Given the amount of time boys spend online, especially playing video games, should we reconsider the concept of literacy? Perhaps the old standards have become irrelevant. Not true, argues Mark Bauerlein, who in this Chronicle commentary argues that online literacy comes up short:

When Jakob Nielsen, a Web researcher, tested 232 people for how they read pages on screens, a curious disposition emerged. Dubbed by The New York Times “the guru of Web page ‘usability,’” Nielsen has gauged user habits and screen experiences for years, charting people’s online navigations and aims, using eye-tracking tools to map how vision moves and rests. In this study, he found that people took in hundreds of pages “in a pattern that’s very different from what you learned in school.” It looks like a capital letter F. At the top, users read all the way across, but as they proceed their descent quickens and horizontal sight contracts, with a slowdown around the middle of the page. Near the bottom, eyes move almost vertically, the lower-right corner of the page largely ignored. It happens quickly, too. “F for fast,” Nielsen wrote in a column. “That’s how users read your precious content.”

NYTimes columnist David Brooks just rattled off his favorite articles of the year, including this piece in the Atlantic which I had missed. Professor X, an adjunct professor teaching writing skills to students who sorely need some college credentials to further their careers — but sorely lack the skills that should have been taught in high school needed to succeed in college — tells us of his travails. Does he flunk students who merit flunking, or let them get along with their lives.

Great piece, and it illustrates the dilemma men face in college. Literacy skills are the currency of any college work, regardless of what you choose to study. Those who can’t pass English 101 won’t get decent jobs. A sample:

There is a sense that the American workforce needs to be more professional at every level. Many jobs that never before required college now call for at least some post-secondary course work. School custodians, those who run the boilers and spread synthetic sawdust on vomit, may not need college-but the people who supervise them, who decide which brand of synthetic sawdust to procure, probably do. There is a sense that our bank tellers should be college educated, and so should our medical-billing techs, and our child-welfare officers, and our sheriffs and federal marshals. We want the police officer who stops the car with the broken taillight to have a nodding acquaintance with great literature. And when all is said and done, my personal economic interest in booming college enrollments aside, I don’t think that’s such a boneheaded idea. Reading literature at the college level is a route to spacious thinking, to an acquaintance with certain profound ideas, that is of value to anyone. Will having read Invisible Man make a police officer less likely to indulge in racial profiling? Will a familiarity with Steinbeck make him more sympathetic to the plight of the poor, so that he might understand the lives of those who simply cannot get their taillights fixed? Will it benefit the correctional officer to have read The Autobiography of Malcolm X? The health-care worker Arrowsmith? Should the child-welfare officer read Plath’s “Daddy”? Such one-to-one correspondences probably don’t hold. But although I may be biased, being an English instructor and all, I can’t shake the sense that reading literature is informative and broadening and ultimately good for you. If I should fall ill, I suppose I would rather the hospital billing staff had read The Pickwick Papers, particularly the parts set in debtors’ prison.

America, ever-idealistic, seems wary of the vocational-education track. We are not comfortable limiting anyone’s options. Telling someone that college is not for him seems harsh and classist and British, as though we were sentencing him to a life in the coal mines. I sympathize with this stance; I subscribe to the American ideal. Unfortunately, it is with me and my red pen that that ideal crashes and burns.

Sending everyone under the sun to college is a noble initiative. Academia is all for it, naturally. Industry is all for it; some companies even help with tuition costs. Government is all for it; the truly needy have lots of opportunities for financial aid. The media applauds it-try to imagine someone speaking out against the idea. To oppose such a scheme of inclusion would be positively churlish. But one piece of the puzzle hasn’t been figured into the equation, to use the sort of phrase I encounter in the papers submitted by my English 101 students. The zeitgeist of academic possibility is a great inverted pyramid, and its rather sharp point is poking, uncomfortably, a spot just about midway between my shoulder blades.

