“At the most recent NCTE conference Jeff [Wilhelm] attended, he heard one such discussion. In one session, the speaker began to talk about his experiences as a teacher and single father of boys. He described the way current psychologists feel boys are marginalized in society and school. Suddenly, one of the women behind Jeff could contain herself no longer. She stood up and announced, “Boy are still privileged! They still have a better chance of success than girls! This is a bunch of—of hooey!” Another woman stood up to add her view that the presentation and the view that boys needed special consideration was “unadulterated baloney!” And they left along with others in the audience.”(p.xvi)
Strange, every school report card I read notes a deficit in the performance of males relative to females in literacy. It is also the one that seems the least addressed in CSIPs. Why would this be the case? We are all committed to making every student successful and offering every student, regardless of race, ethnicity, gender, or gender-identity equal opportunities for success. Could it be that male-bashing is fashionable? Certainly not! It is not as if every father character on family sit coms is an incompetent dolt. Or that roundtable chat shows like The View alternate between running men into the ground and treating them like slabs of meat (a tactic that the same women would howl over if a group of prominent men would flip on them). This is what literate people call sarcasm folks. I honestly had no idea what a narrow-minded chauvinist Barbara Walters was until I watched a couple of episodes, and I never want to hear Whoopi Goldberg complaining about someone objectifying a woman by drooling over her physicality again after the comments she makes about the bodies of various male celebrities. But it is all fine because they are the self-appointed voice of equity.
The fact is that the current pedagogy does everything it can to medicate, denigrate, and eliminate anything definably masculine in school culture. Is it any wonder that many of our young men find little that they can identify with outside of the gym and tech center?
“If, for example, The Scarlet Letter fails, year after year, to draw students into an engaging reading experience ( as I think it does, even with committed teachers), why should we continue to teach it? They [Smith and Wilhelm] show convincingly that these boys are regularly “overmatched” when they are confronted by these books. No book, after all, should hold its place in the curriculum without regard to the experiences students have with it. Schools will be more successful if they know students well enough to recognize what Smith and Wilhelm call “identity markers,” passions and interests that distinguish them—and to match books to that interest or taste, broadening the curriculum well beyond classic literature, and beyond narrative fiction.” (p. x-xi)
I am not sure how I feel about this. Do we only require students to read what they want to read? My initial animosity to Newkirk is mollified, somewhat, by the qualification in the last sentence that the curriculum needs to be “broadened […] beyond classic literature [and] narrative fiction” I am generously concluding that he is not proposing that we ditch the classics and narratives in lieu of whatever trips the students’ triggers, but that we supplement the existing curriculum with such texts. An admirable notion, but as Dr. Kerry Robertson once observed, the four year curriculum is only so large; every time we add someone to the bench, someone else is pushed off. While I am not totally a “Great Works” pedagogy sort of person, it would seem that we all need some sort of foundation in the classics to understand the contemporaries more completely. To make an analogy, many of my students are fond of the TV series Family Guy, The Simpsons, and Futurama (all satires/parodies of classic TV genres) but are unaware of the series they satirizing (60’s & 70’s family sit coms and space operas). Can they truly appreciate humor that satirizes/parodies something they have never experienced? Is it still satire/parody? I am not implying that to understand a text the reader needs to be familiar with every reference within a text. (Most Futurama viewers are blissfully unaware that the character of Bender is a nod to the film The Breakfast Club, but facts like this are sprinkles on the sundae, not the main dish.) I am saying that there would seem to be a certain awareness necessary to “get” even the most banal of pop culture.
On another level, this feeds into a favorite soapbox of mine—not requiring kids to do anything they don’t want to do. Just the other day I overheard a student say, “I can’t wait until I am eighteen and an adult, then nobody will boss me around and I would have to do anything I don’t want to.” If anyone knows the way to this alternate dimension that the young man was speaking of where adults don’t have to do anything they don’t want to, please send me directions. The fact is that as adult, well true adults I know several children whose chronology exceeds the age of 18, by a great deal, you are required to do things you don’t want to. Reading The Scarlet Letter doesn’t even come close to the level of dislike that I have for some chores, and yet no one exempts me from them on the basis that they really aren’t my cup of tea. If one of the goals of American education is to empower students with the skillset necessary to be successful adults, or at least mildly competent adults, then a certain level of tolerance for people and tasks that may not exactly be to their liking would seem to be a part of that skillset. I do, however, recognize that this noble goal is a difficult one to reach when parents are more concerned with being their children’s “besty” instead of their parent.
Pre-Reading
From the moment I laid eyes on the title of this book, I was interested. This is the perspective that most of my “regular” male, and several female, students, and these are the kids I am having the greatest difficulty reaching. Concurrently, they are the kids who need to experience success in academics and the ones that we as an educational community most need to reach to hit the definition of success that seems to be in vogue in public policy and the public arena.
So far I have... felt Embarassed Foot in mouth disease doncha know
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