How I often get asked: “How did you get to MegaSkills?” I often give a short response.  Then, I hear, “Tell us more.”

 

My early life in Monroe, Michigan is central to my whole life.  Maybe it’s just because it was childhood. Yet there may have been a special aura about that little town where I was born and lived mostly happily until my mother’s illness and death when I was 13.

 

My father was a photographer.  He immigrated to the US in the mid 1920’s from a small town in Poland.  He sent for my mother, his sweetheart from back home, a few years later.  My father was a very hard worker.  He and my mother were Jewish immigrants in the classic model of that period.  Their mission was to make good and to do good.  They were ready to sacrifice whatever it takes for their children to make it in America

 

My mother – I can still see her more than 60 years after her death – was a warm, energetic woman – always cleaning the house, always doing something.  Her English never became smooth, but she struggled with it.  She was a good cook and an excellent seamstress and was always sewing something new and nice for me to wear.

 

My father worked day and night.  He was full of life and an avid reader.  He went for a nap after lunch to replenish his energy, reading newspapers and tossing them on the floor, just as I do today.  His work ethic made a deep impression on me.

 

 

 

When I started kindergarten I remember crying most days.  By first grade, I got the hang of it and went to school without tears.  One of my main memories from first grade is the story of the chicken. As a first grade project, our class raised little chicks.  At the end of school year, these chicks, now chickens had to go to children’s homes.  They were to be raffled off.  My mother agreed that I could enter the raffle and I won the rooster.

 

I have never forgotten that rooster and the pleasure he brought me.  I struggled to bring him home – a long five blocks from school.  The rooster lived in a crate on our small back porch.  Every day I would let him out to walk along the streets.  Every night he would come home to his crate.

 

As a child of immigrants in a town with no immigrants, I didn’t possess the immigrant pride that is more common today.  We were all supposed to be alike and my parents were different.  I would feel embarrassed and wanted to be more like the other kids – but I wasn’t.

 

At school, my brother and I were expected by our parents to bring home all A’s, and we mostly did.  Now that I know a lot more about education, I can say that my home town elementary school was a great place.  I loved every class, except maybe fifth grade when I began to stutter.  In sixth grade, I became editor of “This and That at Boyd”.  It was my first experience in journalism.

 

I went to the Monroe movies.  I was there for every new movie.  It was in this movie house that I learned the ways of the world, from Cary Grant to Gary Cooper, to Barbara Stanwyck, to Myrna Loy and all the Hollywood stars of the era. I loved the movies and still do.

 

 

 

Monroe was a safe cocoon in which to grow up.  I rode my bike to the end of the town, to the lonely quarry and never felt afraid.  What a loss it is for kids today not to be able or allowed to be on their own in this way.

 

The greatest tragedy in life so far was my mother’s death when I was 13.  It is a blow from which I have never really recovered.

 

My father, a really good man, didn’t know what to do with me.  My life without my mother had just begun.  There was a lot I had to learn…and learn fast.  He learned along with me. 

 

After my mother’s death, my brother went to college and my father was left with me.  He was uncomfortable. We really hadn’t known each other.  He decided that we should move to Detroit.

 

I was to attend Central High School.  Everyone had already made their friends and I was an outsider.  I had come from the cocoon of small town Monroe and here I was, a fish out of water, in the big city of Detroit.

 

I must have made a few friends (or thought I did) because in my senior year I ran for class secretary – with the slogan – “Dot Dashes for Office.” Actually, I was never called Dot – but it made for a cute poster.  Of course I didn’t win, but it strikes me now as I look back that I showed some inner strength – more than I thought I had.  I stuttered through my speech saying why classmates should vote for me.  They didn’t.

 

I did not distinguish myself at Central High School where I spent my junior and senior years.  I was definitely a good student but not top tier.

I did fine in my English courses and stumbled through math. 

 

 

My strengths in college classes continued to be English and writing.  After I graduated, I worked in two public relations job in Detroit, but I wanted to go to New York.  The safe way in those days was to become a teacher.

 

I did become a teacher at Columbia University in New York City.  I met my husband there in graduate school. He and I are still together over 50 years later, and I am still a teacher.

 

Teaching, Writing, MegaSkills®, and Children…

 

Even as a teen, I worked with  group of  young children.  It was a natural for me to become a camp counselor.  At a camp near Detroit, we had campfires and swam in a dirty lake, and mostly it was a good time.

