Whupping the teenage boy literacy crisis with the vacation journal
If you’re lucky, your boys are eager readers. If you’re really lucky, your boys are eager writers. But in many households, of course, neither is the case, and folks are in the midst of summer book battles.
As I’ve mentioned before, literacy experts have discussed what they often call a crisis in literacy among teenage boys. I wrote in 2017 that “[…] getting boys to read has been a longstanding, well-documented issue” and that 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.
So this is not a new topic. But it seems like in our collective frustration, we–and I use that “we” broadly”–often forget some basic rhetorical factors when it comes to the issue of teenage male literacy: These boys, willfully or not, don’t see a clear audience or purpose for the reading and writing they are asked to do.
Two weeks ago, we took a week’s vacation in Vermont, visiting our close friends’ beautiful lake house. My daughter is in class this summer, so it was just me and mom and the boys–oh, plus we told each boy they could bring a friend. So the boy count was 1+2+2=5. (This made me think there might need to be a kind of Title IX for vacation, because this was rough on my wife, but at least she had our dog, Prue, for some female solidarity/companionship.)
Since the summer is a daily literacy battle–and keep in mind that I do value their extensive digital literacy habits–things could only be worse on vacation. A boy read and write on vacation?!
But I fought back: enter the vacation journal. For years, I have carefully written about our activities during vacations. In my opinion, these are high quality and often quite amusing writings. When I break them out nowadays, the payoff is immediate: The kids, and sometimes their friends, love reading them. They are of course one man’s perspective on a family trip, with a highly slanted point of view, but that’s authorial privilege for you.
In Vermont, building on an idea from a few other recent trips we’ve taken, I asked/forced each kid to write about one day. I supplied them with sheets of old-fashioned loose-leaf paper for the job. This ended up being a good choice of medium; I was going to do it all on a computer, but then I realized there could be a job-sapping logjam at the machine, and they also wouldn’t be able to do multimedia, er, draw silly pictures.
The whole thing exceeded my expectations. After some initial grumbling, they had a blast. They all got into the process, writing quite extensively and adding a good dash of humor while also employing considerable semantic, syntactic, and grammatical complexity. In short, these writings were pretty good. How about these gems?:
“Today was Nate’s birthday (18 years old)! What better way to spend it than waking up at 5 am, driving for 6 hours, and eating burnt hot dogs for dinner!”
“Dinner consisted of chicken, rice, and corn, which the hungry boys quickly inhaled. Then after a short trip on the lake with Zach continously trying to pirate Adam’s ship they were tired out and headed inside for a few rounds of CodeNames.”
“Together, the four of them successfully managed to look like four Neanderthals fighting for their lives in the middle of a lake. After a couple of hours of doing their duties at Rock, the cavemen went back to the house.”
“… two boys’ camp counselors came by on a rowboat. They started interrogating Adam and Zach, asking about a ‘big turtle.’ Obviously, Zach and Adam had nothing to do with a big, dead, floating, stinky turtle so they sent the campers on their way disappointed.”
One page of brilliance.
Perhaps our journal is not quite Walden, but it is an engaging read nonetheless, and by “engaging,” I mean that they found it so: They read each other’s entries, correcting some fish stories to keep the record clear.
While I don’t think they overtly competed, they all tried to do a good job, sitting down, focused, to get their day/page done.
On the last day, everyone wrote one sentence, finishing our five-day week with a nice, collaborative composing exercise.
Will they be ready for college or what?
When we got home, as a bonus, I scanned the entries and sent them to the parents who were brave enough to allow their two boys to travel with us. One marveled that the “English professor” got them to write on vacation. The other said, “This was my favorite summer reading thus far!”
Take that, literacy crisis!
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LOVE THIS ARTICLE! Of course, I loved that it happened at our “happy place” which I believe is quickly becoming your new favorite vacation spot! I treasured the journal pages you sent me and you forgot to mention the “guest book” and how you made the boys each write about something they learned at the lake! My favorite entry was “how to transport a huge dead snapper turtle onto a camp raft”!
Scott,
Great to see you last night and thanks for forwarding this article.
It’s great that you are keeping up the effort to make these kids better readers and writers. Wrestling practices could be more interesting and productive this year if they have to write about each one afterwards…2 birds, as they say.
Just a thought.
Twenty years ago my two adolescent boys considered reading unmanly unless it was Skeeter Skelton or Calvin and Hobbes. Add to that their fear that mom’s passion for reading and writing was a communicable disease, and my dreams for a book-loving prodigy were bleak! As an 18-year-old, #1 son accepted my challenge that pleasure reading could change his life; Faulkner did with “A Rose for Emily.” My haunted believer is now 33 and expecting his own son. When he visited a few weeks ago, and I caught him in my study with Frost. His reading repertoire far exceeds my own. I’m editing a series of his in-process short stories – about a cowboy who eats a lot of dust! He lives 800 miles away, and my favorite phone calls begin with, “Hey mom, have you ever read…”
Xanathar’s Guide To Everything By Wizards RPG Team, Hardcover
OK, so the book itself says you can play Dungeons & Dragons with the? Player’s Handbook,? Dungeon Master’s Guide and? Monster Manual. At the heart of things, I was really only interested in a few spells, as the Core books for 5e we’re exceptionally well rounded and left little else to be desired, on my end, both as a player and a DM. Still Xanathar’s is a solid addition to those rules, and I feel could help others who might feel the need to branch out beyond the original Core books.
An adventure.? Like Volo’s Guide, this is an options and rules supplement. There are a lot of quality of life??? options, creative things that try to anchor the story element for the game. Sure the Encounter Table lends itself towards the combat element, but overall these are all ideas and options that both players and DMs can choose to keep or let go. But there is no story to be had! Unless you, for some reason, are hooked on the Xanathar itself??¦ there isn’t a lot going on.
We had three solid days of Adventurers League at Gaelcon, running regional previews of The Folded Time Trilogy, the season 7 Epic Peril at the Port and The Xanathar’s Guide to Everything tie-in Rats of Waterdeep.? The wandering monk Fai Chen was also present with his Fantastical Faire. Contents: Xanathar’s Guide To Everything follows the format of the previous rulebooks in the line. It is divided in only three chapters.
There has not been an official statement of how Xanathar’s Guide to Everything will be implemented in the D&D Adventurers League1. The reason being is that the AL admins haven’t had a chance to look at it, since it’s not yet complete. The AL tries to be as inclusive as possible with official Wizards of the Coast D&D products, but we cannot make comments on things we haven’t seen in their final form yet.
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