It’s All Because of Football

I’ve been reading a lot lately about the problems that boys are having in school these days, and thinking about the ever growing challenge of keeping them in high school long enough to prepare them to get a college degree. Even in my nice middle class neighborhood, I know that many parents are struggling with their sons, and their lack of academic engagement. That’s why it was such a thrill to learn that the boy next door, who has for many years seemed uninterested in school, has just been accepted into a teacher education program at the University of Redlands.

I barely had time to offer my congratulations to his proud mom when she burst out … “it’s because of football you know.” For this young man, his heartfelt desire to play college football, and the academic requirements he needed to fulfill in order to play in high school resulted in a commitment to his schoolwork, a college acceptance, and, according to his parents, a completely changed attitude, at school and at home. It took a lot of work, and cooperation between home and school, but the outcome is what we all hope for.

A number of the things that worked for my neighbor can be integrated seamlessly into the lists of suggestions in this blog and lots of other resources, about how to create a “boy-friendly school.” In my opinion, the key to making a difference is encouraging boys to read. To do this, it certainly helps to provide them with access to books, articles and stories that provide masculine themes and role models and topics that interest them – starting with sports.

To encourage more reading (and all the good things that results from that) make sure that all your students have easy access to sports magazines, adventure stories and biographies of sports figures. Whether it’s a story of conquering Everest, or winning the Super Bowl, research shows that boys like stories about overcoming a challenge.

So do I; stories about boys getting through high school and into college are just the kind of challenge I’d like to read more about.

How to Create a Boy-Friendly School

The subject of how boys are struggling in school and in life seems to come up regularly in the media. Several years ago, PBS ran a powerful documentary, Raising Cain: Protecting the Emotional Lives of Boys, which “explores the emotional development of boys in America today.” It describes American boys as “the most violent in the industrialized world,” and clearly shows that many boys are struggling in school, and unable to express their emotions.

A while ago, Newsweek published, Struggling School Aged Boys. Though the medium is different, the message is the same. Many boys, (according to the research) an extraordinary percentage of them, are having emotional or behavioral problems that are affecting their lives, and their ability and willingness to stay in school. Many of the problems are severe enough to cause parents to consult a doctor or health care professional.

As an educator, parent, and citizen of the nation that leads the world in fatherless families, violence and failing boys, I can’t stop thinking about the faces, and the voices of the boys in the film, and the issues and problems of the boys I see and hear about every day. So, the questions keep playing in my head … How can we do a better job of raising our boys? And, what can Oregon educators do to create a boy friendly school - a place where boys feel safe, welcome and able to learn and be themselves.
To clarify my thoughts, I contacted Marilyn Brown-Dikeos, whose program Empowered Learning includes strategies that teachers, mentors and parents can use to help boys feel safe and respected in the classroom. She offers the following insights and strategies.

1. Honor the risk of learning. Trying to learn something new can be risky for a boy who is afraid to fail. Help your student’s understand that learning is a process that includes trying, doing, and making mistakes. It is not about achieving perfection. Value a student’s attempts to master a new subject or skill. Celebrate effort and recognize even small accomplishments along the way.

2. Provide safe entry points to learning. Group learning and project based activities offer multiple entry points for students. The ability to choose a role or task which will allow him to work from his strength may help a boy feel confident enough to enter into an activity.

3. Allow students to self-evaluate. Many boys struggle in school because success and failure are tied up with their sense of themselves. A boy who gets a bad grade or fails a test is likely to feel stupid and embarrassed in front of his classmates. Rather than risk failing again, some boys simply stop trying. One way to work around this is to allow students to grade themselves according to the criteria you set. When they turn in a paper ask, “What grade do you think you earned?” Allow them to tell you how they might have done better. Remind a boy that understanding how to do better next time shows that he is learning.

4. Treat them with respect and kindness. Just because boys don’t show their emotions, we tend to treat them as if they aren’t there. In fact, research shows that boys are even more sensitive and more eager to please than girls. Treat them as if they are fragile. They are.

5. Provide opportunities for boys to talk about their feelings – through sports or chess or other games. Boys need to be reassured that their inner lives are NOT shameful, that play violence is not violence. Use their violent games and fantasies as a starting point for conversation or story writing.

6. Boys need to move around. Recess time is being eliminated as school days are shortened. Try to find ways to build action and motion into your activities and schedule.

7. Boys need to feel safe. They need an adult to talk to about bullies, fear, humiliation and their need to be protected. They also need an adult to show them that men are caring, compassionate and kind.
8. Offer opportunities for boys to resolve their own conflicts. Conflict resolution takes communication skills, the ability to listen, willingness to compromise, and often, creativity. It can help boys reflect on their actions, and see them from someone else’s point of view. Best of all, the ability to resolve a conflict without rage and aggression can result in friendship, something that no boy can succeed without.

