STACKED

books

Guys read

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This is the second post in a series to be shared over the next couple of weeks. Today’s topic: why boys don’t read. Before I give the background, make sure you read the first post, and then keep in mind that these comments are about the average boy (not the exceptions you know) and they ARE backed by research. I will post a bibliography in a concluding post.

So, why don’t boys read like we wish they would?

Simple: they’re wired differently.

Boys’ brains work differently than girls because they are hardwired differently. They react differently to stimuli than girls (think of this simple example: a desk chair is in a classroom. Who is making it come off the floor?). And maybe most importantly, boys are taught very different lessons about reading than girls are. When they’re young, reading is fun. They get story time, which allows them to be active and stimulated. The other time they’re read to they’re getting ready for bed. Reading is an activity that energizes and relaxes boys.

But when they get into school, reading is work. You can’t get up and dance and you can’t fall asleep. The way the boy brain works just doesn’t “get” this like a girl brain. So now reading is a chore – but it’s moreso when the boy is nestled between two girls in a classroom, both of the girls reading well and beyond. The boy? He’s struggling because reading is not fun now and he’s struggling because he thinks he’s dumb since Suzy and Sally are reading just fine.

Boys think in a manner we can call “rules and tools” — they want something to do and they want a way to do it (or a way to figure out how to do it). Women think in a manner that seeks information to communicate and connect. Sullivan gave the great example of a man and a woman driving and getting lost. The woman suggests asking for directions while the man pulls out the map and insists the road was supposed to be there. He doesn’t want to ask because he should be able to figure out the solution.

So when the boy sees that Suzy and Sally are reading well and he is not, he’s discouraged. He has no rules nor tools to do it here. And since the majority of teachers are female, particularly in those developmentally important years for reading, boys are taught to read in the same way girls are, but since they don’t learn that way, well, they’re stuck. Boys are trying to read for information, but they’re being taught how to read for communication.

This does not make on type of thinking better than another. It means they are different. This is what we are missing with boys and reading. We are teaching them the way we’ve learned as women — people who have always been catered to in learning reading — and we’re missing that boys learn it in just a different way.

Just to note: a girl’s brain is fully developed at 11 1/2. Boys? 14 1/2. There’s even further disadvantage for them because they’re already starting out behind, but because they aren’t being taught in a manner most advantageous to them, they’re further and further behind.

Now to complicate this information a bit more, here are some scary statistics:

  • Over the last 30 years of standardized testing, girls always outscore boys on reading
  • Boys get 1.5 years behind in reading ability and level (makes sense when you know about their brain development, right?)
  • By 11th grade, the average boy is 3 years behind in reading
  • The Sophomore Study in the U.S. found that boys read 10% less than girls…being 2.3 hours a week on average (that also doesn’t say much for girls).
  • Boys can drag girls down
  • A Kaiser Family study found that boys spend 6.5 hours in front of electronic screen … per day.
  • 35% of the entering males in the freshman class at UCLA said they don’t read
  • 23% of females in that study said they don’t read

Scary stuff, right. Well, it gets scarier:

  • 70% of the Ds and Fs earned in school are from boys
  • 80% of high school dropouts are boys
  • 80% of convicted felons are high school drop outs
  • 85% of special education students are male
  • 85-90% of those diagnosed as ADHD are male
  • 14% of all boys are coded as ADHD
  • 1 out of every 3 boys is in remedial reading by 3rd grade (recall the statistic about boys being 1.5 years behind in reading than girls)

Besides being scary, what do these things all mean?

Being a boy is a disability.

Did you see that part about 35% of UCLA freshman males say they don’t read? This is something important — remember the structured thinking aspect of boy’s brains? Well, for them, admitting failure isn’t okay. Rather, admitting they don’t do something fits with their rules and tools mindset. It’s easier for boys to say they DON’T do something vs. they CAN’T do something. Boys do read. We just need to reach out to them to get them understand they they can.

Thoughts? Comments? Share them. I promise this is my only scary post on this topic. Next installment I will discuss about where and what boys are reading, and then in a final post, I’ll give some of the links to resources from Sullivan’s fantastic program.

Double Take, Part XIII

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Here’s another great double take for you!


Does This Book Make Me Look Fat? is a collection of short stories about body image. It was published in December 2008 by Clarion Books. Pretty memorable cover and I think it’s quite fitting to the book itself.


Check it out — it’s the same image but they’ve given this one a bit of a different crop. They did the same thing with the book, too.
Writing Great Books for Young Adults was published by Sourcebooks in September 2009.

Who did it better? I personally like the first one better because she looks more like a teen than the second one. Something about the cropping makes her look way older.

Lips Touch, Laini Taylor w/ Jim Di Bartolo

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I’m going to do something I haven’t done before: I’m reviewing this title without finishing it.

Lips Touch by Laini Taylor and with illustrator Jim Di Bartolo is one of the nominees for this year’s National Book Award. I’m going to go out on a limb and say — even without reading the other two nominees just yet — that this is going to be the winner.

Why?

This book is fantastic, it is beautiful, and it is a book worthy of such an accolade. Although this definitely strikes me as a book that would speak in that way to an awards committee, this is also a book with high appeal, though it’s definitely going to appeal most to those who love fantasy, mythology, or fairy tale worlds and older teens. That’s not to say it’s got a lot of questionable content that wouldn’t be appropriate for younger teens but more because it is written in a very sophisticated manner with dense language. And the allusions and depth Taylor has is going to be most appreciated by those with a little reading and literary currency.