First this question: Why would a blog about boys falling behind in school bother reporting on the gender pay equity issue? Because the feminist groups denying the boy troubles point to the pay equity issue as a reason why attention should be focused on women in the workforce, not men. Who cares if boys fall behind in school if, as men, they outearn women.

Two articles here that shed some light on the pay equity issue, which promises to blossom anew in the Obama administration. The first, from insidehighered.com, reports on women leaving medical school faculties at greater rates than men. I think it’s fair to assume this principle holds true in other professions, from law to business.

The Second Shift in Academic Medicine
Medical school enrollments - once largely male - have an even gender split these days. But the senior faculty ranks have failed to achieve gender balance, in part because female medical school professors are more likely than their male counterparts to leave academe.

Research published in the new issue of Academic Medicine suggests that part of the problem may be unequal demands on female professors at home, combined with a lack of flexibility about the idea of part-time careers in academic medicine.

The study is based on a survey of all 615 full-time faculty members at the University of Minnesota Medical School, 57 percent of whom responded. Women and men reported equal levels of productivity by various measures and also of hours worked on the job.

But off the job, differences were notable. The full-time female professors (in a profession where full time rarely fits into 40 hour weeks) reported that they performed an average of 31 hours a week in family and household duties, while the men reported an average of 19 hours.

The women were less likely than the men to be married or have children. But of the male and female professors who are married, the men were much more likely than women to have spouses who worked at jobs less than full time.

 The second, from today’s WPost, documents the job choosings by gender that perpetuate the pay inequites.

What is women’s work?

At a time when women represent half of all managerial and professional staff and half of all bus drivers, they still are locked into — and out of — a few professions.

Some jobs are so female-filled that not even one-tenth of the positions are held by men, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Among them are preschool teachers and teachers’ assistants; registered nurses; medical records technicians and receptionists/information clerks

About 98 percent of speech pathologists and 99.2 percent of dental hygienists are women, as are 89.4 percent of the remaining 50,000 switchboard operators and 89 percent of massage therapists.

Conversely, women account for fewer than 10 percent of the electrical engineers, firefighters, machinists and mechanics, and grounds maintenance workers (although women fill more than a third of all janitorial jobs).

Women hold fewer than 2 percent of jobs as carpenters, brick masons, electricians, plumbers, pipe layers and auto body repair workers. They are just 6.4 percent of garbage and recycling collectors.

So much for those who say women get stuck in all the trashy jobs.

Publisher Lee & Low Books solicits thoughts from its authors about boys and literacy. Postings will pick up in January, so watch everything unfold here. A sampling:

You’re a guy and you like to read. What made reading an important part of your life? What keeps it an important part of your life?

Tony Medina: When I was growing up, I wasn’t surrounded by books. I didn’t have children’s books, nor did I see many adults or my cousins reading. My attention span was basically shaped by television and a desire to go outside and play. It wasn’t until the ninth grade, when I had to complete a book report assignment or risk receiving an F, that I really forced myself to read an entire novel. I felt I had truly accomplished something that I didn’t think was possible. The story was so engaging. It truly allowed me to utilize my imagination, transporting me from my little blue room in Co-Op City in the Bronx to another world and someone else’s life and problems. That was when I literally got hooked on wanting to read more and more.

G. Neri: One of the reasons I write for boys is because there are so few men writing from the male teenage perspective. So when I write, I’m thinking about the boy I was, the one who didn’t like reading. My breakthrough as a reader came when I found a book that changed the notion in my head of what a book could be. It took me by surprise and I probably thought, I didn’t know you could do that in a book! As the writer, I try to surprise the new reader by constantly reinventing the notion of what a book can be or do. Voice is really important. I wrote Chess Rumble with a distinctly urban male voice, something you rarely see in books. The number one thing I hear from readers is that they are shocked to read a voice like that in a book. Inner city, street-call it what you will; it’s a voice they know and can relate to but have never seen in print before.

