Three-hole drilled book recommendation

While I read voraciously, I don't usually recommend books to people randomly. I read pretty quickly, so a lot times I'm not sure if the time investment a book represents to me is worth the time investment to other people.

But I read this book recently (within the last month) that seems to creep into a lot of my conversations since then, so I thought I'd put it out there. It's by Paul Tough and it's called Whatever It Takes. I heard about it on This American Life, which is a good teaser if you want a preview of what the book is about: Geoffrey Canada and the Harlem Children's Zone, which is (crediting This American Life's description) "the most ambitious and hopeful solution to urban poverty in the country."

It's the program President Obama is hoping to replicate in twenty cities around the country, just for your current event edification.

There's a lot in the book that talks about how to get kids to move up and out of lower socioeconomic levels and how difficult it is to get kids to move beyond where their parents are and how early those things are set (you know, like age three or seven or ten). If you want to go to college, there's a lot of skill sets that go into that beyond math and reading proficiency; there's the soft skills of patience, persistence and delayed gratification/long-term goal setting. Research is showing those soft skills needs to be in your makeup by ten-years-old or they're near impossible to learn. If your parents don't have those skills and thus couldn't achieve those goals, where will you learn them?

These topics have been coming up a lot in our household what with the onset of preschool.

Like yesterday. I went to Target (Tar-zhay) because we were out of toothpaste and our laundry basket died and so on and so forth. As I wandered office supplies looking for crazy glue, a woman stopped me, a normal-looking woman, just like me.

"Do you know what this is?" She showed me her shopping list, which was a school supply list, and tapped the words Three-ring spiral-bound notebook.

"Are you wondering if they mean a three-ring binder or a three-hole-drill notebook?"

She looked mystified. Absolutely mystified. So I walked with her to the notebooks and explained the differences between a three-ring binder and a spiral-bound notebook and showed her how to look for the three holes on the notebooks.

I walked away thinking, how the hell can you be a grownup and not know what a three-hole spiral notebook is? But then I thought about the child that she was buying the supplies for, and I thought about Geoffrey Canada.

There are advantages I knew A has in life: the basics of two parents who both live at home, a safe place to live, food to eat, clothes to wear, medical care, not to mention all the enrichment opportunities he gets like the zoo; parks, playgrounds, and the beaches; lots of good books and toys; swim classes; speech therapy and preschool; trips to museums, Sea World, and Disneyland. But I hadn't considered having a mom who recognized a three-hole spiral notebook an advantage until yesterday.