“All the Right
Moves”:
A Study of
Successful Males in Literacy Activities
Jill Lawler
May 2006
What insight, you might ask, can a
sixty-year-old woman with more than thirty-five years of classroom experience
and two adult daughters possibly know about adolescent males? Certainly, it takes more than a quick glance
at my background to find a connection.
I am the eldest of four children and
the only female. My father was the dominating
presence in our house, an outrageous and gregarious man who packed a lot of
risky living into his 53-year lifetime.
While I spent much of my childhood certain that his main goal in life
was to humiliate me, my friends and my brothers’ friends adored him and flocked
to our house to participate in the action.
Consequently, I grew up breathing a steady supply of testosterone and
came to appreciate my brothers and their goofy friends through the countless
hours I spent surrounded by what Pollock ( ) has called the “boy culture.”
I spent the first years of my
married life living in a boys’ dormitory on a boarding school campus playing
surrogate mom/big sister to a stream of adolescent males. Since my husband and I had little in common
with the two other married couples on campus, we spent lots of time with the
unmarried young male teachers.
In my first year of teaching, which predated any form of special education,
my entire teaching load consisted of the most challenging and marginal students
in grades 9-12; not surprisingly, the vast majority of them were males. In order to survive that year, I had no
choice but to adapt any preconceived notions I had acquired about what a
traditional English classroom might look like and experiment with alternative
approaches and texts.
And while I have many cherished and
longstanding friendships, both personal and professional, with women, I have
always liked to “mix it up” with the men in my department. Our school is fortunate and perhaps unusual
in that there have always been a significant number of men who have taught
English at ConVal High School; generally the department has had an equal number
of men and women in its membership and there have been times when men have
actually made up the majority. I find
their insights into both content and practice interesting; I find their
teachers’ room banter to be refreshing and little bit naughty. I like to challenge their assumptions about
teaching, about literature, and about what it means to be a man or a woman in
the beginning of the 21st century.
In the years since 1969 when I
started this journey, I have taught thousands of students in too many different
courses to count. I helped develop our
honors program for our most able readers and writers, and for the last eight
years I have taught Advanced Placement English Literature where arguably the
most sophisticated, committed, and insightful students of English end up. I thoroughly enjoy my semester with these
young men and women, challenging them to read widely and deeply and guiding
them through the tricky path of literary analysis. I spend a fair amount of time in this paper
talking about the males in AP English—what they do and how they approach their
study of English in an attempt to define what successful males do to succeed in
the traditional activities of the secondary literacy classroom.
Yet oddly, these high achieving boys are not “my people.” While I enjoy success and build positive and lasting relationships with my most able students of both genders, I have always had a strange ability to relate to the fringe element, especially males. Boys who don’t much like school and especially don’t like traditional English have always seemed to find a comfortable spot in my classroom. I find them amusing. I find them challenging. I find them refreshing. Their lack of regard for conventional activities and authority resonates with me; their fascination with sarcasm and humor mirrors mine.
They are represented in this paper although they are in the background. It is my hope that what I have uncovered in looking at the male students who have “bought into” the system will be helpful to making school and particularly English more meaningful for those who are not yet there.
This paper is built on what I’ve learned from the following individuals whose inspiration is reflected in various ways in these lines: my father Harry Howroyd, my brothers Jay and Josh Howroyd and my late brother Steven, the funniest human being I have ever known; my husband Jerry who, although he doesn’t share my fascination with bathroom humor, has never tried to stifle it; my daughters Jess and Liz who have always been my best audience and taught me what it was like to live with females; my son-in-law Rob and his five older brothers who all gave me a run for my money in my classroom; present and former colleagues Mike O’Leary, Tim Clark, Earl Aldrich, Ron Smith, Jason Lambert, Steve Chabot and the late John P. Sullivan, the smartest man I ever worked with; former students Sam Blair, Morgan Chase, Ty Rossi, Bayard Lohmiller, Mike McCluskey, Brad Shepard, Paul Richardson to name just a few (and who represent an enormous range of attitudes and abilities); and finally to the boys, named and unnamed, who have been on my radar scope this year and have helped give substance to the theoreticial.
Jill Lawler
Dublin, New Hampshire
May 2006
Where
Are the Boys?
