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.

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.

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.

…involve widening gaps in literacy — reading, comprehension and writing. The world has become more verbal; boys haven’t. That’s the starting point. But why have schools been more successful with girls than boys in boosting literacy skills? Here’s a great analysis published in Britain’s Reading Reform Foundation publication suggesting that teaching methods are the culprit:

Illiterate boys: The new international phenomenon
Dr Bonnie Macmillan
Boys are in trouble. Increasingly, it is coming to the attention of anyone who listens to the news or reads a newspaper that boys are struggling to read.

Together two recent international surveys of reading achievement have measured reading ability in more than 50 countries (OECD/Unesco, 2003; Mullis et al., 2003). The results show that at both the age of 9 and 15, boys’ reading skills are substantially worse than girls’. For the first time in the history of such surveys, the gender gaps in performance are significantly large in virtually every country.

Of the countries surveyed recently in 2001, 37 were also surveyed in 1991. In 13 of these, where sex differences did not exist ten years ago, they are now in evidence. In addition, the gap between boys’ and girls’ scores has widened over the last ten years in every country but one. Sex differences in reading are not only showing up in more and more countries, they are also growing larger.

What is happening? Why are boys having such trouble keeping up with girls in their ability to read? And why are more and more boys falling further and further behind?

(more…)