Transcripts of Andy Imparato.1

Thanks for coming Andy, and for agreeing to do the interview. So we usually start by just asking if there are some sort of outstanding memories that you have, along the course of your life, and lot's of time people go back to very early ones, but maybe not necessarily so. . Where was there a major shift or a major moment in your literacy? So reading and writing and practices, and you can separate them out or you can put them together, but you want me to start by kind of saying my name and stuff, or are you...? Ok, so I'm Andy Imparato and I'm the President and Chief Executive Officer of the American Association of People with Disabilities, based in Washington DC. So I guess my experience around reading that I can remember, is really around standardized testing. I was always a very high achieving student. And I kind of thought of myself as somebody who was good at writing. And good at math. And I found as I started to do standardized tests, I got further into my education, the area that ended up being a deficit for me on a relative scale was reading comprehension. And the challenge for me, a lot of times you would be asked to read something on the exam and then say "What's the best title for this?" And they would ask other questions, like that about what you had just read. And I it was never crystal clear to me what the right answer was, it seemed very sophisticated objective to me, what the right answer was. Whereas in a math question it was just a lot clearer. You know, on the SAT, I did a lot better on the math than I did on the verbal. And when I took the LSAT to get into law school, all of the questions that I missed on that test were reading comp. questions. I didn't miss any other question, but I missed a lot of reading comprehension. So I did well on the test, but it was just, understand that all of the deficits were in one area. So I've never been diagnosed as having a reading related disability, learning disability, As a young adult I started experiencing the symptoms of my primary disability, which is bipolar disorder. And that also affects my reading. 

And I don't know if some of my reading issues as a young kid were early connections to what was going to happen later. But the way that I experienced my disability is, it's really about energy, and it's about brain speed. So when I'm depressed, my energy goes down my brain slows down, and reading is a little bit easier for me then, in the sense that I can focus on the text. But it's hard to muster the energy to read. When I have a lot of energy, my brain speed goes up, so when I'm depressed my brain is moving like 5 miles an hour. It's having the same thoughts but they're just coming slower. And when I have my high energy my brain is just going like 200 miles an hour. So it's hard to slow it down enough to read text. So I tend to scan more than I do read. And as a child I remember it always took me a long time to read anything. In part because I was reading every word out loud in my head, I never learned to kind of, somehow, capture text without reading each word out loud in my head. So it just took me a long time to read. I think probably in college, I was a liberal arts major, I studied Italian Renaissance culture, a lot of reading assigned to me, and I probably read 10 percent of what was assigned. And I graduated in the top 5 percent of my class, so I came up with other ways to get the information and to be able to report it back on an exam. Writing on the other hand has always been easy for me. I could always sit down and compose quickly. I tend to do everything better under pressure. Including writing. But I've never had a problem writing. And I think as a kid I just assumed that if I was a good writer that I was good reader. And as an adult I've come to realize it's different skill sets. So I, people are always recommending books to me, books that directly relate to my field, and it takes a lot for me to read an entire book. 

I think the last book I read cover to cover that was fiction, was "The Davinci Code." And that was right in my sweet spot. I mean it had Italian Renaissance stuff going on in it, it was compelling, and I basically read it in two days. I just did nothing but read the book. But that's very unusual for me. And it's very rare for me to kind of slow myself down enough, and block out enough time to really get into a book. It just doesn't come naturally to me. You mentioned that you developed, like other strategies, other ways to do the reading, so can you talk about some of those? Sure, and this carried through to law school as well. There was a lot of reading in law school that I didn't do either. Typically what I would do is I would go to class. That was always a priority for me, I always had very good attendance. I took notes in class. And I guess this is also related to reading. I've always had the ability to study my notes and remember them close to verbatim, like photographic... You know, I'd remember what was on the page exactly where it was. And I could pull that back in an exam context. So what I would typically do is go to class, listen carefully to what the instructor was saying was important, about the reading or about the topic, write that down, and that's what I would study in terms of preparing for exams. And it was an adjustment for me between college and law school. Because in college again in my liberal arts courses, history courses, art history, literature courses. It was generally TAs that were grading the exams, not professors. So I would spew information in those blue books, I would fill up lots and lots of bluebooks on exams and it was really about volume, just pushing out as much information as I could in the time permit. 

