You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed.

Or you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read?

Hi, this is Michael Silverblatt, and this is bookworm.

Today, my guest in the studio is Tracy Kidder,

whose most recent book among school children was published by Houten Mifflin,

whose book House was a longtime bestseller,

and whose book, Soul of a New Machine,

about the computer, won the Pulitzer Prize.

He spent, I think I've read two years, is that correct,

in a fifth grade classroom?

It was one year.

It was one year.

And the book is the product of being among schoolchildren, which is its title.

I thought I'd begin with the opening of the Yates poem among school children

just to set the scene of the sometimes horrifying classroom.

I walked through the long schoolroom questioning.

A kind old nun in a white hood replies, the children learn to cipher and to sing, to study reading books in history, to cut and sew, be neat in everything in the best modern way.

The children's eyes, in momentary wonder, stare upon a 60-year-old smiling, public man. Yates, when he brings himself to the classroom, sees with a kind of horror the thing that

he's become to the children.

He's not there as a poet.

...