rail

I’m not sure whether this qualifies for Miguel’s passion quilt meme, but my son and daughter have turned our yard into a terrain park. I’m not sure about the meme business because this isn’t something that I am passionate for kids to learn about. It’s their passion. I’m just the observer/promoter. The project began last fall when the kids scrounged some scrap lumber and nails. My daughter built the rail and superstructure, and after I showed them how to stand it up (without digging big post holes in what we call “the lawn”) they’ve practiced and improvised endlessly, adding new features using whatever comes to hand. It represents countless hours of middle school-aged effort for times they couldn’t be at the big ski area.

Yesterday, in a stiff wind at -15 degrees, my son added an improvised bench and an old tire to the complex. This, after we learned that one of our plastic lawn chairs had “just broken” when he jumped (not quite) over it. I think that’s where the tire from the old swing goes now.

Some days I wonder how we could get students to feel as passionately about reading and writing as they do about their personal passions. But I don’t really want to do that. Those are the days that I have it all backward. Instead, I’d rather think about how teaching could involve kids with projects they care enough about to spend endless hours doing them, leaving them with the same sense of accomplishment they could get from grinding a rail.

I started thinking about this after I read about Susan’s quest to understand how motivation ties into reading engagement for the boys in her class. I had a vague memory of a book called Reading Don’t Fix No Chevys. I was happy to find that the publisher even provides downloadable versions of the first two chapters [Ch. 1], [Ch. 2].

Chapter one reviews the literature on boys and reading achievement. Noting the difficulty of over-generalization, Smith and Wilhelm list the achievement and attitude differences between boys and girls toward reading: Boys read less than girls; they tend to prefer informational texts, and they’re more likely to think of themselves as non-readers. There’s more, but we don’t need to dwell on that now.

I was interested in how the authors unpacked the gender issues of schooling and reading from a social constructionist perspective. Being a male elementary school teacher with a Reading specialist credential, their point of view hit home for me. Literacy conferences, I have found, are heavily attended by female teachers, who similarly overpopulate the lower grade levels in schools. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, as Jerry Seinfeld would say. Boys get in more trouble at school, and they’re more often identified as having attention deficit disorders. One of the reasons this happens is that teachers tend to see certain behaviors commonly associated with males as disruptive to the academic mission of schools. Reading, especially in school, is typically viewed as a passive and private cognitive process, which are not traits that boys are known for. Important note: Boys are encouraged to act this way outside of school, and they use these traits to their economic advantage after they graduate.

Besides asking whether there may be a gender bias in literacy tests, the authors suggest that remedies to the problem boys have with reading in school may also be found in the social construction of literacy itself. And here we could wander into David Warlick’s world, but I’ll try to avoid doing that. Instead, the simple answer is that we should begin to teach more, and sooner in primary grades using informational texts. As Susan said, “It’s not that they can’t read. It’s that they don’t choose to read.” Smith and Wilhelm suggest that one of the problems, historically, is that the power of literacy as a political tool for working class people was undermined by emphasizing the study of literature to the exclusion of critical approaches to non-narrative texts. Boys tend to like informational texts more than literature.

The second chapter of Reading Don’t Fix No Chevys looks at the concept of “flow” as it affects boys and reading. Wes Fryer covered this a while ago, and the subject of engagement comes up regularly in discussions about technology and education. I enjoyed seeing how Csíkszentmihályi’s flow theory was used as an analytical frame for reading instruction, mostly because it emphasizes the value of immediacy in our appreciation of experience, which is not how “developing reading skills” is presented in school.

Flow, engagement, or whatever we want to call it, of course applies to girls as well as boys. And I’m not thinking about the boys’ problems with reading here, especially, as much as I’m reconsidering the how and the why of teaching reading using informational texts vs. narrative texts. Since just about everyone seems to think we’re living in The Information Age now, maybe it’s time we put literature on a back burner, and begin to focus more on teaching strategies for content area reading. That’s where I’m heading now. And I want to read the rest of Smith and Wilhelm’s book.