Related Resources: For more information about this subject, help for parents, and classroom ideas, visit the following websites:
Raising Cain: Boys in Focus
http://www.pbs.org/opb/raisingcain/

The PBS Parents Guide to Understanding and Raising Boys
http://www.pbs.org/parents/raisingboys/index.html

Boys in School
How to help boys adjust to school and schools adjust to boys.
http://www.pbs.org/parents/raisingboys/school.html

Buy the Program
Raising Cain (DVD)
http://www.shoppbs.org/product/index.jsp?productId=2175911

Boyz n the Book: Johnny can read, but won’t and who can blame him?

This post appeared first in my Making Connections blog on Thursday, November 6th, 2008. I was pleased to receive several thougthful comments, which I will include at the bottom of this post. I continue to welcome thoughts from men and boys about what inspired them to love reading, and what got in the way

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A thought provoking article in a recent Weekly Standard magazine points out that there are far more women than men in college these days. The article, Boyz n the Book: Johnny can read, but won’t and who can blame him? (by Mary Grabar) states that “a generation ago, women made up less than half of students. …In 2005 that made up 57 percent of fall enrollments, and the Department of Education estimates the gender discrepancies will increase every year in the foreseeable future.”

Why? The article suggests that the problems that boys are having with reading create a set of problems with study habits and school performance that affects their future success in school.

And, it suggests that their reading problems may be connected to a lack of male influence, and books written to appeal to their interests. “Socially … boys have few male reading role models at home or at school.”
Boys like action, danger, competition, conflict, tests of strength, and strategy,” in their play and their books. This may explain their love for video games, especially those that “present a quest in which the imperiled hero tries to find clues or treasures so he can go on to the next level.” But, the article points to a “lack of ‘masculine’ books that appeal to boys on such topics as sports, war and competition.”

Research on children’s reading interests “consistently shows that boys like to read nonfiction, especially historical nonfiction, (biographies, books on important wars/battles), adventure stories, books on sports, books on facts, and science fiction. Yet, most of the books assigned in school are novels or memoirs.”

Pair this with the fact that most librarians and teachers are women; that mothers read to children more frequently than fathers, and that “those responsible for promoting reading … promote those virtues that appeal to girls, … games and books that tend toward the virtues of cooperation and sensitivity,” and a possible answer to why boys don’t read as much as girls (and therefore are less academically successful) begins to take shape.

The research in this article makes it clear that if we are to encourage boys to love reading, they need books that provide masculine themes and role models. They need stories about soldiers, heroes, male athletes and adventurers. They need to find what they love in books … AND YOU CAN HELP.

Men, please tell me about your favorite books. What books turned you on (or off) to reading? What books do you teach in your classrooms? What books inspired you? Which were the ones you could not put down? Which are the ones the boys you work with love the best? What books would you recommend for the boys you know?

If you could suggest one way to get boys to read, based on your experience, what would you suggest?

Please share your answers and comments here – click on the COMMENT button below. Thank you in advance for your responses.
COMMENTS:
• I always loved to read - even though my Dad wasn’t a reader - except for newspapers. Favorite books - anything by Assimov or Clark, whether from their SciFi or hard science collections. Also loved Hawaii, and the classics.
• What was a turn off for me was having to write book reports. That took all the joy out of the books I read.

• Best way to get boys - or girls for that matter to read is to read to them and/or bring them to a good library with a solid story hour program. What is key is that the reader put an effort into his or her reading so as to bring the characters alive. A flat or dull tone will not work.
• I think the key is to help boys find books about topics they already like. For me it was sports and adventure. I read lots of magazines such as Sports Illustrated and National Geographic. Books - anything on football, basketball, baseball, track. Adventure stories about climbing Mt. Everest, K2, Annapurna, about exploration - Antarctica, Magellan, Sir Francis Drake, etc. The books can be about the topic, or they can be biographies about the people involved. The biographies, if selected well, can impart broader life lessons to kids.
• Speaking from my own experience only, neither of my parents read for pleasure. My mother did try the last 10 years of her life. I never did either. What I read were how-to books; manuals for a wide variety of devices, everything from tools to computers, to how to build or fix something. When I went to Engineering School I did more of this type of reading. All this reading had to be done slowly and carefully. It wasn’t done for fun; it was done to learn something. Reading was for accuracy not fun. And it frequently got tiring. What I did like was Shakespeare. It too had to be read slowly due to the difference in the language. I enjoyed reading most after seeing the play. Then I didn’t have to struggle with the language.

• I never liked sport or war stories. I never had exposure to adventure stories; perhaps they would have been attractive to me.
• The research in the story you cite and the previous comments track with my own experience. As a child I remember reading sections in an old set of Encyclopedias we had - descriptions of far away places like Rome and Athens that I had heard about in stories.

• I especially agree with the comments about using magazines. Most younger kids have a short attention span, and magazines like Sports Illustrated or ESPN magazine have great photos to help tell the story, but are also well-written. For much younger kids, don’t forget about comic books. I used to read and re-read the same 40 or 50 comic books all summer when I was 7 or 8 years old.