It’s a ritual. Every May the English department sits down to
determine the winners of various college book awards that will be presented at
the end-of-the-year assembly. Although
the institutions differ, the criteria for these awards are all pretty much the
same: the recipient should rank in the
top 5-10% of the class, carry a rigorous course load, make a meaningful
contribution to the school and the community.
If the presenting institution is a woman’s college—and many of them are
because of their active alumni associations—the choice is limited to a female. The others, however, are gender non-specific.
We dutifully suggest students who we
feel meet the criteria, paying special attention to those students who have
distinguished themselves in our English classes. It is an annual chore we relish; what better
thing for an English department to do than award books to students who love to
read and write?
About three years ago, a colleague
brought the proceedings to a halt.
“Where are the boys?” he asked. “I’m worried about the boys.
He was right, of course. The obvious lack of viable male candidates
who met the criteria and who had come to our attention through their
performance in our courses, particularly our honors and Advanced Placement
classes designed for our most avid readers and writers, was staring us in the
face. Why hadn’t we noticed it before?
The colleague who brought the
problem to our attention was fairly new to teaching, having joined our ranks
after more than twenty years with a high-powered job in publishing and
editing. Those of us who had been in the
classroom trenches through the 80’s and 90’s were used to worrying about the
girls. After the American Association of
University Women brought the country’s attention to the “gender gap” in
American education, lots of attention was being paid to making girls more
successful in school, particularly in the areas of math and science.
After Tim raised the question,
however, I began to notice that he was on to something. Fewer and fewer males were showing up in our
honors and Advanced Placement classes that are designed for students who enjoy
reading and writing. And in our ninth
and tenth grade core classes the boys were the ones who were not keeping up
with the reading assignments, not passing in their written work, and often it was the girls who were answering
most of the questions.
Certainly the ConVal English
department was not alone in recognizing that males were lagging behind in
nearly every measurement of academic success.
What had happened in our schools, and particularly in the teaching of reading
and writing, that had left our boys in the dust? Was this a new phenomenon or had this always
been the case? And whether this was a
new issue or not, what could be done to help males be successful literacy learners?
This last question became the
central focus of my research. The topic
is huge, with myriad factors that need to be considered. Undaunted, however, by the vastness of the
question I set out to see what looking closely at the boys that I teach could
reveal about how adolescent males feel about reading and writing and what approaches
to these topics are most successful.
Some smaller questions also presented themselves:
As a secondary English teacher with more
than thirty-five years in the classroom,
, I have witnessed the coming and going of many educational concerns and
priorities. Beginning my career in the
late 1960’s, I have experienced firsthand turmoil in our nation and within the
educational establishment. Since my
career started at the same time that feminism gained widespread attention and
as a woman, I have always been somewhat aware of gender issues in my classroom.
In the early 1990’s, the American
Association of University Women drew
national attention when it issued a report citing the enormous lag in
achievement between girls and boys particularly in math and science. As a result of this study, a great deal of
attention was paid to the education of girls, not only in math and science but
in school in general.
In my field of English, this concern
manifested itself in the choice of titles that were taught in the traditional
literary canon. In an attempt to provide
young women with positive and identifiable role models, a great deal of
attention was put into choosing books that would balance the voices of all the
dead white males that made up the majority of the typical high school English
curriculum.
At the end of the 1990’s, however,
educators began to notice that male students were losing ground to female
students. While this was true of all
academic measures of achievement, it is particularly true in the areas of
reading and writing. It seems that while
many of us were busy Reviving Ophelia (Pipher,
revised 2005) Hamlet was having difficulty right before our eyes. To make the metaphor more accurate, males
like Hamlet—introspective and indecisive—have always had trouble, but suddenly
Laertes and Fortinbras who leapt into action with little or no provocation or
forethought were suddenly “having issues” as well.
Recently, researchers like Thomas Newkirk
in Redefining Masulinity and Jeff
Wilhelm and Michael Smith in Reading
Don’t Fix No Chevies have shared their findings about their work with males
in the literacy classroom and what forces work against them. Their voices, that apply to middle and high
school English classrooms, are added to those of a number of other theorists
who are actively examining the “boy problem” that became a widespread public
concern in the wake of the Columbine shootings in 2000???
My study took place at ConVal High
School, which is located in the Monadnock Region of southern New
Hampshire. ConVal opened in 1970 with
approximately 600 students and today its official enrollment hovers around
1180; the huge increase in student population has changed the character of what
was originally a small, personal school and a shortage of space and staff has
contributed to a feeling that it is bursting at the seams. According to its
mission statement “the ConVal High School Community is dedicated to learning,
thinking, and growing,” but the school
staff constantly struggles with exactly how to demonstrate that learning,
thinking and growing are actually taking place.
