As I continue to develop strategies for jury-rigging my kids’ meh public school education into something closer to world-class, I may have stumbled onto what I consider the first absolute winner. 

This parental educational hack resulted from some reverse engineering. After looking over the sort of typical non-fiction essays and texts that schools have kids read in ELA to work on their comprehension of informational texts, the light bulb went off.

Instead of reading the standard forgettable middle-school nonfiction fodder, why not just skip the line and start reading the sort of text that, if all goes well and the kids grow to be mildly sophisticated readers, will be the materials they will be reading and comprehending?

For me, a sterling example of the sort of nonfiction that the kids will be digesting by the time they graduate from K-12 would be the essays and articles found in the The New Yorker. 

The New Yorker has, for decades and decades, set the standard for quality prose, based in part on the legendary contributing and staff writers, including E.B. White, Joseph Mitchell, John McPhee, Ann Patchet, and on and on.

Additionally, the magazine has managed to miraculous==thriving in a time when other magazines have foundered, enjoying a current subscription base of over a million readers, readers who are disproportionately leaders in the fields of the arts, business, learning, and politics. 

If we are going to build quality neural pathways in the minds of our children that help them process nonfiction text, as well as ideally informing their own writing in the future, adding them to the prized readership of the New Yorker seems like a savvy blueprint.

(Needless to mention, there are other options, depending on your tastes and aspirations for you kids, everything from Vanity Fair to the Wall Street Journal. One other advantage of The New Yorker for us is that is weekly and we have dozens of copies lying around, waiting to be read.)

My insight, then, was simply that The New Yorker would make a good Ueland family standard for nonfiction reading comprehension AND that, rather than have the kids work up that reading level, they should just start reading the magazine now.

Your immediate response to this idea might be serving up a stack of New Yorker’s to your kids will be as well received as a plate of overcooked lima beans, but, as luck would have it, I have tips, based on my own efforts, that will result in a surprising amount of enthusiasm.

The key parental trick is that you need to carefully curate their New Yorker reading. Part of the magazine’s success has been the breadth of topics covered and the mix of high and low (or middle) brow. Among all the topics covered, there are many that your kids will my consider fun. 

For example, my son’s New Yorker reading began with an article on the science of avalanches and my daughter went with an article on the science of yawning, both of which the kids loved. In case of my daughter, the science of yawning article ended up taped to her door. She had written on the first page, everyone should read this.

This is a child who is a very typical 11-year-old and not a precocious reader. And she had had no similar reaction to any of the texts she had encountered in school.

The magazine offers an endless supply of these sort of fun, interesting, and approachable articles mixed in with the dryer and denser fare, so your job as a parent is doing the digging. The following are examples of articles that we have queued up:

• One More Game; Pickleball goes pro, by Sarah Larson

• Out of Kansas; Revisiting “The Wizard of Oz.” By Salman Rushdie

• Swamped; Why our wetlands matter by Annie Proulx

• Why the Bicycle Still Dominates Global Transportation, by Jill Lepore

• Why do online shaming frenzies happen? By Becca Rothfeld

• Just Dance; Beyonce’s exuberant night-club record. Carrie Battan

• Petey’s Earnest Songs and Absurd TikToks; By Kelefa Sanneh

In addition to selectively picking topics for your kids to read, you may also want to read along with younger kids. My 11-year-old and I take turns reading paragraphs, and I am there to explain the unfamiliar words. (For more on this approach, check out the post, Educational Wing Parent).

One other step I sometimes take is to access a potential New Yorker article online so I can copy the text and paste it into a Word or Google doc, which I print out without the small print and narrow column formatting of the magazine, as the articles may look less and intimidating and more familiar this way.

My son is now reading about Rich Paul, who is the game-changing manager to LeBron James and a number of other stars, and my daughter and I are reading about Scandinavia’s experiments with timber-based skyscrapers.

Contrast these pieces with those that the informational texts your kids are working on in today’s ELA classroom. 

Things have arguably improved since I was a kid and when the most interesting passage you were likely to encounter was about George Washington Carver and his incredible skill at repurposing the peanut (which were amazing and is the only informational text from back then that I retained).

There are a variety of often dispiriting reason why the information that you, I, and kids today encountered in these information passages is often less than inspiring, including the fact that for many years there is was little consideration to the quality of the information in the texts.

These passages are also an area where politics can rear its unhelpful head in education. Battles are fought. On one side, proponents want more essays that positively position hijabs and gender fluidity, while the other offers up new cutting edge science in support of creationism. 

Kidding, of course, but there is some of this, and  also death-by-committee, budget issues, and more.

We parents don’t have to wait. These efforts in school, in the end, amount to trying to educate America’s school kids so they are ideally able to read at a level of the New Yorker, the Wall Street Journal and all the others. 

So, cut to the chase. If your experience is anything like mine, you will be amused at how much your kids, and possibly you along with them, enjoy delving into these entertaining, extremely well-written, and zeitgeisty pieces. 

Meanwhile, you also have the parental satisfaction of having a strong sense for how this is a form of reading that is the literary equivalent of a deep green smoothie--reading that is overflowing in vitamin and mineral goodness.