Well-Read Life™

Why I’m Glad Staples Knocked Us Off

The day I walked into Staples and saw their knockoffs, a cold shiver went down my spine. There, on a long section of aisle, were what looked just like Levenger Circa notebooks. Sitting propped up at a nice angle were our leather covers, our dividers, extra discs for enlarging notebooks, even our wide-column paper formats with our miniature illustrations of the various paper options. “Slavish” was the word that came into my head. They had slavishly copied Levenger, not even bothering to pretend that they had come up with anything original. They did what big-box stores tend to do: find innovation in the marketplace, make it cheaper, make lots of it, and blow it out the door.

Of course I thought about suing Staples. I mean, come on! Even our page formats? Plenty of customers who had also seen the products reached out to us. They asked, “Are you selling in Staples now?”

But we didn’t sue Staples. I knew too much. First off, they had more lawyers. And second, the original design for what can generically be called disc-bound notebooks was patented in Belgium in 1946.

When I saw my first disc-bound notebook, it was a little item with the brand Atoma. I saw it at a pen show, some 25 years ago. It was all plastic and kind of cheap. But the revolutionary idea was there.

Consider conventional three-ring notebooks: You pry the thing open, exposing ragged metal prongs, remove a sheet, close the rings with a finger-pinching thwack, pry it open again to put the sheet somewhere else, and snap the contraption closed again. Forcing inherently strong metal to open up and then chomp back down again is a bad idea that, like a bad gene, keeps replicating down through the generations.

The fundamentally different idea in disc-bound notebooks is to take advantage of the inherent flexibility of paper to bend easily when in a single sheet, yet be strong when united together. It’s a kind of Zen approach to notebooks.

After seeing my first disc-bound notebook back at the pen show, I went hunting the world for more examples. At the international stationery show in Frankfurt, my merchandising group and I found versions from Israel, Brazil, India, Europe, and the UK. Each had slightly different spacing of the discs and different page sizes, but it was clear the idea had traveled around the world. Yet while it had gone a long way geographically, in another way, the idea had stalled out.

In all the renditions we saw, the notebooks were trying to compete with existing, inexpensive wire notebooks sold around the world. The disc-bound notebooks were better, yes, but their parts and assembly made them inherently more expensive to make. Since the largest market worldwide is for low-cost notebooks, the innovation foundered on the rocks of conventional thinking.

But Levenger was, and still is, an oddball company in the stationery world. We sell to lawyers, engineers, teachers, scientists, doctors, professors, writers—professional people of all types whom we sometimes refer to as the hyperliterate. Our customers read and write for their livings—and typically for pleasure, too. They look to Levenger for high-quality tools of their trade. So we had a different mission than companies that had tried to sell disc-bound notebooks in the past. Ours was not to make them as inexpensive as possible in a vain effort to compete with conventional low-cost notebooks. Our mission was to see how good we could make them. How beautiful could these kinds of notebooks be, both in their function and their looks? First we would build it, and then see if they would come.

Build a Better Notebook

The first thing we did was reunite paper with its longtime friend and fellow naturalist, leather. Then we upgraded the discs. We realized they didn’t have to be plastic. We made them out of aluminum, instead—lightweight, strong, and handsome in the variety of colors we introduced. We found that the pages also turned more easily over polished aluminum, “high-speed” discs.

Finally, we improved the paper: not just the feel and performance of the paper, but the graphic layouts of pages as well.

Facing the increasing competition from digital devices, we felt an obligation to see how good paper notebooks could become. How fast and how far could paper notebooks evolve?

Thanks to thinkers like Paul Saffo and Kevin Kelly, we were aware of a pattern of technological change: that not all old technologies go away when they are obsolete. Candles are obsolete as a lighting source, yet they continue to evolve. What home or romantic dinner is complete without them?

Bicycles are another of my favorite examples of this pattern. Made obsolete a century ago by cars and motorcycles, human-powered bikes continue to evolve into ever more specialized and delightful forms.

Yet who was doing this with the paper notebook? Paper is obsolete for big data, but who doesn’t still want notebook pages to fill with inspired thought? Around our conference table, we would ask ourselves, “What company will do this if not us?”