The nine towns that comprise the
ConVal district vary widely in their socio-economic make-up; this
socio-economic range is mirrored in our high school population. The entire region, however, is undergoing
such rapid growth and development that former stereotypical generalizations
about the unique character of individual communities no longer apply. Housing costs have risen to the point where
it is becoming difficult for teachers, police and firefighters to be able to
afford to live in the district.
The ConVal English Department
delivers its curriculum through a
combination of required courses and electives.
The school follows a four by four intensive block schedule, with most
courses lasting a semester. Because the
department also offers a number of 9-week electives, many of which focus on
specialty areas such as debate, film, and philosophy, many ConVal students
graduate with more than the state’s four required credits of English.
In my efforts to study the literacy
habits of adolescent male students, I initially identified three groups of
students to survey, observe, and analyze closely. This population consists of the 9 males who
are currently enrolled in a one-semester course in American Literature, the 10
males who were my students during the 3rd quarter in a 9-week course
in Introduction to Ethics, and the 7 males I taught first semester in Advanced
Placement English, three of whom continued as my students in an elective in
Film Study. At the beginning of my
study, I deliberately limited my concern to those courses in which the
traditional literacy activities of reading and writing played a major
role. After some background reading and
input from colleagues, I also decided to look at non-traditional forms of
communication as literacy. To
accomplish this, I have also been observing males who are enrolled in two
fourth quarter electives, Film Study and Argumentation and Debate.
All of the students in AP English were
seniors; the students in American Lit. are juniors and seniors, and the students
in Intro. to Ethics were in grades 10-12.
While ConVal does not adhere to a rigid tracking philosophy, these
courses are labeled according to level of difficulty and carry different
weights toward calculating class rank.
Students in Advanced Placement English Literature must meet rigorous
criteria. American Literature is
identified as an “012 course” for students considering a four-year college, and
Intro. to Ethics is identified as “123 level” which means that it is open to
anyone. With the exception of AP,
however, students self-select courses and levels.
These
three courses varied in level of difficulty of the material as well as the mode
of delivery, although certain common elements were present in all three of
them. All of them involved daily journal writing; they also all contained both
literature and writing. The biggest differences among these three courses are
in the titles that are studied and the way in which students process the
material. The students in Intro. to
Ethics read what was perhaps the most challenging material in that we were
reading philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle, but we read together as a
class and discussed the passages as we went along. The big ideas from the philosophers were then
connected to current films and other things from popular culture. The AP students read titles in many different
genres and from different literary periods as the College Board recommends, but
in addition to Hamlet and Thomas
Hardy, they also read a number of 20th century American works
including Catch-22. The American Literature course is billed as a
traditional survey course and has access to a traditional anthology, but the
course began with Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild and also considered such
mainstream but edgy works as The Crucible
and Huck Finn.
Because this identified group
represents a cross section of the ages and attitudes of our entire school
population, it seemed that they would provide a good starting point for the
consideration of the ways in which adolescent males approach reading and
writing in high school. I have devoted a large part of this early study,
however, to analyzing the most successful students. Inspired by Jeff Wilhelm’s approach in You Gotta BE the Book, I wanted to
identify the strategies and skills that more accomplished readers and writers
possess that contribute to their success.
If these moves can be isolated and then compared to the strategies used
by the less proficient male students, perhaps it might lead to some insights
that would begin to answer my central question: what can be done to help males
become more successful literacy learners?
In order to look closely at the
literacy habits of the males in my classes, I have chosen to present two
in-depth case studies of learners with different backgrounds and different
approaches. The one thing they have in
common, however, is a desire to be successful.
In the first case, school has always been a place for personal
achievement and success; in the other, being a good student, particularly a
good student of English, is an emerging and recent goal.
Zach,
a senior boy who is currently ranked first in a graduating class of
nearly 300, is the only child of well-educated parents. Small in stature compared to other 12th
grade males, he is an avid sports fan, particularly of the Red Sox. He competed
in competitive sports in elementary and middle school; in high school ha has
limited his participation to Varsity Golf and Varsity Baseball where he is
currently enjoying a successful season as the starting center fielder. He is
the co-editor of the student newspaper, a largely a student-run activity; of
the 3 student editors he is the one who has taken on the bulk of the
responsibility for the content of the weekly paper and its quality. In December he was offered early admission to
Brown University.
