Boy Year

Boy Year by Donalyn Miller in Teacher Magazine, October 18, 2009.

I think Ms. Miller is very much on the mark here. We get so busy pigeon-holing individuals by race, gender, income, SES, etc. that we then do them a disservice by pandering down to the anonymous and indistinct averages rather than examining what we can do to meet their individual needs.

Considering the data (and we all know it is about the DATA these days), boys score lower than girls on standardized reading tests and report less motivation and interest in reading. I often wonder how much of the disengagement many boys have for reading stems from classroom instruction designed by predominately female English teachers, though. When every class novel and reading activity filters solely through the predilections and worldview of a female teacher, boys can become demotivated and believe that their personal interests and opinions are not valued in English class. It is clear that when selecting books to read aloud, purchasing books for a library, or designing lessons, we must be mindful of the boys we teach and our latent prejudices about the reading material we offer to students.

Boys want the same thing that every reader wants--to open a book and find themselves in the pages. As teachers, invested in creating readers, we owe it to our boys to help them find such books.

Reflecting on my own experiences, it probably helps that I appreciate the same books many boys do. I love fantasy epics and authors like Roland Smith and Eoin Colfer. I am just as likely to pull Scott Westerfeld's new steampunk science fiction novel, Leviathan, out of my bag and recommend it as I am to suggest a title like Helen Frost's The Braid, a book geared toward girls. I don't have strong gender preferences in what I read myself, so providing a balance in the books I recommend to students and choose for us to read together in class seems natural to me.

We create a crisis when we define readers along gender lines, and I think boy readers get a bad rap. They will read fiction, they will read books that explore emotional issues, and they will read books that are longer than 100 pages. They will read. Instead of blaming our boys for their gender, or lowering our expectations for their literacy development, we should scrutinize any system where boys are hailed for their achievement in science and math class and allowed to define themselves as nonreaders