W. Nikola-Lisa: I grew up in South Texas, where reading was most definitely not a part of my life. I didn’t find the library until I got to high school. I attended an elite private high school in Florida. We had a beautiful library with vaulted ceilings and floor-to-ceiling book stacks. The only reason I visited it, however, was because that was where you served your detentions-in the library after school. And I usually had a few to serve every month. As I sat there looking around, I’ll never forget how that room impressed me; and I began thinking: If people build an entire room just to house books, then books must be very important. That was when I really started looking at books in a more serious manner.

Everyone knows that the solution to unparented boys who lack a father at home is to hire more male teachers. You know, establish some authority in the classroom. Makes sense, except when it doesn’t. According to this survey described by the BBC, male teachers are more likely to draw classrooms disruptions, not less likely.

Lessons ‘tougher for male staff’
Schoolchildren are more likely to disrupt lessons if they have a male teacher, a survey suggests.

The National Union of Teachers (NUT) polled 1,500 of its members in 13 English local authorities.

Although the survey found a general improvement in pupil behaviour since 2001, 77% of males said they had a lesson disrupted at least once a week.

Researchers at Warwick University who analysed the data found female teachers generally had fewer problems in class.

Of the women, 44% reported no disruption on a weekly basis at all.

Poor behaviour

But 69% of men and 57% of women said they had been sworn at by pupils.

Christine Blower, acting general secretary of the NUT, said the analysis demonstrated how “misleading” gender stereotypes could be.

She said: “Despite the impression given by some national figures that women teachers are more subject to experiencing bad behaviour than men, the evidence is that it is male teachers who sometimes experience greater levels of poor pupil behaviour.”

 There’s no question that male teachers have been disappearing from classrooms, especially in middle schools. That disappearance coincides with the slide in boys’ academic achievements. But are the two connected? I lean toward the camp arguing that attracting more male teachers is a good thing, but don’t expect a gender rebalancing in the teaching force to affect the boy troubles.

Several years ago the Southern Regional Education Board released a unique study documenting the ninth grade “bulge,” the extra students in that grade resulting from holding many students back a year. Not surprisingly, the bulges were dominated by boys.

Here, the Minneapolis Star Tribune (photo courtesy of the Star Tribune) takes a look at an effort to make ninth grade successful for students. Part of the remedy includes single-sex classes:

By GREGORY A. PATTERSON, Star Tribune

Ryan Gresafe wants to be a professional boxer, but he’s staying in school to get an education “in case anything goes wrong, like I break my hand or something,” says the 112-pound division fighter who’s in ninth grade at North High School in North St. Paul.

The school is fighting for Ryan to get a good education, too, by enrolling him into what it calls “Freshman Academy” — North High School’s new, first and, perhaps, last-ditch effort to keep kids on track to graduate.

“If kids are successful in ninth grade they go on to graduate, and if they aren’t then they go on and drop out,” says Greg Nelson, principal at North.

Plenty of evidence suggests that ninth grade is as important to graduating as, say, first grade is to learning to read, Nelson says.

Freshman Academy takes kids deemed most at risk of failing and puts them in single-sex classes that are half the size of normal classes. They are led by two of the school’s best-liked teachers.

Such efforts are worth the resources, Nelson says, because the individual tragedy of dropping out often creates a wake of broader problems in society, including higher costs for incarceration, health care and welfare.

…………………………..

Others school districts are giving special attention to freshmen.

In Chaska, the entire ninth grade attends a separate school just down the street from the high school. That phenomenon owes it origins to the timing of school construction and the passage of tax levies that fund them, but school officials say it has been a successful experiment having the ninth-graders sequestered on their own campus the past seven years.

“Everybody loves it,” says Mark Shoquist, assistant principal. “The people who love it most are the parents of 14-year-old girls.”

Making choices

Fourteen- and 15-year-olds typically begin spending more time with their friends and less with their family, and invariably end up making decisions about drinking, smoking and sex, Shoquist says. It’s better that the students make those decisions with friends their own age, rather than be influenced by kids who are two or three years older.