He was my student during the first
semester in Advanced Placement English; this past quarter he took my elective
in Film Study. Zach was one of 18 male
students who responded to a series of open-ended questions about their
experiences in and attitudes toward reading and writing. It is significant to note that he was the only student to word-process his
answers, thereby foiling my attempt to read them without knowing the
responder’s identity. His answers are
more thorough than anyone else’s and provide specific examples to back up his
observations. They show that he is considerably
more cognizant of himself as a student than many high schoolers, and is
unusally aware of what he likes and how he approaches his work for English
classes. He is not a typical student, although the thoughtfulness and insight
he brings to his learning as well as the proficiency he exhibits in both
reading and writing are characteristics shared to some degree by the other
males in my current and former AP
classes.
He reads, both for school and for
pleasure, more than most high school students and probably more than many
adults who are readers. He
differentiates between the reading he does for classes and the reading he does
for pleasure. He comments “class discussions help my understanding” and that
when you read alone “you have only your own thoughts and things that you
notice.” He mentions that this lack of
group support is one thing he doesn’t like about “summer school reading”
because there is “no opportunity to see if what you are thinking…is compatible
to the thoughts of others.” This desire
to hear from the group to validate his reading experience indicates that he has
bought into the concept that there is a certain kind of reading that you do for
English classes, especially those classes that focus on literary analysis. This attitude makes him an exception from
even the most diligent high school English student who will occasionally
complain that a class is “analyzing everything to death.” On the other hand, Zach reports that when he
reads for pleasure he is “less concerned about picking up on small details and
tend to read more for the experience of the book.”
First semester Zach was also enrolled in
an elective called Modern Novel, taught by another department member, so he had
a significant amount of assigned reading.
He still had time, however, to read for pleasure and listed seven books
that he read on his own including On the
Road and A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam. He says he likes to read history and
historical fiction but will also read “books I see on the bestseller list” and
books I hear are good “based on word of mouth”; since he has limited time
during the school year he states that the ones he does read “are usually an
extension of something that piqued my interest in school.”
In a separate assignment in which he was
asked to choose his favorite quotation from everything the AP class read this
year (the assignment was to be shared with classmates in a booklet) he chose
two stanzas from “The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock” and in his response
showed an uncanny ability to synthesize on his own works that he had read in
his separate English classes:
One reason I picked these two segments of
“Prufrock” as my favorite quote…is
because…it voices the despair of the lonely soul-searching journey that has
been a recurrent motif in my favorite novels this semester. Be it Esther’s frantic pacing through the
scorching New York streets in The Bell
Jar, Tim’s summer night car ride…as
he grapples with his conscience about going to Vietnam in Tim’s summer night car ride…as he grapples
with his conscience about going to Vietnam in The Things They Carried, Jake Barnes melancholic strolls back to
his Paris apartment, Walt Whitman’s more heartening walk to observe the stars
in “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer,” or Yossarian’s harrowing jaunt
through the hellish moral underworld of the Eternal City in Catch-22, this motif has struck me…and I
think that Eliot captures the essence of the feeling that spans each novel.
This passage reveals mature insight
and sophisticated thinking, and is expressed in fluent (note the careful
parallel structure in the series) yet controlled prose that comfortably makes
use of an impressive vocabulary.
Zach
exhibits what Newkirk and Smith and Wilhelm identify as typical male taste in
the titles that he claims he enjoyed reading in school. They are for the most part modern and he sums
up the “characteristics that made these books enjoyable: relatable, the quality
of the writing, historically important, humorous, able to combine an absorbing
plot with thematic/symbolic content.” He
is less charitable in his evaluation of the assigned reading for AP English:
“reading Shakespeare is always a chore, but I think it necessary to add Hamlet to my own literary canon. Tess of the d’Urbervilles was awful and
it was tortuous to slog my way through it in the last few weeks of summer. Please replace this plodding novel with
something more palatable if it is necessary to include an older work. Cry,
the Beloved Country was similarly painful and I think this maudlin,
predictable novel should also be kicked off the AP list…Cry …was too much Oprah Book Club literature for my tastes.”
