Senator-Elect Abdul El-Sayed talks about importance of literacy, being an author & more |LIT HAPPENS

Just now joining us, you are watching Lit Happens with Sid on Detroit Fox 2 Live. And so the next interview that I want to play for you guys, I actually happen to do. last month with the one and only Abdul El-Sayed and this was of course before he won the senate seat which congratulations to him if he's out there watching but we had a chance to talk about you know the importance of literacy you know he talks about it all the time with going to med school and studying and learning and he also had a book that came out in 2020 and so it was an amazing interview and things that really lawmakers can do now they don't have to wait to help motivate these kids to keep reading and to keep literacy alive and up those levels and so let's take a listen to what he had to say. And so I know throughout your campaign, because you're running for Senate, you have talked a lot about literacy when it comes to our kids. And, you know, essentially Michigan numbers are down really across the country. So why is literacy so important, especially starting with kids so young? Well, it's the access to the world around you. If you can't read, you can't access so much of what makes our world go. It's also the ability to think beyond your current circumstances. You can open up a book and it can transport you to a place or a time that's so far away, a time in some imagined future or a time in the past. And we need that for all of our kids. So it's not just functional. It's also about the horizon of what we get to dream about. And the fact that we've been failing literacy in our state, I mean, that is a true crisis. And I'll be honest with you, it's not surprising to me because 11 years ago, I got to tour a school, Spain Elementary, in the middle of winter. I saw these first graders trying to learn how to read in their coats because the boilers had broken like two weeks ago. I saw icicles coming from the ceiling in their building. And that's a choice that we've made to underfund schools, to underfund teachers, to underfund the quality of opportunity for kids. And it's the kind of work that I've tried to take on. One of the big reasons that we guaranteed glasses for kids in the city of Detroit. And across school districts in Wayne County, 16,000 pairs that have been delivered since we built that program is because it doesn't matter what's happening at the blackboard if you can't see what's happening at the blackboard. One of the critical things about literacy is it starts with your eyes. And if you can't see just because nobody got your glasses, that's a big challenge. And with Michigan being ranked number 45 in the entire country when it comes to education, that is very low. That's not even just literacy itself. And even states like Mississippi have surpassed us. What are some things that you're seeing in the governmental level that they're doing when it comes to education and reading that maybe Michigan can implement, especially if you win this race? Well, it's about attention and it's about funding, right? You've got to fund a program and the program has to be focused on the issue. One of the challenges that we've had in our state is that we've just underfunded schools for a very long time. We ask teachers to be teachers, sure, but we also ask them to be janitors and to be social workers and to be nurses. We've got to fund the people around teachers, too. And we've got to make sure that teaching can be the kind of career that people can invest in because you get better at teaching as you do it, just like you do anything. And so this has to be a career, and it means that you have to be able to earn a living wage. The other thing we have to do is invest in the school buildings that we need to make sure that they're clean and safe and warm and dry for students, unlike the school that I walked into 11 years ago. And that means that instead of having funding formulas that rely on property tax to dictate the amount of funding that goes into a school, we need to make sure that school funding is equitable so every kid gets that in their... classes. And then the other thing about it is to ask, what are the other things that a student needs? Just like we did when I was at the city of Detroit to give kids glasses, to make sure that they weren't polluted at schools by taking on big corporate polluters in the local community, to make sure that kids weren't drinking leaded water. We need to make sure that we're thinking around a student so that that kid is their best learner at any given time. And then we've got to make sure that the curriculum makes sense, that we're teaching kids how to read in a way that is is consistent with what the science tells us. is the best way and that we're investing in school books and investing in libraries and library books and all of the ways that people can. or children can learn the beauty of reading because it's one thing to read whatever it is that you have to read in your material but what really as a you know somebody who's taught in my career great teachers they make you fall in love with the material and there are books about anything and everything and as long as you've got books the minute that you teach a kid to read and you you show them that this unlocks all these different universes and ideas to them that's what really gets them motivated to want to learn how to read. Yeah, and you've read a lot over your years because you were in college, you did med school, and then you actually had your own book back in 2020. And taking a message from your book, you know, back then, you've grown over the years, and now look at you. What is one lesson you've learned from yourself compared to then compared to now? The more you test your ideas against other ideas, the better your ideas get. Maybe that you don't change your mind, but you get a better sense of what your mind is relative to all of those other ideas out there. There's something about learning, right? That's about deepening the crevices of your mind, understanding how you think about a thing, not just what you think about a thing. And that's bombarding your mind and your ideas with different ideas, testing them over and over again. And that's one of the things I love most about reading. There's also a lot that we take for granted about our current lives, the way that we think about things, the ways that we act and we engage. And sometimes when you just move yourself out of your current scenario through a book, you transport yourself into a different time or somebody else's life or a different place, you start to realize there are a lot of different ways about how to think about something. And you start to realize that, you know, maybe the way I think about it, I could improve, I could engage with. And that's, to me, one of the great joys of reading. Uh, and one of the great joys of, uh, of, of, of literacy. And so I want to make sure that every kid in our state has that. And that means that we've got to be making these investments. Uh, we've got to be thinking really critically about how to start there and work from there. Now what would you say is one way or a couple ways that we could promote you know reading among kids to be lifelong readers because essentially it starts at home you know we have to get the parents more involved and I know you know schedules are busy you know they're trying to do this or trying to have to make sure they have enough money you know food on the table but it's always good to have like maybe an hour or two before bedtime or somewhere in the day to read to the kids so how can we promote that more amongst everyone really in our state? There needs to be books in every home and, you know, kids need to see you reading and they need to engage with you reading. I have an eight year old and a three year old. My eight year old is a voracious reader and my three year old loves to be read to too. But a lot of that is just engaging them in the norm in reading that, you know, you'll be reading and you're off time and they see that as a thing that people do in their time. And too often the thing that steals our reading time is our phone, right? So you're sitting there scrolling on TikTok or Insta or whatever your poison might be. And the ability to put your phone down and read or read to your kid, that's really, really powerful. The other thing about it is too often folks can't afford having books in their home. And so I think we've got to make a norm of public libraries. We've got to invest in our public libraries and make it normal for folks to be able to borrow books that there's always books around a kid and that that is just normal in a home. And then, of course, we've got to make sure that we've got the tools to teach kids how to read in their schools. And so before I let you go, are there any last words that you have for fellow book lovers out there? Read, read a lot, read to your kids. And then I always find that, you know, I got a particular set of genres I like. I like nonfiction, I like biography, but sometimes I'll just pick up something outside of a genre that I tend to read often just because it makes you a better reader of the other things that you enjoy reading. So I'd say read widely as well. Well, Dr. Abdul-Aziz, thank you so much for taking the time to come to chat with me and fellow book lovers out there and for all that you're doing within the community and within the government. And I wish you the very best. Thank you, Sid. What a fun interview. Thank you for having me.