Novel Stunts : Many Principals Resort to Silliness to Sell Students on Reading

Call them the Almost-Ready-for-Prime-Time Principals.

They’ve come to school dressed as hot dogs, bears, ballerinas, raisins, alligators and Hershey Kisses. They’ve climbed roofs, milked cows, smooched frogs, kissed pigs and shaved their heads--all in the name of education.

And they’ve eaten worms--fried, microwaved, cooked in omelets--to encourage their students to be, you guessed it, bookworms. Last month, in front of gaping, gasping students, Colfax Avenue Elementary School Principal Shirley DiRado ate three mealworms--live, wriggling mealworms.

In challenging their students to crack open books, school administrators across the country have increasingly turned to stunts worthy of “Saturday Night Live” or David Letterman’s Stupid Human Tricks.

But when the bear costumes are shed and the smudges left by a pig snout wiped away, do the students continue to read? Or do they shut the books until the next stunt?

“After the worm is swallowed and after the contest is over, the kids probably go back to watching television,” said Myron H. Dembo, professor of educational psychology at USC.

Dembo and some other educators consider the hype and excitement that often surround such challenges no substitute for a year-round emphasis on reading.

“It’s cute, but it’s not necessary,” Dembo said. “If that’s all it took to get kids to read, my God, I’d get every teacher on a roof.”

But educators who use stunts to challenge students to meet a reading quota--a certain number of books, pages or hours spent reading--say at least it’s a start.

“What about the couple that really enjoyed the book and got another one?” DiRado said. “If you open doors with students and present learning as a wonderful thing instead of a boring, horrible thing, then you’re ahead.”

J. P. Roberts, a Colorado special reading teacher, cajoled her principal into wearing a monkey costume and reading Curious George books to the school’s children. “Through this promotion to get children to read, there’s a good chance they will come across something that will touch their heart. If they don’t read, there’s not a chance,” she said.

The fraternity of educators willing to reach for the ridiculous in the name of education has burgeoned in the past decade.

“It seems to me it’s picking up a lot now in the last three or four years,” said Julie Million, spokeswoman for the National Assn. of Elementary School Principals. “There’s a lot of pig kissing.”

Roof-sitting once reached epidemic proportions, with principals climbing up ladders while dressed as bears, gorillas and chimney sweeps. A Santa Ana principal climbed to the roof in a clown costume when her students read 1 million pages.

But now any educator worth his or her stunt knows that roof-sitting is passe. The cutting edge is far more ludicrous. In Michigan, a principal dressed as an alligator and rode her bicycle to school. Another flew over his school in a hot air balloon for a “Sky High with Reading” promotion. Yet another skated on roller blades while dressed as a piece of candy.

Richard Lioy of Beachy Avenue Elementary School in Arleta let a teacher give him a crew cut in June. This year, if enough students read two books in a summer reading campaign, they will turn him into a human ice cream sundae--covering him with ice cream, hot fudge and cherries.

“I’m out of ideas for next year,” complained one principal. “Do you have any suggestions?”

DiRado is the latest inductee into this frog-kissing, fake fur-wearing fraternity.

The principal of the North Hollywood school made international news--she was interviewed by South African radio--with her worm-eating reward for students who had read at least two books in the school’s Read-a-Thon.

With each swallow, DiRado sealed her fate. Though she’s been in education since 1958, “I’ll go down in history as the worm principal.”

But her plan to lure students out of their apathy and away from their television sets apparently worked. The number of students participating in the Read-a-Thon doubled to about 350.

“It got kids to read who normally wouldn’t be interested,” DiRado said. “Parents were calling and saying, ‘I can’t believe it. They want to read.’ ”

Daniel Cerny, a sixth-grader from North Hollywood, was an avid reader well before DiRado pledged to eat a worm. He read 26 books in the Read-a-Thon. But the 12-year-old was nevertheless impressed.

“It showed how dedicated she was to the school. She was willing to donate her time and her stomach to make sure kids get a good education.”