Although Zach claims he doesn’t have
“that much time” to read books on his own during the school year, he also is
unusual for someone his age in that he also reports reading newspapers,
magazines, and websites. He reads The Boston Globe daily, Sports Illustrated, Time, National
Geographic, reads “3-4 articles” from The
New York Times on-line 4 times a week, and on Wednesdays and Fridays
Espn.com’s Bill Simmons. He says he
likes to read “at night to unwind from the day, and right when I get home from
school.” He also has writers that he
particularly likes and names Rick Reilly and Steve Rushin from Sports Illustrated who he says is
“probably the most talented sportswriter alive in his ability to craft
sentences and paragraphs. I look forward
to his column every week and marvel at single sentences that he writes.” He also lists magazine and newspaper pundits
including Charles Krauthammer, Joe Klein, and Fareed Zakaria. When asked if any of these writers has
influenced his own style he states, “although I can’t say that I consciously
incorporate techniques from these writers, I feel like I pick up a lot by
osmosis.”
Despite his
academic success, however, Zach expresses a high level of insecurity about his
abilities and the relative merits of his ideas.
In an assigned response to the poem “Breaking Camp” in which students
were asked to reflect on their high school experience in general (and their
high school English experience in particular), Zach reveals that even though
his accomplishments might appear effortless to others, he works extremely
hard. By his own admission he does not
always choose to speak in class, not only because he likes to listen and get others’
ideas, but because he is not always convinced that what he has to say has
merit. Remembering his ninth grade honors English class he recalls that “I
dreaded each day of class for fear that I would blurt out some incoherent
statement that was nothing like the carefully constructed insights that I would
float around in my brain in preparation for each class.” This revelation was
interesting to me because I was never certain why he was one of the more
reticent students in AP; occasionally I sensed that he was not interested in
what other students had to say so I was quite surprised by his comment that
what he doesn’t like about the assigned summer reading is that he doesn’t have
a chance to learn about other people’s thoughts.
As a
writer, Zach possesses the gift of fluency.
I don’t know how much he drafts and redrafts his work because, unlike
many of his classmates, he never asked me for feedback during the composing
process and by his own admission that “usually the only time I can write with
satisfying results is on the Sunday the weekend before a paper is due, or the
night before a paper is due, but only if I am not already exhausted.” He confesses in an End-of-the-Quarter
Self-Evaluation that “I still feel like I have a hard time writing my papers as
efficiently as some of my peers and I am a little worried about this heading
into college.” Here he exhibits the same
insecurity that he alluded to in describing his anxiety about speaking in
class, yet his papers stand out as being among the best that I have read in
over 35 years of teaching.
His writing
not only expresses important, well-supported ideas in a fluent way; he also has
voice. His essay on “Breaking Camp” is
full of self-deprecating humor and many of the articles he penned for the
school’s annual April Fool’s Day edition of the student newspaper exhibited a
well-honed sense of irony (“Fidel Castro to be Commencement Speaker”). While in his answers to my survey he “can’t
say that I consciously incorporate techniques from [his favorite] writers, I
feel like I pick up a lot by osmosis,” he is certainly a careful reader which
translates into his writing; in discussing his chosen quotation from “Prufrock”
he states: “I love the rhythm and pace of this poem, the repetition of sound
and the idiosyncratic way in which Eliot voices his own frustrations, longings,
and anxieties…”
Despite his
lofty achievements as a student, however, it is significant that Zach exhibits
the same behaviors that other researchers into the literacy habits of males
such as Newkirk and Smith and Wilhelm have uncovered. His preferred reading involves action and
strong characters and he especially enjoys humor. In addition to the novels he is assigned in
school, he enjoys non-fiction as well as magazines. He is an avid movie goer. And while his taste in both literature and
film is more refined than that of many of his classmates, in Film Study no one
laughed harder at Ferris Buehler’s Day
Off than Zach.
After
thoroughly examining the habits and inclinations that Zach brings to the
English classroom, I have tried to identify the specific behaviors that
contribute to his success. They include the following:
He reads widely: not only does he take a number of English
electives that involve reading, he follows up the assigned reading from his
courses by reading on his own. He also
reads newspapers, magazines, and on-line.
He makes connections: he
acknowledges the thematic and stylistic connections between the various works
that he reads.
He relishes class discussions: He states
that he feels that he learns and is helped in understanding the literature that
he is reading by listening to his classmates process the material.
He is metacognitive: He knows
himself as a learner and understands what he needs to do to process and produce
various kinds of material.
