Getting them there boys to read
As a little boy, I had a literate environment in my house, and I myself was a big reader. I remember material literacy moments, such as when I kept sneak-reading my mom’s thrillers, like By Reason of Insanity and The Omen. I recall scaring myself stupid with those books and then coming back for more. I remember how The Lord of Rings trilogy smelled. I remember hiding the Alien “graphic novel” (I mean, that’s what it was) because of the language.
As it turns out, I was an exception, because getting boys to read has been a longstanding, well-documented issue. One of my favorite books on the topic is Jeffrey Wilhelm and Michael Smith’s Reading Don’t Fix No Chevys: Literacy in the Lives of Young Men. They quote psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in trying to dig into this problem: “If literacy is for the sake of the children, how come we so rarely bother to find out what they want to use it for?”
I’m dealing with this on the local front.
For many boys, reading is lame, a waste of time, or, as the word of choice often in my house lately, “dumb.” The results are tangible. An article in The Westerly Sun said, “A pair of reports released in 2010 — the Scholastic’s Kids and Family Reading report and another from the Center on Education Policy — show that the reading lag between boys and girls exists in every state and grade and is ‘the most pressing gender-gap issue facing our schools.’”
Is this a heightened gendered side effect of what David Denby said The New York Times the “communion” of electronic devices? Because boys or girls, the Pew Research Center finds “few late teen-agers are reading many books.” Denby though, doesn’t just point a generational finger, saying, “I know perfectly well that there was never a Golden Age of Teen Reading.” Denby has nailed the situation in my house in saying: “Making the case that serious reading is one of life’s great boons—that screen-bound kids are in danger of missing something tremendous—has become awkward, square-headed, emotionally difficult.” I might add, “Dumb.”
Technology or not, boys don’t see a practical need, a connection. The Westerly Sun article reported that at Pawcatuck Middle school, in an after school program, “about a dozen fifth-, sixth- and seventh-grade boys created their dream reading space, participated in speed-booking, shopped a book fair and met Sean Faye Wolfe, a recent high school graduate and author of the ‘Elementia Chronicles,’ an unofficial Minecraft-Fan adventure series.”
Certainly bending them toward things in which they are interested — Minecraft! — is viewed as a solution. “If reading would fix that Chevy…”
But I wonder, even as I write this, if for some of us old-timers the reading itself isn’t enough. I mean, these kids are reading many more words than likely we did, albeit digital words, but they still have an aversion to the idea of reading, perhaps mostly because they associate that with book reading.
Or maybe we, literate anachronists that we are, have a yearning for our children to develop not just the skill but the material memories of reading, the hard-copy past, the smells of books, that we want our children to experience. That’s not so bad either. As I write this and think of Lord of the Rings, I don’t feel “dumb,” but I’m anticipating such a critique…
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I don’t think the mandatory high school reading bibliography helps the matter. I understand and appreciate the value of the classic, but Great Expectations and Othello are still seen as utterly torturous by freshman and sophomores. Kids really do truly hate them. They hated them in the 80s when I was in high school and they hate them today. I watch my daughter slog through them, remembering just enough for the test, and then it’s gone. I have always believed that if kids were presented something more current or relatable, then reading wouldn’t be seen as so burdensome or arduous and I wonder if for most kids whether it makes more sense to inspire a love of reading than to force feed them the classics and turn them off in the long run. I didn’t really “love” reading until I discovered Vonnegut or JD Salinger when I was a teenager, and I contend that what I learned from Kilgore Trout or Holden Caulfield at 16 was ultimately more influential and meaningful to me than Miss Havisham ever was. Nice article, Scott.
Love this article Scott! I have found that boys love to read just as much as girls when exposed to great books. EVERY day in my class, I have my students read for 30 minutes. They can choose any book from my classroom library. My only rule is they have to finish the book before choosing the next. I put on relaxing music and we read for the joy of reading. Watching children lose themselves in a book, wow, one of my favorite parts of my job.