A latte grande you can write on

Periodically, journalists would pen articles about the paperless office, often predicted, yet always just off on the horizon. Sometimes they would call me for interviews and I’d quote Steve Jobs: “The easiest way to predict the future is to invent it.” So while Silicon Valley was reinventing telephones and countless other digital devices, we were laboring over new paper notebooks.

The good news: Our expensive Circa notebooks took off. Bless our customers who would pay for better function and looks. Who says notebooks could cost only $1.99? Starbucks didn’t think coffee had to be 99 cents. And just as customers drank up the affordable luxury of a Starbucks latte, they turned with pleasure the pages of Circa notebooks from Levenger.

Staples noticed.

When they launched, they also did hip videos and social media. Clearly, they were serious about making this a significant part of their business. We felt the impact right away. Our sales went down. Then Office Depot and other notebook makers got on the disc-bound notebook parade. Martha Stewart, who had praised the Levenger notebooks on one of her platforms, liked them so much she made her own.

Our CFO was alarmed. “Shouldn’t we go after them?”

But then something else happened. Our sales started to grow again. It seemed that some people who were introduced to disc-bound notebooks at their local big-box store somehow found out about Levenger and upgraded.

Instead of suing Staples and the other followers, we wrote the words of Walt Disney on the whiteboard: “We can invent faster than they can copy.”

When innovative companies come up with better products and big players copy them at lower prices, customers win. It’s what’s supposed to happen when capitalism works well. And in the spirit of Conscious Capitalism, I salute Staples, Office Depot, Martha Stewart, and the rest of the players who copied Levenger. For they all have helped spread this advancement in heritage technology to millions of new people who would not have found it otherwise.

Editor’s note: Steve writes more about candles, bicycles, and Circa in his quasi-memoir, Holding Dear: The Value of the Real.

The Peace of Paper

Steve Wozniak, the uber-geek co-founder of Apple, gave a speech a few years ago when I was in the audience. I’d heard he carried four or five smartphones around at any time that he was testing out, so I expected him to read from one of them, or maybe from an iPad. When “The Woz” stepped up to the microphone, he reached into his sports jacket and pulled out a sheet of paper that looked like it may have come from a yellow legal pad. He unfolded it twice, looked down at what he had written, and began to speak.

 

The Woz reminded me of something I saw every day when I was at Levenger: people who know and love the latest technology frequently love paper, too. After speaking with many of them over the years, I’ve come to believe it’s because they appreciate appropriate technology, and paper is, after all, technology. I call it heritage technology. Pens and pencils are technology, too. And virtually all of what we count today as civilization was created by writing things down by hand on paper. Only in the last one percent of our history as a species have we been using anything else. 

 

Rediscovering Comfort Food for Thought

 

Not that screens are bad. Like most of us, I love them. They have the ability to instantly morph to something different and update themselves as we direct—and often as we don’t direct. When we’re trying to concentrate on one thing, we’ll get an alert about something else. Sometimes this is welcome, but often, it is not.

 

From what I’ve seen, our chameleon screens are distracting many of us much of the time. To actually get work done, some of us, including me, try to apply some discipline. We may try to check email only at certain times of day. We may intentionally go offline. We may even try to use software to shield us from other software, although this seems like asking the family dog to watch a house full of teenagers.

 

I love my screens as much as the next knowledge worker, but I also recognize that I need some peace in order to get any real work done. When trying to get my mind around some big ideas (big for me, anyway) I don’t sit at my computer. I sit in a comfortable chair or sofa with a big sheet of blank paper before me and sketch my thoughts out on that old comfort food for thought—paper.

I’m not alone.

 

A  young friend who is an undergrad at Stanford, and a wiz on her laptop, keeps her calendar on paper. “I just find it easier,” she explained. And author Tom Kelley of IDEO keeps all his notes on half-sheets of paper—one idea per sheet—and then uses a big table to shuffle them around and arrange them into the structure for his next his book. (Shameless Commerce plug: these half-sheets of paper are pages of Levenger Circa Jr. notebooks.)

 

On paper, we can reflect, gaze out the window, and return to the same page we left. Instead of it changing, we change. If screens are about going fast, paper is about going slow. If screens are where we connect with others, paper is where we connect with ourselves.

