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 [1] 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 [2].
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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[5]Scott Warnock [6]
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