Here’s an article in USA Today about the most literate cities in the country. Minneapolis and Seattle top the list:

Minneapolis and Seattle are the USA’s most literate cities, according to an annual study examining the “culture and resources for reading” in the nation’s largest metro areas.
For the past six years, the two cities have traded the first and second spots in the rankings, which analyze six key indicators of literacy (newspaper circulation, number of bookstores, library resources, periodical publishing resources, educational attainment and Internet resources) against population rates for cities with populations of 250,000 or more.
The study does not look at reading test scores or how often people read, but what kinds of literary resources are available and used. This is “one critical index of our nation’s well-being,” says study author Jack Miller, president of Central Connecticut State University in New Britain, Conn.
The findings come at a time when newspaper circulations across the USA are declining, and online newspaper reading is increasing. Miller’s analysis suggests that, contrary to conventional wisdom, the availability of free online news is not to blame for the decline in newspapers’ print circulation - and that neither is the decline in bookstores across the country caused by the rise in online book buying.
Cities that ranked higher for having more bookstores also have a higher proportion of people buying books online, the analysis found, and cities with newspapers that have high per-capita circulation rates also have more people reading newspapers online. Likewise, cities that ranked higher for having well-used libraries also have more booksellers.
“Cities that rank highly in one form of literate behavior are likely to rank highly in other forms and practices of literacy,” says Miller, noting that a literate society tends to practice many forms of literacy, not just one or another.

i know a little about Washington State. A few years ago they broke out the gender numbers on the state tests and even the governor expressed astonishment over the size of the gender gaps on the verbal portion. Had the graduation tests taken effect on schedule, hundreds of boys were facing the prospect of failure.

Minnesota is a state I know more about. That’s the state leading the nation in women surging ahead in higher education achievement. In 2003-04 Minnesota became the first state where women outnumbered men at all degree levels, from associate’s to Ph.D. Here’s a recent blog item where I break down the Minnesota K-12 numbers, which of course drive the higher education trends.
  

It must have something to do with the dry BBQ at the Rendezvous. Or the duck parade at the Peabody (pictured here…sex of the ducks still under investigation). Or the jungle room at Graceland. Whatever the trigger, Memphis is becoming associated with single sex education — the home of the last national meeting of the National Association for Single Sex Public Education.

Now the AP weighs in with this profile of single sex education in Memphis schools. Interesting read, with updates on the number of single-sex experiments in public schools. Local educators never emphasize it, but when you talk to them the biggest driver they cite are the boy troubles:

 Gender-specific classes have been part of the U.S. private school environment since before the Constitution. But until a few years ago, public school parents who couldn’t afford $15,000 to $20,000 in private tuition were out of luck, said Dr. Leonard Sax, co-founder of the single-sex group.

“If you don’t have that kind of money, you don’t have any choices,” he said. “Why not make these choices available in the public schools?”

In 2002, 11 U.S. public schools offered the option. Today, 514 do, including Washington, Corry Middle, Vance Middle, Kingsbury Middle and Georgia Avenue Elementary in Memphis. Pockets of experimentation are taking off in other Memphis City Schools.

At 48, Sax has given up his medical practice to preach full time the gospel of gender-specific classrooms, hoping in five years that 7 percent of the nation’s public schools will be gender-specific. Just about 1 percent are today.

He lists the benefits with the fervor of a convert, including that girls “tend to find their voice” in classrooms where they don’t have to worry about being wrong and being ridiculed, he said, ticking off a list of women who graduated from all-girl schools, including Reese Witherspoon, Madeleine Albright, Nancy Pelosi, Rosa Parks, Gwyneth Paltrow and Sally Ride.

“In colleges, you can tell which women went to girls schools,” he said. “The girls who didn’t will raise their hands and wait for you to call on them.

“The girls who did still raise their hands, but if they don’t get called on, they interrupt.”