When I got to law school I tried to do that the first semester, and I came to realize that it generally was older professors that were reading these things. They didn't want to sort out my handwriting, they didn't want to see volume, they wanted to see well reasoned cogent arguments. So second semester of law school I completely changed my strategy towards exams. I spent a lot of time figuring out exactly what I was going to say, how I was going to organize the argument. And then I actually typed my exams, I wanted to make it easy for the teacher to read it. And it just, my worse grade second semester was better than my highest grade first semester. So it definitely made a difference, but it was an adjustment for me, learning how to write for a different audience in the context of law school. You just used the word that was on the tip of my tongue the whole time, thinking about that, talking about the way that you had adjusted for audience, figured out that you needed to find a different way for a different audience of moving towards that. Exactly. I want to come back to the writing in a little bit, but I'm guessing, I'm really interested in, if you had to mark out who you have seen as influences on your own literacy practices, reading and writing, who are the people or events or moments that stand out as major influential moments? Well I guess, for me, I've had a lot of positive experiences around writing. So I remember in 5th grade I had a writing instructor if you will, I think she was an English teacher, but she was teaching us power paragraphs. Where you had to have your thesis and then supporting arguments under it. And for whatever reasons she thought I was very good at it and gave me a lot of positive feedback on my writing. And that continued through High School and through college. 

My wife jokes, one of my college instructors read a paper I wrote on Dante. This was a course called "Interpretation, Signification, and the Medieval Textual Tradition." And the first thing we read in the class was the book of Mark in the Bible, and the last thing we read was Dante's Paradiso. And I remember I wrote two papers for that class, both about food imagery. One of them was talking about food imagery in Mark, and the other was talking about it in the Paradiso. But he wrote in his comments in the paper that "I was the master of the art of prose", which I think he was being a little bit tongue in cheek, but my wife likes to tease me about that. So writing has just always been positive feedback. My mother's a journalist, I was the editor of the High School newspaper, I thought of myself as a good writer. And I guess as I've gotten older and I've done a lot of public speaking. I now kind of think of myself, as one of my talents, that I think it's kind of a gift that I try to apply in the area of disability advocacy is taking complicated topics and making them simple and easy to understand for a general audience. I, big picture comes naturally to me. Getting into a lot of detail technical detail, I find is kind of an energy drain for me. Part of it's attention span, and that goes back to the reading, I just don't think I have a very... A long attention span doesn't come naturally to me. Could you talk then a little bit about the business of public speaking? Because it strikes me that in our whole set of interviews, I'm sure that it occurs, but it doesn't come up quite often, that we think about the skill of speaking is also very much a literacy skill. 

But it's not one that a lot of people have, or feel that they use everyday. But obviously in your position you do, so could you talk a little bit about the development of that as a skill and things you've learned? Or major moments in your public speaking arc? I mean it's funny, there were probably two courses I took in High School that in retrospect maybe ended up being the most useful. One was called personal typing. And I basically learned how to type quickly. And that still serves me well to this day, because my fingers can keep up with my head. When I'm trying to write something. And the other thing I took that ended up being very valuable was, I took a course at UCLA, that... We had a program at my High School where you could take courses at college, and I just did it because I thought it would be interesting. So I took a course on public speaking, at UCLA. And most of the students in it were like 5th year and 6th year Seniors. So it was just kind of an easy course, so it attracted people that were just trying to get their credits. But we learned extemporaneous speaking. We learned how to give a speech from an outline. So to this day, even when I'm testifying in front of Congress, I never read my prepared remarks. When you testify in front of Congress, you do have to have written testimony and I always do that, and that's what goes into the record, but I believe that when you're actually giving the testimony, the most important thing is to make a direct connection with the member of Congress or the members in the committee. And if you're reading your testimony that they already have, you completely lose them. If you kind of ignore your written testimony and treat it more like a speech, and have like 3 points that you're trying to make... First they get discombobulated because they expect you to be reading your written testimony and you're not doing it. And that's a way to get their attention. And I always try to work in, like if they've already said something based on another witness or their opening statement, I try to work in a reference to that, and make it more of that live interaction, so we're really having a human interaction like a dialogue and it is not me as a kind of automaton just reading my prepared testimony. And it amazes me how few witnesses understand that. Most witnesses, the vast majority, even people that testify repeatedly, they feel it's critical that they read their testimony because they don't want to get anything wrong.