Keira's preconceptions/ predictions/ expectations + Chapter 1

In this post I'm going to respond to Paul Morris's question about our preconceptions, predictions, and expectations of our book and of the book-club process. I will then go on to deal briefly with some specific aspects of Chapter 1 of Reading Don't Fix No Chevys.

My first thought, when I was unexpectedly re-assigned to the Chevys book club when my original (Just Girls) club dissolved, was: "I don't know anybody like that. I've never known anyone who would say anything along the lines of: 'Reading don't fix no chevys.'" I did, nonetheless, feel very open to learning about something very much outside of my personal experience. I thought: "Well, if I'm going to teach community college, I'm going to be expanding my horizons. I'm ready to get excited about the extent to which this book might help me."

I guess I'm going to have to share quite a bit about myself and my background, or none of this discussion of my preconceptions is going to make sense. Please excuse me if I over-share; I'll do my best to exercise good judgment.

So, anyway, one detail I can share about my teaching experience is that so far I've taught at three Canadian universities. I've never taught in the US. Two out of the three schools were in Montreal, and I'd say that, even many of the less successful students there were fairly artsy city boys. I don't think they had much interest in fixing cars. The young men in rural northeast Nova Scotia, where I taught full time for a year, were different, probably--though I don't think I could tell you what, if anything, they liked to read. I'm just now remembering a conversation I had with one of them about what his motivations were for wanting to become a pharmacist. He said that, if he could become a pharmacist, he wouldn't have to leave Nova Scotia. He could stay and contribute to his community. That was what meant the most to him. Because I'm such an uprooted person myself, I was quite affected by what he had to say. But, in any case, this is a bit of a tangent. In general, it's the case that I didn't find very much about my Nova Scotian students' reading habits. I didn't find out about this guy's reading habits. What I learned was that he wanted a good grade in my class so that he could get into pharmacy school and ultimately stay in Nova Scotia.

When I began to read the back cover and Forward to Reading Don't Fix No Chevys I did start to ask myself: Why *haven't* I ever wondered about my students' reading habits and preferences? It's not a bad question, I thought. Ok, so: Even if I haven't had classrooms full of budding mechanics, this book still addresses questions that I might have done well to consider in the past--and I and my future students could benefit if I start considering these questions now. I felt happy about the opportunity to do some good learning.

I did, I'll admit, continue to kind of list for myself the ways and reasons for which I've been insulated from the Reading-don't-fix-no-chevys boys. For one thing, I have daughters. I don't have a son, and I'm not expecting to have any more children. I am, it's true, married to a man, but he's a sensitive sort--and, I gather, he stood out when he was in school back in western Pennsylvania. He was one of only a couple of boys who never went deer hunting. He and one other boy would actually go to school on the first day of hunting season. All the other boys were absent. He and this other boy (who was the son of the district superintendent of education, I believe) took optional literature classes. They were receptive to the reading material offered as part of the curriculum--and actually asked for more.

But then...thinking about my husband's past makes me think about his family. I remember his grandfather. He had worked almost his whole working life in a steel mill. He was ostensibly pleased to see us get married, but, truly: when I spoke, this man always claimed not to understand me. He would sometimes say it was my accent (!!!??) that was the problem. But, for whatever combination of reasons, I could never communicate with this man. It was really striking and unsettling. I would talk...and he would either ignore me or turn to someone else and say "I didn't understand a word she just said." I could see that he could hear other people just fine, or at least BETTER, so I didn't think it was just a problem with his hearing. I don't have space or time here to say everything I know about him...but, in any case, I will say that being assigned to this book club did make me think about him. Are there young men 70 years younger than this guy who would be equally incapable of hearing me? Would I be *this* incapable of reaching them or making effective connections to what matters to them?

It's probably not true, after all, that I haven't known Reading-Don't-Fix-No-Chevys types.

Well, and when I perused the inside cover of the book (where there's a list and a bare-bones description of the boys who participated in the study), I noticed something I hadn't expected. The boys were not all of low socio-economic status, and they were not all performing poorly in school. Oh. The title alone had given me a wrong impression. Ok, so: this book is actually about a *variety* of boys' attitudes to their schools' English curricula.

I've never taught high school boys, but what about the boys from my own high school? Ugh. Bad memories. Suddenly, something I hadn't thought about at all in a long, long time came back to mind.
This was a very unpleasant episode when the mainstream boys in my class (by the way, I was in a "learning community") turned against me for dating the nerdiest boy in the class. NOBODY is supposed to date the nerdiest boy in the class. If *this* boy gets a girl, the social order is severely disturbed. Anyway, *I* was the one who was going to pay the price for this disruption. And the mainstream boys--who were, if memory serves, mainly interested in basketball and rap (and, no, not one single one of them was African American, so don't go running with that stereotype)--really harassed me very openly in English class. The episode culminated with a (male) English teacher cornering one of the boys in a cloak room and (I think) swearing at him and possibly threatening him in some way. Ugh. I really hadn't remembered that incident in a long, long time. We're talking about something that happened over 20 years ago.