 

A Golden Age for Creativity

 

It seems to me we live in a golden age for creativity. We have our fast updating digital screens that daily find new ways to delight us. And we also have a cornucopia of paper and pens—heritage technology ready to be called into service. When all we had was paper and pen, that technology was very limiting. But today paper and pen have been liberated to do what they do best.

 

It has been a century since horses have been freed from being beasts of burden and engines of transportation. Today horses are recreational, and help us humans recreate ourselves. The same is true for sailboats, which became obsolete about the same time horses did. And in our present age, the same evolution is happening for paper.

 

Leave the heavy production to computers with their ultra-high resolution, touch-sensitive screens. But for recreating ourselves, paper—humble, glorious, quiet paper—is waiting for us to come home.

 

Steve writes more about the value of paper in the virtual age in his book, Holding Dear: The Value of the Real.

Encore: How Some Retirees Choose Not to Retire

As those of us north of 50 come to know, retirement is not what it used to be. In fact, many older Americans are retiring from their principal professions only to pursue a different kind of passion. Often it’s one that takes us well beyond our ZIP code, and comfort zone.

The dividend that comes with age

Ann MacDougall is the president of Encore, a nonprofit organization based in California whose mission, Ann told me, is “to tap into the experience and wisdom of older adults for the greater good.” Ann describes the dues that older professionals have paid during their years of working as “a dividend of talent and experience.”

It’s a dividend, she says, that we can apply toward making communities better.

I had a chance to see some of that dividend when Lori and I visited San Miguel de Allende, a picturesque city in the central highlands of Mexico with a thriving community of American expats.

“The expat community here is all about contributing,” Robin Loving told me.

 

Robin Loving's little project

Raising money, winning trust

A successful public relations executive who sold her company when she was 51, Robin left Austin, Texas, to come to San Miguel de Allende on a calling.

“I had this notion I should be working with girls,” she says. That notion turned into a seven-year project helping a local orphanage for girls, raising a million dollars for them in the process.

“The triumph for me was getting the protective Catholic nuns to allow me to come into their orphanage and see what they needed,” Robin says.

 Robin had studied Spanish in school, but like many of us who did, never used it on a consistent basis. In San Miguel, she decided to forgo the kinds of classes she’d had the first time around and work one-on-one with a Spanish tutor instead.Part of Robin’s success is her engaging, warm nature. “As friendly as a stray dog in a meat market” is how one Texan friend describes her. But she also became adept at trading her delightful Texas twang for a very respectable Spanish accent.

“I didn’t want to hear anybody else’s mistakes,” she says. “There would be enough of my own.”

Redefining citizenship

Jennifer Lawson is another American expat in San Miguel. A retired executive from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in Washington, D.C., she had long had on her bucket list a wish to become fluent in Spanish.

She chose a different path from Robin, undertaking a full immersion course that ran from 8:30 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. every day, and living with a local family.

Having a second language in this, her second act, “makes me feel that I’m more a citizen of the world,” Jennifer says.

Adventures in language learning

At the language school that expats Warren Hardy and his wife, Tuli, have run in San Miguel for 27 years, they see a lot of older Americans experiencing a broadening of horizon.

“These are people 60, 70, 80 years old,” says Warren, “all lifelong learners. They’re still engaged in reading, learning and growth.” Learning a second language adds to the adventure.

“When people first come to San Miguel, they’re nervous,” Warren says. “They learn enough Spanish to get by.” But as they settle in, they’re eager to learn more of the language. “It’s an evolutionary process,” he says.

“A win for our country”

Ann MacDougall, president of Encore

It also flies in the face of what Ann MacDougall of Encore calls “pervasive ageism”—the myth-guided notions that older people are rigid, fear technology, and don’t know how to learn anymore.

And the notion that older people can’t learn other languages?

“Nonsense,” Ann scoffs. Older people learn a language differently from younger people, especially children, who learn more reflexively. But older learners, according to Ann, “bring a discipline and focus to the job.”

That’s true even for older Americans who see their second-act adventure closer to home. Says Ann: “The whole notion of making our country more multilingual is a win for our country.”

Click here to hear more from Ann, Warren, Jennifer and Robin in Episode 16 of my America the Bilingual podcast, “Bless the Late-Blooming Bilinguals.”