Writing is important to him: He acknowledges in his survey “I think that
writing will play a critical role in my adult life.” He states that he values the feedback he
gets from teachers, not only about content but about mechanics as well. He also recognizes that he works best under
pressure and even can describe the conditions in which he writes best.
How unusual
a student is Zach? Is he too polished,
too insightful, too fluent to consider as a source? Is it possible to consider what he does and
has said in light of the qualities listed above and apply these qualities to
other students who may not possess his combination of natural ability and a
strong work ethic? To test this idea, I
decided to try to apply the same close scrutiny to a student in my American
Literature, and use Zach as the lens through which to view this student’s
behaviors and attitudes.
In contrast
to Zach, Mike is just beginning to view himself as a “student.” A junior who is currently in Survey of
American Literature, Mike looked like a fish out of water on the first day of
the course. I’m not particularly proud
of the fact that when I first spotted his name on my class list I was afraid
that he did not belong in this course. I
based this on what I had observed about him from seeing him around school in
the hallways and common areas, his dress, his affect, what I perceived to be
his attitude. I soon discovered that I
could not have been more wrong.
He is an
18-year-old 11th grader who came to ConVal from a Catholic
elementary/middle school. His parents sent him to St. Pat’s for his second time in first grade because he
was being picked on and bullied by
students in his elementary school class in a town in different school
district. Eventually the family moved to
Peterborough, so that their children could attend ConVal believing that “ConVal
was known as a good school.” For the
first two years of high school Mike dressed primarily in camouflage and
fatigues, earning him the nickname “Solj,” a moniker he proudly had tattooed on
his belly earlier this year in celebration of his 18th birthday.
My first
surprise with Mike was discover that he was always prepared for class; he did
his reading on time, brought in the assigned written homework, and was both an
active listener and speaker in class discussions. He first really got my attention, though, one
day when he pulled a book out of his backpack and made reference to a
connection between something he was reading on his own and what we were discussing
in class. I later asked him about the
book, it was a title that was unfamiliar to me, and he told me he had bought it
in the used book section of our local
bookstore. When I mentioned that he
could then return it and get a store credit, he replied that he wanted to keep
the books he bought because “he liked seeing them on a shelf in his room.” And while he states that he doesn’t have a
lot of leisure time to read, he does bring a book to school and reads it when
he can.
When I
asked him if he could remember the first book that really resonated with him,
without hesitating he answered that it was The
Catcher in the Rye when he was in seventh grade. He had just moved to Peterborough and had
befriended the kids in the neighborhood.
One of the boys’ mothers is an English teacher in my department and she
suggested Catcher. When I pushed him to explain what resonated
about that particular book, he said it was the first time he had ever
encountered a character that he could “identify” with. Finding books with strong characters is still
a criteria that he uses when he chooses what to read. This mirrors two findings by Smith and Wilhelm who found that boys
value the social in their reading, liking books that are recommended to them by
people who are important to them, and that they are drawn to books with strong
characters. Where Zach is most likely to
read a book that he has heard about, seen on a bestseller list or is by an
author he has enjoyed, Mike says he doesn’t pay attention to authors; he decides
whether or not he will like the book by reading the back.
Like Zach
he also will read books about personal interests. Mike has found athletic success through
running and participates in competitive track and cross country in all three
athletic seasons. Building on his taste
in fiction that finds him reading books with strong characters with whom he can
identify, he also enjoys reading biographers of famous runners. He also reads
for information that he wants to know such as “how to breed ko fish.” In his other leisure reading, however, he differs
from Zach as well as most of the boys studied by Smith and Wilhelm in Reading Don’t Fix No Chevies who do read
magazines; Mike reports he no longer reads them just as he no longer plays
videogames, another alternate form of literacy reported by many researchers.
(Newkirk, Smith and Wilhelm ) Personal
reading is a new activity for Mike; he reports that “I never read books when I
was younger that weren’t assigned” and “reading plays a minimal role in my life
but it’s started to increase in the past years.”
Mike has a
clear opinion about class discussions of books.