This release from the International Reading Association nicely lays out the problem and the solution:

–By fourth grade, the average boy is two years behind the average girl in reading and writing.
– Boys score significantly lower than girls on the National Assessment of Educational Progress reading and writing assessments.
– Boys make up 70% of special education classes and are four times more likely to have ADHD than girls.
– Boys are 50% more likely to be retained a grade than girls and are three times more likely to be placed in reading/learning disabilities settings.
– Boys around the world score less well than girls in reading and writing and have lower motivation to read and write than their female counterparts.

And now the solutions, as laid out in the new book I’ve promoted here before, Bright Beginnings for Boys, by William Brozo and Debby Zambo:

What can be done? In Bright Beginnings for Boys, Zambo and Brozo say that boys will have great potential as active readers when they

– Are viewed as a resource with unique imaginations, abundant curiosity, and the capacity for self-regulation and sustained attention.
– Become engaged readers because of responsive instruction that is sensitive to the achievement and motivational challenges they face.
– Have print encounters upon entering school that capture their unique and burgeoning male imaginations and build strong literate identities.
– Are exposed to books with positive male characters that serve as both entry points to reading and templates of honorable masculinity.

“As we learn more about gender differences,” Zambo said in a recent interview, “we see that the way many boys are taught to read goes against the way they love to be, which is playful and active.” Repetitive drilling on basic skills can lead to boredom, inattention, and behavior problems. The question teachers ask is, “How can we help boys learn basic skills in a way that is active and motivating for them?”

In their new book, Zambo and Brozo assert that by harnessing young boys’ unique abilities and interests, preschool and elementary-grade teachers can get boys excited about reading and put them on the road to school success. Drawing from extensive research and 30 years of combined experience in classroom, the authors provide perspective on what makes boys tick, how to get boys interested in literacy and learning, and how to get parents and community members involved in boys’ literacy learning.

Let’s be honest here. The gamers are winning. Parents are caving. Here, Bill Costello describes the pounding he took from gamers after suggesting in ednews.org that violent video games were not the best holiday gifts for boys. I posted  about the op-ed Costello wrote. Wrong! said the gamers.

Below, Costello strikes back in ednews.org, beefing up his argument with studies and numbers:

EdNews.org recently published an op-ed I wrote titled “Video Games for Christmas? Perhaps Not for Boys.” It upset many gamers who wrote comments on the publication’s website and on popular gaming blogs. The gamers did not reference any research that contradicted my position, but did provide numerous ad hominem arguments.

Parts of the op-ed were more controversial than others. For example, gamers were clearly angry that I wrote: “A definite link has been established between violent video games and antisocial behavior. Games like ‘Grand Theft Auto’ and ‘Halo’ can make your son more aggressive.”

Typical responses from gamers were: “There have been no studies that prove a solid link between violent video games and aggression” and “It’s possible there’s a correlation between violent video games and aggression, but video games do not cause aggression” and “This article provides no references to back up its claims.”

First of all, it was an op-ed, not a scholarly article written for a peer-reviewed journal. References aren’t usually included in an op-ed because it’s an opinion piece. While I have had scholarly articles published in peer-reviewed journals, I wrote the op-ed to express my opinion-which is based on having read many peer-reviewed articles on the subject at hand.

Second, there have indeed been studies that prove a definite link between violent video games and aggression. And these studies reveal the link to be causal.

I will break with tradition in this op-ed and list references: “Exposure to Violent Video Games Increases Automatic Aggressiveness,” by Eric Uhlmann and Jane Swanson, “Journal of Adolescence,” volume 27, pp. 41-52, 2004.

“An Update on the Effects of Playing Violent Video Games,” by Craig Anderson, “Journal of Adolescence,” volume 27, pp. 113-122, 2004. “Violent Video Game Effects on Children and Adolescents: Theory, Research, and Public Policy,” by Craig Anderson, Douglas Gentile, and Katherine Buckley, Oxford University Press, 2006.