Teaching Triplets to Read

As a boy growing up, one of my favorite authors was Isaac Asimov, an incredibly prolific writer who penned more than 500 books during his lifetime. A professor of biochemistry before he became famous as an author, he wrote both fiction and non-fiction and covered a wide range of topics: everything from children's detective stories to science-fiction mysteries, histories of the ancient world to annotated literary guides and books on popular science.

As a young teenage fan I knew none of this, however. All I knew was that he wrote some pretty cool novels about robots. I was fascinated by "I, Robot" and, after devouring it, searched high and low for other science fiction works by Asimov. One book I found was a collection of short stories that was also an autobiography. In it he wrote that he taught himself to read at the age of five, and then taught his younger brother to read - who was only three years old.

As with most readers, I found this astonishing, and I've never forgotten it. It struck a chord because I had trouble learning to read when I was growing up. I remember vividly my first few years in elementary school when my mother sat down every day and painstakingly went through books with me, letter by letter, sound by sound, word by word. She had to do this because the school had given up on me and told her that her son would "never be able to read."

I wasn't only behind in reading. In fifth grade a classmate actually came up to me one day and said sneeringly that I was in the math class for "dumb dumbs." When I asked my teacher if this was true, the kindly man said, "You're in the class that's right for you." I knew then that my classmate was right.

In the end I caught up with my peers, graduated from university with honors and went on to earn a master's degree. But I vowed that if I ever had kids of my own I would make sure they didn't experience what I went through. I wanted others to think of them as intelligent, and for them to be confident that they could learn anything. I'm a firm believer that if you give children the tools to learn from a very early age, their potential will be unlimited.