On his survey response he stated “I tend not to like them because
everything that gets said I’ve usually thought about. It rarely hinders or helps my understanding
because I just lost interest because of all the repetition, also no one
participates.” Mike’s answer here, that
is direct and honest, differs strongly from Zach’s, where he values the
opinions of most of his classmates to help him clarify his own, as well as the
vast majority of the other boys who responded to the survey. In the case of Zach and Mike, their different
attitudes may be influenced by the kinds of English classes they are accustomed
to; Zach has always been in honors and advanced placement classes where the
level and quality of participation may be more stimulating. I was, frankly, surprised by the number of
boys who stated that they found discussions helpful; my classroom observations
over the years have suggested that organized discussions about literature, even
ones that are not teacher directed, result in large numbers of boys tuning
out. While Mike’s response is refreshing
in its honesty, it also interests me in that in American Literature he has
become a more active participant as the semester has progressed. In the last week in discussions of Huck Finn, Mike has made insightful
connections between Huck and other
works of literature he has studied in school, demonstrating his ability to
synthesize.
Mike
recalls that the first thing he ever wrote was a story about dinosaurs and he
relates that he has written on his own two movie scripts of “about 50 pages
each” and “I also write songs. They are easy because they just flow out of my
head.” When he describes the conditions
under which he writes best he claims “conditions don’t matter. All I do is get a flow or rhythm and it just
flows out.” His response suggests what
Smith and Wilhelm refer to as “flow activities” and their importance in
engaging males.
Mike’s
sense of getting a sense of flow when he writes was evident in a paper he wrote
for American Literature in which students, in connection with the study of
Emerson and Thoreau and the American Transcendentalists, were asked to find a
truth in nature in connect it to something that they noticed in human nature. Mike was the first in the class to pass in a
draft of the essay and in it he discusses the process he went through to find
his natural truth:
“So I began my search to find any small piece of
inspiration (that I would otherwise never of [sic] looked twice at) to spout
about in these following paragraphs.
Obviously I began the search with trees because they are the most
abundant forms of life. I try to compare
then [sic] reaching branches as my growing ambitions of life or whatever but it
does not make to [sic] much sense and I’m reaching pretty far to make these
seemingly unconnected connections…”
Mike
continues to narrate his process of finding the natural truth in the paper as
well as developing the metaphor he has chosen; in the his search for meaning he
frightens a duck out of some grass which “was exactly what I needed to start my
paper. The trouble is, how do you connect the flight of a duck to everyday
human life? My question exactly. The
answer soon came quite easily though. It
was almost a question of how can I not relate the flight of a duck to everyday
life. We all at one point or another
have been guilty of ‘taking flight’ when a external force is acting upon
us.” Eventually this metaphor leads him
to several personal revelations about his adjustment to high school, finding a
group of friends with whom he felt comfortable, and ultimately finding his
girlfriend “the dearest girl I know.”
Despite stating in his survey that
feedback from teachers hindered his progress in writing “because in highschool
[sic] they assume we do it all (or that’s how I feel) and don’t have so much
emphasis on writing technique,” Mike was not only willing but eager to get my
feedback on this particular assignment
and went through four drafts before he achieved a product he was satisfied
with. And while the final product did not come near Zach’s in fluency or
insight, it represented a huge milestone for him.
Mike’s success with this assignment, which
perhaps led to more personal revelation than he was expecting, along with
Zach’s heartfelt response to the poem “Breaking Camp” differ from what Newkirk
found in his study of boys and writing in Misreading
Masculinity. My own experience with
boys and their ability to write compelling personal narratives differs from his. The fact that Newkirk was primarily looking
at younger boys may be the explanation; perhaps juniors and seniors in high
school who are at an age where they are making important decisions about their
futures are more willing and able to engage in the kind of self-reflection that
personal narratives and memoirs require.
Mike’s success in athletics and his
personal life seem to have helped him become more interested in school. He exhibits many of the same behaviors I
found in Zach—he is beginning to read on his own, he makes connections, and
despite himself he is becoming metacognitive.
And while he does not yet “relish discussions” he is willing to
participate in them and though he might not yet feel that writing is important
to him, the fact that he went through four drafts to produce something he was
proud of speaks volumes.
“The survey
says…”
This close look at two males who
have found success in high school English classes confirms most of what other
researchers have discovered. And while
the level of achievement of the two is different, both Zach and Mike have
indicated that they have developed strategies and habits that will allow them
to continue to grow. What I discovered
in looking at responses from the other males in my classes confirms other
researchers’ findings as well.