And I’d love to hear from you about your second acts—those in play, and those you’re planning.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Shave and a Haircut—Two Books

Alvin with a young Barbershop Books reader.
Photo by Andy Kropa.

One of the many rewards of sitting on the board of the National Book Foundation (NBF) is having the Levenger Foundation underwrite the NBF’s annual Innovations in Reading prize. It’s a call to action to the many individuals and organizations around the country who are engaged in creative ways of promoting reading to share their programs with the NBF. The NBF has the difficult job of picking the best of these innovators as the recipient of the $10,000 prize.

This year’s winner is a program that Alvin Irby conceived, prototyped and is now scaling. Writer and editor Mim Harrison spoke with him and relays his inspiring story.

                                                                    —Steve

While he was getting a haircut one late afternoon in the barbershop across from P.S. 69 in the Bronx that he frequented, Alvin Irby noticed the fidgety first-grader. He knew the little boy: he was in the class that Alvin taught at the school across the street. It was clear to Alvin that, while he waited with his mom to get his hair cut, the youngster was bored.

If he wasn’t a teacher and the boy wasn’t his student, Alvin says he might not have come to the conclusion that he did: the little guy needed to be reading.

Alvin, who has a master’s in childhood education (one of two—he also has an M.P.A.), had an idea for how to make that happen. It was one of those stunningly simple ideas that seem so obvious in retrospect: equip barbershops with fun books for young boys to read while they wait for a haircut.

From deficit to desire

 “Girls read at significantly higher levels of proficiency,” Alvin says. “They read more, more often, and better. This is true across all ethnic groups.”

By contrast, the U.S. Department of Education has found that 85 percent of African American fourth-grade boys are not proficient in reading. Alvin believes that the deficit framework used in early literacy, focusing on what kids can’t do rather than what they are able to, has contributed to poor reading outcomes among black boys.

Additionally, he says, when the books that boys encounter in school and at home are not culturally relevant, age-appropriate, or gender responsive, many boys conclude that reading isn’t fun. (How many of us, whether as children or adults, want to read boring books?)

“I wanted to combat these deficit ways of thinking,” Alvin says, “by providing social cues and environmental factors that would help young boys of color identify as readers.”

Go see Denny Moe, a friend advised him.

“Would you like to read some books?”

Dennis Mitchell is the owner of Denny Moe’s Superstar Barbershop, located on Frederick Douglass Boulevard between 133^rd and 134^th in Manhattan. The shop became the first to be part of Alvin’s nonprofit program called Barbershop Books.

“Barbershops are one of the few places left in many black communities where people from all walks of life come together and interact on a regular basis,” Alvin says. As an undergraduate at Grinnell College in Iowa majoring in sociology, Alvin spent four years considering how people and institutions intersect in society. He sees the barbershop as an ideal place to support early literacy for young black boys.

Between his background in sociology and his second job as a stand-up comedian, Alvin appreciates the value of knowing your audience. So he took a stack of books, geared for young readers through adults, to Denny Moe’s. He sat and observed for hours. Would children and adults read books in a barbershop? Alvin didn’t know but was determined to find out. 

“I’d spend eight to 10 hours just watching to see what would happen with the books,” he said. “I’d ask the kids, ‘Would you like to read some books?’ It’s how I found out if Barbershop Books was a viable idea that had value.”

The boys in the 4 to 8 age range were most likely to interact with the books. The next challenge was to figure out what books boys really wanted to read.

Captain Underpants, meet Gross Greg

Another stunningly simple solution: Alvin asked them. The responses he received echoed the results of Scholastic’s children’s survey, which revealed that the number-one thing children look for when choosing a book is one that makes them laugh—like Captain Underpants does.

Alvin further validated the results by writing a rhyming picture book of his own, Gross Greg. He sent the manuscript to a few kindergarten and first-grade teachers and asked them to read it to their students. Once he heard that it scored high on the laugh meter and had students “rolling on the floor,” he published it independently.

Barbers as early literacy advocates

Barbershop Books now outfits its partner barbershops with a small, colorful bookcase filled with carefully curated softcover books that the boys and girls can read while they wait. Some wait for a haircut; others wait for their dad, or brother, or uncle. Barbers at participating barbershops encourage the children and their family members to read. They also talk to the boys about reading. The barbers become male reading models who create early positive reading experiences for young black boys.

