every hospital would have reading mentors on staff to read with the moms and dads… especially the young ones and the disadvantaged ones… to the babies. Moments. Minutes. Miracles perhaps. The mentors would teach the parent or parents of the ways babies grasp language. Catch words. Feel soothed. And loved. Each parent would go home with a wonderful selection of books, from board books to beautifully illustrated classics, to continue this process of learning to love to read. Then, each clinic and hospital would have a reading site where parents could come back with their infants… babies… children… for years of more mentorship and millions more books.

I know a program of this scope and sequence would take millions and millions of dollars to develop and implement and continue… but I think it would make all the difference in the world. An equalizer of sorts for kids who’ve never thought themselves as equal. All because of that little thing called READING.