The Best College Prep Course

I LOVE this story about a young man in 2002 who scored a perfect 36 on the A.C.T. If you want your kids to succeed be sure to read to them starting from birth! This story was taken from Jim Trelease's Read-Aloud Handbook, a must-read for all parents and educators:

"We start with the family of Susan and Tad Williams and sons, Christopher and David. Of the four hundred thousand students taking the A.C.T. exam with Christopher back in 2002, only fifty-seven had perfect scores—he was the fifty-eighth. When word got out that this kid from Russell, Kentucky (population 3,645), had scored a perfect 36, the family was besieged with questions, the most common being "What prep course did he take? Kaplan? Princeton Review?" It turned out to be a course his parents enrolled him as an infant, a free program, unlike some of the private plans that now cost up to $250 an hour.

"In responding to inquiries about Christopher's prep courses, the Williamses simply told people—including the New York Times— that he hadn't taken any, that he did no prep work. That, of course, wasn't completely true. His mother and father had been giving him and his younger brother free prep classes all through their childhoods, from infancy into adolescence: they read to them for thirty minutes a night, year after year, even after they learned how to read for themselves.

"The best S.A.T. prep course is to read to your children when they're little."

"Theirs was a home brimming with books but no TV Guide, GameCube, or Hooked on Phonics. Even though Susan Williams was a fourth-generation teacher, she offered no home instruction in reading before the boys reached school age. She and Tad just read to them—sowed (and sewed) the sounds and syllables and endings and blendings of language into the love of books. Each boy easily learned to read, loved it, gobbled it up voraciously. Besides being a family bonding agent, reading aloud was used not as test prep as much as an "ensurance" policy—it ensured the boys would be ready for whatever came their way in school. That, combined with church and Scouting, would ensure they were ready for whatever life threw at them.

"By 2011, David was a University of Louisville graduate working as an engineer and Christopher was pursuing his PhD in biochemistry at Duke. Sometimes Christopher's early reading experiences surface even in the biochemistry department, like the day after a Duke basketball loss and he remarked to his lunch mates, "I guess 'there's no joy in Mudville' today." None of the other grad students grasped the reference to Ernest Thayer's classic sports poem."


Inspired by this awesome story? Grab some news books for your kiddos and start reading to them TONIGHT!