“Sometimes the family members that the children come with read to them,” says Alvin, “but for the most part, the boys read the books by themselves.”

Currently about 87 barbershops across 26 cities in 15 states and the District of Columbia participate in the Barbershop Books program, which has a goal of reaching 800 barbershops in 20 target cities over the next three years. The mayor of Minneapolis recently funded the implementation of Barbershop Books programs in 10 Minneapolis barbershops. Chicago, Oakland, Baltimore and Philadelphia are just a few of the target cities in which the program plans to expand.

Barbershops wishing to participate need only have space for the little bookcase, at least 40 young boys who come into the shop every month, and a willing owner. (If you would like to connect with Barbershop Books, visit barbershophooks.org or email info@barbershopbooks.org.)

Cheerio

Barbershop Books’ current headquarters “is my living room,” says Alvin with a laugh. “There are literally hundreds of children’s books and packing boxes everywhere.”

He buys the books from Scholastic and welcomes participation by other publishers. NFL defensive end Jarvis Jenkins led a read-aloud at Harlem barbershops in 2016. The support of individual donors in combination with local funders such as school districts, churches and local municipalities help keep the venture growing, with one dollar equating to 27 minutes of reading—an ROI that Warren Buffett might love.

Alvin would like to attract a national sponsor. “Cheerios would be perfect,” he says.

The entrepreneurial reader

As a young child growing up in Little Rock, Arkansas, Alvin didn’t like reading and didn’t identify as a reader. It just wasn’t something he or his friends did.  But his mom, an elementary-school teacher, gave him reading lessons and ensured that he learned to read proficiently.

It was as a teenager that Alvin’s passion for reading was ignited. As the student council president at his high school, Alvin developed a keen interest in reading that inspired him to create a reading incentive program, for which he acquired an $810 grant from the Barnes & Noble bookstore in Little Rock.

Barbershop Books is, he feels, a doable idea that can make a difference. “But ideas just stay ideas until someone executes,” he says. “There’s always farther to go when you have a vision.”

And a love of books.

                                                                                        —Mim

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Let’s make some little doves”

 

 

Say “let’s make some little doves” to someone in Spanish, and you may soon be making some popcorn (palomitas de maiz—little doves of corn). In Episode 10 of my America the Bilingual podcast, I chat with two native Spanish speakers from Mexico, my producer Fernando Hernandez and friend Mario Bravo, about favorite dichos—those sayings in different languages that make the language sing.

Have a listen to our conversation. Then I’d love to have you share with me your favorite saying from another language you know, or admire, or aspire to.

And if you’d like to learn about the history of the Spanish language, including why it’s so wonderfully easy to spell, I recommend The Story of Spanish by Jean-Benoit Nadeau and Julie Barlow. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mother of Five, Disrupter of Monolingualism

Disrupting is a positive term in business, but for a young mother, “disrupting” was not a term friends used approvingly when they watched how she was raising her five children.

Why on earth was this American mom pulling her children of out of their good schools in the USA and taking them to Italy for six months at a stretch? And not just once, but every other year for six years.

In Episode 7 of American the Bilingual, Bettina Young, a lover of literacy (she’s been a bright light at the Literacy Coalition of Palm Beach County) and a lover of languages, tells why she did it, and the consequences for her children as a result.

Did she disrupt her children’s education, as some disapproving friends feared, by having them live in a country where they were surrounded by another language? One of Bettina’s children weighs in on that. So does Dr. Guadalupe Valdés, a professor at Stanford University who conducts research into bilingualism, with this surprising observation: language, she says, is not a school subject.

Listen on iTunes by clicking here: America the Bilingual by Steve Leveen on iTunes

Or on SoundCloud, by clicking here.

As a parent, I wonder what might have been

When Lori and I had our two sons, we dreamed of taking them to live in a Spanish-speaking country so that we could become fully bilingual as a family.

But our business was growing; the boys were busy in school and summer camp. Their grandparents, aunts and uncles loved having them around. Life was good, so maybe next year, and then next year, and suddenly our boys were off to college.

While we did travel with them, we did not give our boys The Gift of bilingualism. I’m in awe of parents like Bettina and her husband, Greg, who did choose the bolder path, which in the end, has such sweet rewards.

