Saturday, September 25, 2010

How to Get Boys to Read

This is an entertaining article. Apparently many publishers are producing "gross-out" books in order to encourage boys to read. I have the Captain Underpants books on my classroom shelf and they are quite popular, but I haven't heard of any of the others mentioned in the article. Thomas Spence concludes that
One obvious problem with the SweetFarts philosophy of education is that it is more suited to producing a generation of barbarians and morons than to raising the sort of men who make good husbands, fathers and professionals. If you keep meeting a boy where he is, he doesn't go very far.

I do have some challenges getting some of my students (male and female) to read, but at home everyone (male and female) reads about the same amount - a lot.

4 comments:

Janet said...

"The SweetFarts philosophy of education."

I have some really deep reflections on this, but I'll have to share them later, after I stop giggling...

Tricia said...

Yesterday I read "Boy Writers: Reclaiming Their Voices" by Ralph Fletcher. Did I learn about it from you? Not sure. Anyway, it was quite eye-opening in how I see many parallels in my own boys. And when I think about them as readers: they do have access to computers and a Wii (although we have time limits), but still read a lot. C tested at a college reading level in 5th grade. Nice to be an outlier and defying the statistics there...

One of Fletcher's points is that boys will write if they have free choice in what to write about. I wonder if one reason boys don't enjoy reading is because of restrictions and requirements put on them at school? I've heard that complaint from some kids not at our school (required to read "dumb" books). Interesting to ponder.

Ruth said...

Tricia, I did blog about that book - I really liked it. My students do choose their own books, and some of them are still reluctant readers.

Tricia said...

Oh right, I didn't mean to imply that free choice solves all reading issues - just that on the whole, in the "typical" school (which is what the SweetFarts grouser was talking about), there's a lot of requirements around the reading and that probably has an impact... (kind of like being forced to write "personal narrative" the majority of the time can turn off boy writers)

By the way, thanks for the recommendation! I just wish I'd read it sooner, instead of letting it gather dust for so long.