But, yeah, ok: Deep down, I do remember those basketball boys. I don't like them. I admit it. It's probably good that I realize this, because young men I teach now or in the future shouldn't be unconsciously lumped in with those guys from my high school and just written off. That wouldn't do anyone any good.

My high school was quite upper-middle class, and these boys were all academically successful. But, now that I think about it: They DID hate fiction. They WERE resistant to the English curriculum. By grade 12, the teachers were pretty openly frustrated with them--even though I think we all knew they were going to do well by the world's standards.

And that whole successful by the world's standards thing touches on a very important point made in the early pages of Reading Don't Fix No Chevys: Many people might argue that boys don't need any extra help or consideration in educational settings; they still end up with a myriad of real-world advantages over girls. But, as I started actually to read our book, I was very pleased to see the authors clarify their stance on this issue. It's not that they believe that boys need defending from the effects of feminism on the curriculum or any such thing. It's not that they are worried that boys--at least the ones with socio-economic advantages, etc.--won't get jobs and make money. They are more deeply concerned with the extent to which boys' "development...through language" (16) might remain stunted, the extent to which they might fail to "embrace the life of the mind, the emotions, and the various forms of literate creativity" (16). Oh, right: those things. I do care about those things. So did my high school teachers. In fact, I'm pretty sure the boys' underdevelopment in these areas was what frustrated the teachers so much.

It's disturbing to me to realize it, but I think I perceived my English teacher to have picked me over the boys. And I don't just mean that he sided with my on a particular issue, or that he felt the boys' *behavior* in this instance should be corrected. It went way beyond that. I think I felt that "English" was sort of a domain in which I could turn my back on boys like that in favor of another kind of person and other values. That's ok for the teen-aged me. But, as I teacher, I need to re-orient myself to the problem in a very significant way. It's actually extremely valuable to me that I remembered that icky episode, because now I have the chance to be *conscious* of possible prejudices that might get in the way of my ability to teach many young men effectively.

I see now that Reading Don't Fix No Chevys really addresses something that does matter a lot to me in my teaching life. This subject matter has already been a lot more relevant to me than I might have guessed, and it will continue to be relevant.

As for the book-club process...I think that, until just a few hours ago, I felt relatively neutral about it. I now see that it's already, even at this early stage, allowed me to uncover a crucial formative experience that really had the potential to contaminate my teaching. I did not expect to get so personal--or so uncomfortable--in my reflections on a book that I initially perceived as having not that much to do with me, but I can see already that the book club process has the potential to foster this kind of personal reflection.

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What else do I want to say about Chapter 1 specifically? Well, first of all, I do think it's good that both the authors of this study and the (separate) author of the Forward to the book address right off the bat the skepticism some female educators might feel toward the project. Some might argue that (as I noted above), since boys still have many advantages over girls in the world of work and money, any special attention to male under-achievement in the educational domain might just serve to further bolster or "re-inscribe" male privilege. The authors did successfully persuade me that their project is not anti-feminist. I think we'd all be better off with more men whose literate potential was more fully actualized. I don't feel that attention to that issue takes away from (for example) my daughters' education. Indeed, I would much rather my daughters have more (rather than less and fewer) fully literate boys around them.

Another aspect of Chapter 1 that I appreciated was that the authors addressed the possibility that crude attempts to change English curricula to focus on reading materials that boys might like have the potential just to re-enforce boys' limited roles and preferences--"rather than to expand on or re-define them" (12). Since Chapter 1 is largely a "lit review," they note previous studies that have addressed this issue. The authors' balanced, nuanced consideration of this problem further won me over. I guess I did wonder a bit, when I first picked up this book, whether there was going to be much more to this book than just a crude recommendation to make reading materials more "boyish."

Finally, I appreciated the fact that the authors repeatedly, in the opening sections of the book, make reference to the fact that they themselves had not been "average" boys when it came to their own reading interests and literacy development--and they note that this fact makes them appreciate the extent to which the picture of the "average" boy can fail to capture complexity. Indeed, I was surprised by some of the details in the boys' profiles in the Interchapter immediately following Chapter 1. Clearly, these authors are trying to capture more than just crude averages, a rough approximation, a general picture, or stereotypes. I am, in several ways, impressed by the nuanced picture they're already starting to convey--even very early on in the book.