If you know some families with school-age children, you might pass this episode on to them. ¿Quien sabe que pasara? Who knows what might happen?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

When You Are a Hyphenate-American

Michelle Bazargan’s earliest memories are not the kind parents want for their children. Her mother ushering her quickly down to their cellar. The bombs going off. Her grandfather crying when her mother told him: she needed to leave, for her daughter’s sake. Packing her one bag; no room for toys. Waving forlornly to her grandfather as the bombs continued and the bus pulled away into the freezing cold of who knew where.

Michelle and her parents fled Iran in 1979, during the Islamic revolution in Tehran. But, says Michelle, “the real journey started when we came here”—to the United States, and Miami. (In the photo, a young Michelle is with her mother in Tehran, during happier days.)

 

Today Michelle is a successful technologist with a college degree and a TED Talk under her belt. She is also an Iranian-American and, as she will happily tell you, “so proud of it.”

Her language story of Farsi and English does not follow the common trajectory of loss and gain. And it includes a pivotal moment that occurred in that most iconic of American symbols, McDonald’s. Hear her story, and some Farsi, in Episode 6 of my American the Bilingual podcast, “Little Ketchup Girl.” 

Listen on iTunes by clicking here: America the Bilingual by Steve Leveen on iTunes. Or on SoundCloud, by clicking here.

Iranian-Americans in literature

So many talented authors have written about the American immigrant experience. One of these is Andre Dubus III, the author of House of Sand and Fog, a book that, although I read it 15 years ago, still lives in me, and still shakes me. Written in the author’s car in the dark early morning hours before he began his “real” job, House of Sand and Fog became a finalist for the 1999 National Book Award in fiction. It also became an Oscar-nominated movie starring Ben Kingsley, Jennifer Connelly and Iranian actress Shohreh Aghdashloo, who won an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actress. I recommend both.

Note to Graduates: When You’re CEO, Be Vulnerable

Two things worth keeping in mind for those about to launch careers: first, you may actually use some of that required coursework from college that you can’t imagine you ever will; and second, showing your vulnerability when you’re CEO can make your business stronger.

Just ask Lois Melbourne, who now heads a foundation that helps young people decide on careers. But that’s her second act. Her first was as a software entrepreneur back in 1994, when both “software” and “entrepreneur” were almost exotic. Lois launched a website for her business in 1995, and marveled at how companies all over the world could find her. Plus, they all communicated in English…at least, on the surface.

That was good for Lois, who grew up in southern Missouri and jokes that she and her brother are bilingual because “we speak hillbilly and English.” At Missouri State, Lois took the requisite one year of another language. She chose French over Spanish because “I thought it was more romantic.” But she didn’t think she’d ever actually use it.

Still, she knew enough from taking that class to realize that if she wanted to grow her business internationally, she would need some serious bilingual chops.

Lois’s solution was not what you might expect—she did not become proficient in speaking French, even though she was adept at reading it. Moreover, her solution made her vulnerable in the eyes of her clients. And that turned out to be one of the best executive decisions this CEO made.

Find out how Lois made her company international in voice as well as reach, in Episode 5 of the America the Bilingual podcast.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Mother’s Day gift—for mother and daughter

 

As recently as 20 years ago, moms in America worried that their young children would not learn English—even though they themselves spoke it. Jeane Deligero Forrest, who is from the Philippines, was one. Although she spoke to her daughter, Amber, in English, she also talked to her in her native Tagalog when Amber was little.

Jeane’s story on how she immigrated to the “wrong” America first, and eventually to the actual United States, is filled with the kinds of setbacks, serendipities and unwavering determination typical of so many who come here.

The Tagalog that she spoke to her daughter was one of the few things Jeane brought with her to the U.S. from the Philippines. It is the common language Filipinos speak “to understand each other,” Jeane says. “There are three hundred sixty dialects in the Philippines.” Jeane’s family spoke Ilonggo as well as Tagalog.

But once in the “real” America, Jeane soon stopped talking in Tagalog to Amber. “I got scared,” she says. “I was afraid she wouldn’t learn English.” Much later—too late, actually—a pediatrician told her that young children are perfectly capable of learning two languages at the same time.