Daniel said his classmates, every one of whom read enough books to earn tickets to the worm-eating assembly, now share his enthusiasm. Many students who would read Mickey Mouse books during silent reading time are now choosing books like Madeleine L’Engle’s “A Wrinkle in Time.”

“They wanted to read to see it and now they see reading can be fun, too,” he said.

Jessica Loveman, a fourth-grader from Studio City, thought DiRado’s trick was disgusting, but an interesting tactic.

“I thought that was pretty different,” said Jessica, who read 20 books for the Read-a-Thon. “Because, what other principal would eat a worm?”

Though the stunt was a success, DiRado said no more worms will pass the lips of this former science teacher.

“I have no plans. No crazy extravaganzas,” she said. “I’m not going to do this every year.”

But for some educators, each year brings a new challenge.

“This year I was really groping. I was running dry of ideas,” said Bob Ziegler, a principal in New Hope, Minn.

Ziegler has milked a cow in the New Hope Elementary School gymnasium. He even challenged the state’s commissioner of education to a milking contest. Big mistake. The commissioner had grown up on a farm. Ziegler grew up in Milwaukee. Ziegler lost.

Ziegler has eaten his hat--a gingerbread hat that he swears was drier and less tasty than the real thing would have been--he’s been sawed in half by a magician, has filled in for the local television weatherman and has kissed a pig.

“Now I’m stuck. I don’t know what to do next year,” he said. “I’m thinking about doing something with a boa constrictor, maybe walking around the hall with him wrapped around me. But I don’t know how heavy they are.”

The growing trend concerns some educational experts.

“I think it’s a lousy idea,” said Julia Palmer, a New York educational consultant who founded the American Reading Council, which disbanded in 1991.

“This assumption that you have to put on high jinks or give them free doughnuts in order to get them to read gives them all the wrong reasons. It teaches them that reading is something you have to be lured to do,” Palmer said. “You don’t do things like that to get kids to play Nintendo.”

The stunts might not be harmful, educators argue, but unless they are combined with an intensive reading program, they aren’t worth the time it takes to plan them.

“Conventional methods of teaching reading haven’t really panned out that well and they’re trying something new. But there are lots of better things to try,” said M. C. Wittrock, chairman of the Division of Educational Psychology at UCLA’s Graduate School of Education.

Emphasizing comprehension instead of the number of books read, and setting up classroom projects about the books will foster a long-term interest, educators say. And the choice of reading material is paramount. The way to get children hooked on reading is to have them read about things that are familiar or interesting to them, educators say.

If a child who likes to fish reads a book on fishing, he will learn that reading is more than just an exercise, that he can get something out of it, Wittrock said.

“It turns them on and they get interested in it and they’re ready to read something else,” Wittrock said.

Principals, many of whom say the stunts are part of a larger reading focus, agree that getting children to read for the sake of reading is the objective.

Ziegler, the Minnesota principal who milked a cow, said that since he came to the school in 1986, the circulation in the media center has shown a marked increase.

“We’ve heard from kids and parents saying that had it not been for that reading contest, they wouldn’t be reading as much as they are now,” he said. “It is hokey and it doesn’t work for everybody. But it works for some.”

“In today’s society they need to know somebody’s willing to do something ridiculous for them,” said DiRado of North Hollywood. “I cared enough to eat a worm.”

Sharon Millen, principal of Pearblossom Elementary School in the Antelope Valley, cared enough to be a pie-throwing target, to kiss a frog and to rub noses with not one, but two, pigs. She even talked a vice principal into acting as a ventriloquist’s dummy.

But how far will Millen go to encourage her students to read? Not as far as they’d like.

A couple of smart alecks suggested she swallow a goldfish.

“Not until I check with my doctor,” she told them.

But the more she thought, the less appealing it seemed.

“The goldfish has been ruled out for health reasons--mine and the fish’s,” she said, adding a few more conditions. “I don’t want this to be permanently damaging. I don’t do snakes, and I don’t do bungee jumping.”