 

I have always enjoyed writing.  How I got the idea to ask for a reporting job at a local Detroit community newspaper, I am not sure.  Yet, there I was one day at the Grand River Record.  I wrote my own column.  I got paid $22.50 a week.  I was the editor , the only staff person, and I put the paper to bed.  I loved it. 

 

From early on, I have integrated my work in teaching, writing and children.  I was able to teach part-time: I started the Home and School column at the Washington Post.  It ran weekly from 1964-1970.  The column gave me a wider world and it helped in the launch of the nonprofit Home and School Institute which I started in 1972.

 

 

My first jobs laid the base for combining in my work – writing and teaching. Many decades later that is what I am still doing.

 

The idea for the Institute started in the late 1950’s when I began teaching.  I saw my senior high students having problems in class, difficulties that they just didn’t need to have.  And I started asking myself and my fellow teachers a lot of questions.  Why are these smart kids having trouble?

 

In the 1960’s, in my own kitchen, my young children were asking me questions about learning before they were ready for school.  This was still in that “dark ages” period long before Head Starts and preschools, when we really did believe that children started learning when they entered the school door. 

 

A “very-radical” idea started whispering in my head saying: Children learn a lot outside of school.  A home, every home is a very important learning place and parents can do a lot to help every child learn and do well in school.  This is the founding base for my work.

 

First, came the seminars for parents called Success for Children Begins at Home.  One of our basic strategies was what I called “the home learning recipe.”  Then came the teacher training programs, to build working partnerships with families, I developed a master’s degree program in School and Family Community Involvement.  It was called “cutting edge and pace setting,” all those wondrous words.  Yet, parental involvement in education was still considered an “extra.”  This was the late 1970’s and early 1980’s.  We had to produce all of the training materials.  Publishers were just not interested.  I have a file of rejection letters to prove it.

 

 

It was in the 1980’s that things began to change.  More of us began to realize that the school, not even the best school, could do it all in education.  I was hearing from the families who were using our home learning “recipes.”  They told me something very important – they said, “These activities, like Measure for Pleasure and Math in the Bathtub, are teaching more that the three R’s.  They are giving our kids, and us too, confidence.  They are building initiative, they are teaching common sense.”  And another light bulb went on in my head.

 

By looking at school report cards and job evaluation forms, I formulated the list of MegaSkills.®  They are the success attributes for school, for our jobs, for life.  My husband calls them the “inner engines of learning.”  In 1986, I mentioned the word “MegaSkills” in a speech. I kind of whispered it.  In the question period, a voice from the back of the room, asked: “What are those MegaSkills?”                                                                                                                                                                       

 

I began writing, pulling together all that had been learned from the parent classes, the teacher training, the demonstration projects and started sending out the manuscript for MegaSkills.  The first edition was published in 1988.  It was clear from the strong reception that parents across state and socio-economic lines recognized the importance of MegaSkills. 

 

My major contribution to education I believe is the “home learning recipe” combined with MegaSkills.  Home learning recipes are easy to do activities, using home resources, fast, no-cost, yet, they extend and reinforce the work of the school.  My books are filled with hundreds of these activities.

 

The goal of MegaSkills® is the melding of academics and character development using these “recipe-activities”.  The work has been more significant than I had envisioned originally.  That’s why I keep supporting it – writing, talking and going to meetings.

 

MegaSkills®, as a book has sold 300,000 copies and is going into a 5th edition in 2008.  From the book came the training programs for teachers in how to teach MegaSkills in parent workshops and in classes with children.  Almost 15,000 parents and teachers have been trained to lead MegaSkills Program. I started Dorothy Rich Associates to extend this work.

 

I have learned a lot from my children especially from my two daughters now grown and working, one as a physician, one as a lawyer. My children were the first ones to use the MegaSkills activities. 

 

 

It has been a true pleasure to have my grandchildren growing up near me to be able to watch their development and have a hand in helping them develop.

 

My hope for my grandsons and for all children is that they see the world as full of possibilities, that they are eager and curious.  That when they do fall down and are disappointed that they get back up and keep going.  I wish for them a strong education and cultural background that enables them to have the inner tools they need to move forward.

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My own MegaSkills, earned the hard way, have come in handy for me.  My hope for the readers of my new books and those who know MegaSkills over many years is that these values, attitudes and behaviors keep making a positive difference in the lives of many more children, families and teachers everywhere.

Dorothy Rich, Ed. D.