“Missing a part of my history”

When Amber was 14, Jeane took her to the Philippines for the first time to meet her family members. Jeane’s childhood home there was a marked contrast to Amber’s comfortable home in Florida—a bucket of cold water for a shower, a cot for a bed, an open window for air conditioning.

None of this bothered Amber. What did trouble her was not being able to converse with her family. She knew some rudimentary Tagalog phrases, but they were not enough.

“It felt like I was missing a part of my history,” Amber says. She and her relatives had only the breezes wafting from the window to fill “those long, awkward silences.”

A mother-and-daughter gift

It’s not all that surprising, then, that today, Amber (who appears to have inherited her mother’s determination) is learning Tagalog. And it’s Jeane who’s inspiring her—by learning another language herself. “Spanish is an important language to have,” she says.

For this Mother’s Day, Amber has a simple gift she is giving her mom. You can hear it here, in Episode 4 of America the Bilingual. 

Some of my favorite reading on the languages they carried

If Jeane had known about the 1986 book, The Mirror of Language: The Debate on Bilingualism, she might not have agonized over whether to speak to her young daughter in Tagalog. Kenji Hakuta, an emeritus professor at Stanford, explains in his clear, gentle prose how half-baked science misinformed generations of Americans about the supposed disadvantages of bilingualism.  

Another Stanford professor, David M. Kennedy, shared with me over a glass of wine a few of his favorite books on American immigration: The Uprooted: The Epic Story of the Great Migrations that Made the American People, by Oscar Handlin, and Becoming American: An Ethnic History, by Thomas J. Archdeacon.

David’s own article from 1996 article in the Atlantic Monthly, “Can We Still Afford to Be a Nation of Immigrants?,” is 21 years old and as fresh as ever.

For a delightful little book on American immigration, I recommend American Immigration: A Very Short Introduction, by David Gerber, in which he leads us through the three great waves of American immigration. I learned how what seems new in today’s immigration debates isn’t. All in just 160 pages, in a book that fits handily in your pocket and your mind.

 

 

Is It Greek to You?

What do you do when your full name won’t fit in the allotted boxes for your grade-school registration? If you’re Anastasia Kastrenakes (pictured below), a Greek-American now living in Miami, you say to the class: “Just call me Anna.”

Soccer? No. Language? Yes.   

A first-generation Greek-American, Anna faced the challenges that many such children do, with parents—in Anna’s case, her mother—who don’t always understand some of those peculiar American ways. Like Anna wanting to play soccer in school. (“Good girls don’t play soccer.”) Or her excitement about being crowned queen for a junior-high school function. (“Unimportant.”)

Although she grew up in an ethnically diverse neighborhood in Miami Beach, few of the other families were Greek. And none of Anna’s friends had to translate what their parents were saying for teachers and shopkeepers, the way Anna did for her mother.

Plus, there was the matter of her school lunchbox. Her mother filled it with such Greek delicacies as dolmades, the Greek-stuffed grape leaves. “I wanted peanut butter and jelly like everybody else,” Anna recalls.

But Anna shared something important with her mother: both are determined women who wanted their children to speak Greek. Anna does. But what about her three children? Especially after being told by a school official that “Let’s face it: these kids are never going to learn to speak Greek fluently. They live in America.”

Bucking a linguistic trend

Linguists call it “shift.” The rest of us would call it “loss.” It’s what happens to the languages spoken by immigrants, and it happens fast. By the third generation, and sometimes even the second, the German or Hindi or Greek spoken in the home is gone.

But not always.

Listen to Episode 3 of my “America the Bilingual” podcast and find out what happened with Anna and her family.

Listen on iTunes by clicking here: America the Bilingual by Steve Leveen on iTunes

Or on SoundCloud, by clicking here.

And just as important—I want to hear from you: Are you a first-generation “hyphenate-American”? I’d love to hear your own story about how your family handled speaking—and also reading—two languages. You can write a response right on this post.

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America the Bilingual is a storytelling podcast for Americans who are learning another language, or would like to start. Subscribe on iTunes or wherever you listen to podcasts and hear a new episode every two weeks. (If you use Twitter, I’ll let you know about future episodes there as well.)

A big “Bravo!” to America’s language teachers. The American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages — their acronym ACTFL (pronounced ACT-Full) is fitting. Its Lead with Languages campaign encourages bilingualism for all.