Lips Touch is a series of three short stories that revolve around kissing. They’re wildly different but are related through that common theme. Each story is preceded by a few pages of fantastic illustration by Di Bartolo which tell the story graphically. The art uses red, black, and grey to set the tone and the colors are throughout the book, as titles, page numbers, and chapter titles are red themselves. The extra money that the publisher spent on the color was well spent and as a reader, I just loved the beautiful book itself. Sorry Kindle users, but you will miss out on a piece of art.

The first story is an exploration of Christina Rosetti’s famous poem “Goblin Market.” This a poem that, like Taylor, I’ve been fascinated with for a long time. Kizzy, the main character in the story, is one of those girls who wishes she had the boys interested in her like others in her class do. She never will, of course, because she’s not that attractive and well, she has a very, very weird family.

That is, of course, until a new boy comes to town and rouses the goblins. Will they ruin her or him? Will they ever get to experience a true kiss or will they become victims of the goblins out to haunt Kizzy?

Taylor’s second story is a story about a curse placed upon a baby. Based heavily in mythology — and I believe this is Middle Eastern mythos — Taylor crafts a story where the Devil can kill at will, but it is through the promise to a woman with power to travel between life on earth and Hell that he chooses no longer to kill children. That is, if this child who will be given the most beautiful voice on earth never utters a word. When a solider sees the cursed individual upon her late teen years, and she falls deeply in love, will she break the curse? Will she break it for love?

And the third story, admittedly, I did not get through. This is a story that relies a lot on world building and development and will definitely appeal to fantasy readers. This is not my genre and because I was so enamored with her first two tales, I did not want to read through the third knowing that I could not appreciate nor evaluate it well. The preceding art I did enjoy but knew from that and the short summary following the illustrations that it wouldn’t be for me.

Lips Touch was so enjoyable, so different, and so memorable. I first heard of this book from a webinar I attended wherein David Levithan raved about the book but had a heck of a time finding it anywhere. I wanted to purchase it for my library when I first learned of it but could not locate it through my vendor. A few trips to a number of big chains proved fruitless, as well, both before and after the NBA nomination announcement. So, if you’re interested in reading it and can’t find it easily, don’t be surprised. I did land a copy through Amazon.

This is a literary work. It is based deeply in language and imagery, and it alludes to many myths, legends, and other literature. This will not have wide appeal, but I think that any reader can appreciate at least one story in here. If for no other reason, pick up Lips Touch for incredible language use and for the unique use of visual story telling.

I’m pretty okay taking the risk in saying this will be the winner this year — I suspect that Claudette Colvin and Charles and Emma are going to be great reads, but this book has so much more to it than the text and for a fiction title just glows differently.

Dairy Queen winner!

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Yep, it took me a couple of days to realize that indeed, the 19th already happened. The winner of the audiobook of The Dairy Queen is Literature Crazy! I’ll be emailing you soon.

Didn’t win? Don’t worry. There will be another contest soon.

Jumped by Rita Williams-Garcia

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On to my second book out of the five nominees for the National Book Award in Youth Literature. This time it’s Rita Williams-Garcia’s Jumped, which is also a Cybils nominee this year.

Jumped is an urban novel, told from three perspectives and takes place over the course of one school day — about 7:30 a.m. until 3:00 p.m. with a bit of story taking place later. This is the story of a girl full of confidence and pride who inadvertently got in the way of a girl with a mission to cause trouble (to make herself feel better about her troubles) and a third girl – the one who saw it coming.

Leticia has to take class during 0 hour to make up for not doing so hot in school last year. She’s a sly one, of course, and tricks her teacher into thinking she needs to use the bathroom desperately and is able to ditch out of class early that day.

Dominique, at that time, was making her way to her basketball coach’s office to ask for play time in the game. She’s not passing with a high enough grade in one of her classes and coach has benched her. She isn’t happy. When her coach tells her she can’t play, she leaves his office, rage rising.

And Trina? Well, her day is great. She’s looking cute and her art work’s put on display in the hallway. Girl’s floating through her day … and floats right past Dominique in the hallway who swears she’s going to beat her at 2:45.

Leticia saw it all go down. But is it her responsibility to tell Trina? Should she intervene in a situation that could only get her in deeper trouble? Trina did nothing to warrant the anger Dominique has for her.

Jumped is an interesting story and it gives a good perspective into a culture I am totally unfamiliar with – the urban high school. With the proliferation of stories in the news lately, I thought this book was so contemporary and so well done without becoming an issue novel. But unfortunately, I think the enjoyment I got stopped there.

I found the book very slow for being such a small book. I think the pacing is intentional, building up how each character proceeds through their school day through the end scene. The end scene unfolds precisely as we imagine it will, but when it’s over, well, there’s no resolution. An issue novel would go the mile to resolve the story, and since this ISN’T an issue novel, there’s not a good resolve. I’m still undecided how I feel about that as a reader taken into such an unfamiliar world. I believe readers who find this a familiar world may feel similarly.

Williams-Garcia knows the language and the people well. I don’t think, though, that their voices are well developed. If this is intentional, it’s brilliant, but my reading on the story — and my understanding in the format of a very short time line and short novel more generally — maybe didn’t lead to that conclusion. The characters are pretty flat, built as just their situation. As a reader, I know why Dominique is mad and I know what Trina did to irritate her. Kind of.

Maybe I’m meant to feel like Leticia, unsure of what’s going on and what to do about it.

That said, this is a quick read that will be enjoyed by so many teen girls, both those who know about this urban landscape and those who don’t. I don’t think this one will walk away the winner of the award, though — but I think it was highly deserving, whether or not it was one of my favorites. I understand entirely why it is appealing and worthwhile, and the press it will get from its nomination is justly earned.