When it comes to taste in reading,
my students preferred books that had strong characters and involved action;
they also appreciated humor. Among the
titles that showed up as “the best book you ever read in school” were The Catcher in the Rye, Catch-22, Tuesdays
with Morrie, The Things They Carried, Into the Wild, A Prayer for Owen Meaney,
and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Because these individuals had taken different
English courses, the variation in titles is not surprising. Because it is taught in a required course in
tenth grade, Catcher was one common
title that many of them cited as being meaningful; it is significant that all
sophomores also read To Kill a
Mockingbird, a staple of high school English classes, and that only
received one mention from a male. While Catcher also appeared as a favorite on
the girls’ surveys, many more girls also mentioned Mockingbird. Girls also
mentioned such traditional English titles as Oedipus, The Odyssey, Romeo and Juliet and Macbeth. Only one boy listed
Macbeth as a favorite with the
added note that it was because of all
the blood.
When
they were asked to name the best book they ever read on their own the responses
were, not surprisingly, all over the map but did contain the common elements of
action, mystery, and some fantasy. The
only title that was mentioned more than once in this category was Harry Potter, a title that also showed
up on the girls’ lists. When asked to name books they read on their own girls
mentioned The Lovely Bones, The Secret
Life of Bees, A Child Called It and The
DaVinci Code.
Their
responses affirmed that the titles the ConVal English department teaches appeal
to both males and females. We are
fortunate to be given choice in our selections as well as a reasonable book
budget to purchase new titles in response to student interest. Because we are not required to use standard
anthologies we can offer titles that are more meaningful to students and more
interesting for us to teach.
Because
most of our English courses also ask students to write in journals in response
to prompts or write daily in response to their reading, both males and females
are comfortable with being asked to write in their classes. On their surveys, the vast majority of the
boys from all of the courses indicated that they appreciated teacher feedback
in their writing. They cite help with
organization, use of details, structure, and mechanics as contributing to their
writing success. Even the less skilled
responders had praise for the help English teachers offer including Ricky’s
“they helped me learn to right [sic]; I don’t see how they could hinder you.”
Next Steps
My
observations, discussions, and surveys suggest that at ConVal we seem to be on
the right track. We need to continue to
find ways to encourage all our students, but boys especially, to find meaning
in the written word. My abbreviated
review of the literature on this topic also suggests that many of the things
that researchers have found to be appealing to boys are already part of our
practice. This is not to suggest that we
do not need to continue to look at the success and responses of all of our
students, regardless of gender.
My
examination of Zach and Mike suggests that what works for them can work for
everyone. It would appear that the
biggest factor in their approach toward
their learning is being able to recognize and articulate what they like and
what they need. Encouraging
self-reflection and self-knowledge can only be beneficial for all learners.
What has become more obvious to me
as I have gone through this study is that we need to spend more time
considering other forms of literacy that may have more interest for males than
the traditional high school English activities of reading and writing. In many of our electives such as Film Study,
Writing About Music, and both World and Classical Mythology, large numbers of
males are finding modes of expression that they enjoy and respond to. In and out of school they are plugged into
their iPods and text message on their cell phones with a fluency that is
staggering. Tapping into the energy and
enthusiasm that they have for their music and their other forms of written
expression is a good place to start.
I began this study by asking the big
question of what could be done to help males be successful literacy
learners. My two case studies have
suggested what successful males do and the general results of the surveys and
observations have supported this. But
the sub-questions have only been addressed peripherally. It certainly opens up many avenues for further research including
finding strategies that help less successful boys find meaning in traditional
literacy activities as well as examing more closely non-traditional and
alternate forms of literacy such as film, graphic novels and comics, music,
graffiti, and countless other ways in which boys construct meaning to help them
interact with the world. Stay
tuned…there’s much more to discover.
Blackburn-Brockman,
E. (2001). Investigating the role gender
plays in adolescents' writing processes and products. WILLA, 10. Retrieved Mar 23, 2006, from http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/ejournals/WILLA/fallo1/blackburn.html
Froschl, M.,
& Sprung, B. (2005). Raising and
educating healthy boys. A report on the
growing crisis in boys’ education. Educational Equity Center, New York
City. Retrieved Mar 23, 2006, from http://www.aed.org/Projects/healthyboys.cfm.
Peterson, M.
(2002). You have to go there;
"literary cross dressing". WILLA,
11. Retrieved Mar 23, 2006, from http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/ejournals/WILLA/fall02/peterson.html.
Smith,
Michael & Jeffrey D.Wilhelm (2002). "Reading don't fix no chevys". Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. 2002.