Boys and Reading: How Do We Get Boys to Wrestle with the Pages?
In the 1970s educators and policy makers identified an achievement gap between boys and girls in math and science. Boys were taking and excelling in more science and math classes than girls. With dedication and persistence, commitments across districts and states, careful revision of curriculum, the gap snapped shut. Now when you peek into a calculus or physics class you are apt to see as many girls as boys.
Today, schools have another achievement gap educators must address, one that has troubled many an English class for decades: Boys lag behind girls as readers. In Idaho, they score lower than girls in reading and language usage on the ISAT starting in the third grade and they never catch up. In addition to standardized test data, English teachers have tons of anecdotal evidence of boys’ attitudes toward the study of literature. Boys are less likely to enjoy reading or identify themselves as committed English students than girls, attitudes that often affect their behavior in the classroom. Now when you peek into an Advanced Placement English class, you frequently see more female faces than male.
Fortunately, with the success in improvement for girls in Math and science still fresh, energizing, educators have turned their attention and intelligence to the literacy gap. Michael Smith and Jeff Wilhelm have thrown their prodigious research weight in identifying the issues and toward finding solutions. Bruce Pirie, in Teenage Boys and High School English, raises his thoughtful, eloquent voice to the cause, offering practical strategies drawn from his own practice. With this issue of InLand, we want to drive the issue closer to home, to hear from educators in the region who are working, too, for solutions. Boys’ reading matters!
Bev Wolff was pushed by Smith and Wilhelm’s seminal text, Reading Don’t Fix No Chevys: Literacy in the Lives of Young Men, to look more closely at how and what her son and his friends read. In “A Boy’s Life,” she found that though John’s teachers would characterize him as a reluctant reader, they glimpsed only a small slice of his story. Outside the school context, reading not as assignment, John is an exceptional, even voracious reader, and an exceptional writer. Wolff’s gentle plea, echoed by others in this issue, is to get to know your male students, to find out what they do read, and give them choices.
In “The D & D Boys: What’s Wrong with This Picture?” Bruce Robbins and Maggie Chase present a case study of Brandon and James, two boys who get poor grades in English classes but who engage in many literate activities outside the classroom. Little do their teachers know they are not only avid readers, gobbling up every book they can find by authors such as David Eddings, they also take their reading beyond the book, into D & D role-playing, an activity that Brandon says is “like writing your own book.” Through interviews, Robbins and Chase get the boys talking about their reading at home, what they think of the reading assigned at school, about class discussions, which the boys surprisingly didn’t value, and the need for choice. Like Wolff, one of their parting points asks teachers, as a first step, to listen to their male students.
We know the challenges boys face as readers have biological, personal, and cultural roots. Just skim the sit-coms on television to see how our culture continues to reinforce the belief that boys should not express their emotions in public or in private, nor talk about personal issues. Mainstream media is a difficult force to counter in the scant time we have to work with boys and young men in our classroom. Melissa Spencer in “The English Teacher’s Guide to Understanding and Supporting the Male Reader,” drawing from superb sources, describes some practical ways to address these cultural challenges, such as Jennifer Allen’s acceptance of what on the surface appears to be rude behavior in the small group book discussions in her class. Spencer argues that we find ways to make the most of boys’ energy in the classroom. She also adds that it is incumbent upon us to know what material boys are reading so that we can point them toward these books and articles.
Jim Uhlenkott in “Johnny Won’t Read? Maybe “Reading” is the Problem” also offers practical, imminently doable suggestions to teachers, especially at the elementary level, including selecting a variety of genres when you read aloud, include nonfiction, make literature circles more boy-friendly, e.g. incorporating some physical activity into them, posting recommendation charts around the class, and making sure to include recommendations from the boys in class. Uhlenkott, along with the other writers in this issue, advocates giving choice of reading material to boys.
Another easy-to-do activity in class is to get students to recommend books to each other. Bev Wolff in “What Boys and Girls Like” shows the effect 6th Grader George Wolcott had on 3rd Grade readers, as readers and book reviewers. After reading his review of The Lightning Thief, thirteen 3rd Grade students, including seven boys, wrote their own reviews. This is a short, rich list for both boys and girls.
A hearty welcome back to Marilyn Carpenter, InLand book reviewer from 2000-2003, and a huge welcome to Chris Valeo, who will join Marilyn in reviewing books in forthcoming issues to give InLand readers–students and teachers–recommendations for reading. This column may be at the end of the issue, but it just may be one to turn to first and to return to often.
The following from the last issue of InLand I edited in 2003 bears repeating: InLand does not always appear in a timely fashion. It’s a chronic problem. Our goal is to publish the fall/winter issue in January and the spring/summer issue at the end of May. During my previous tenure, we did not always meet those deadlines, primarily because the core of each issue, the five or six or more articles exploring the issue’s themes, was not yet filled when the deadline arrived. Often we are still beating the bushes for two or three or four articles that will interest our readers.
The solution? I can think of but one: find some way to get more affiliate members to write for publication. I have argues in many different venues that elementary and secondary teachers should be required to write for publication, though perhaps not as extensively as college professors because the teaching load is considerably heavier. But what if K-12 teachers were required to publish an article in a professional journal every three years? Would their voices not then be heard?
It has been my experience that writing for publication has been more rewarding professional development that 99% of the mush school districts serve up. It is demanding. Who has time during the school year? It is daunting, writing for one’s peers, yet the practice forces one to clarify one’s thoughts about important professional issues, it helps fuel the professional dialogue, and it shows students that we practice what we preach. To help Inland attain a timeliness that has heretofore been elusive, to maintain InLand’s stature as one of the preeminent affiliate journals, let’s see your articles piling up in our mailbox! I assure you, you can not find a more welcoming place to start speaking out through writing.
Crag Hill
