Chloe's Chapter 5

Phew…this chapter really relieved a lot of the tension I was feeling with the authors’ ambiguous statements, and not much concrete advice for teachers.  I see now that they are not simply recommending that teachers change their texts.  I guess for the last four chapters that’s exactly what I feared.  I feared this because each student has a different interest, and so changing texts seemed like it wouldn’t solve any problems. 

 In this chapter, they mention that teachers need to enhance student interest in texts by front-loading and this is an idea that I can really get behind. This is similar to what I do in the listening and speaking class I teach.  I do this for exactly the same reason.  The listenings are based on random topics that not all students find compelling.  By showing them how these ideas connect to their lives, they are more willing to complete the listening and the post-listening activities.

In many ways this idea of creating connections reminds me of McCormick.  She mentions that teachers should help students relate to texts that come from a different historical time period by showing them how the past and present relate and are not so different.  She talks about it as historically situating the students.  This seems like an idea that Smith and Wilhelm would like, and could use.

One point of note that I want to discuss is about engaging students through proper instruction.  As they are discussing the students who enjoyed “My Sister’s Marriage,” they discuss the notion of how to engage more students. They say that “even more could be engaged with appropriate instruction – instruction that attends to the conditions of flow experience and that provides assistance in ways of reading that Vygotskian educators would endorse” (p.175).  I agree with teaching students through flow and engaging as many students as possible, but I wonder if haing done more instruction for this story would have disengaged more students.  In earlier chapters, Smith and Wilhelm make the point that the boys see the activities done in class as draining.  I wonder, am I contradicting myself? Or, is it okay to sometimes say, “Well, I didn’t engage everyone, but at least some of the students connected with this?” Or could we find a middle ground: teach and foreground some stories, and let students read for enjoyment on other stories?

Chloe's Chapter 4

There were a couple points that this chapter made me think about. I think that I find this chapter difficult because they bring up many components that boys need and want from their classroom environment.  The boys want the teachers to be more interested in them, they want the readings to be more interactive, they want a challenge at the right level, and so forth.  All of these are completely valid and I can see why they would want those, but what I find difficult (from the teacher’s perspective) is how to provide it all for them.  This is reinforced by how little concrete solutions the authors are giving us.  This chapter is better though than the others, because we get some ideas that are valuable.

As a teacher, I would love to get to know all of my students personally and be invested in them.  However, how realistic is that? Each classroom has potentially 20 students in it, and most teachers are teaching more than one class.  In some ways, the design of school does not allow for individuality.  Many of the boys said that "[teachers] want a collective" (p.100).  I don't think it's necessarily that they want a collective, but that one person cannot adhere to the needs of so many students.  Perhaps a compromise is to allow more freedom for the students, I like the idea of having students do an I-Search paper because they can choose a topic that is relevant and important to them.  Book clubs could also be a good way of letting students have more choice.

 I also liked the idea of the SRI as a way to process a story.  On a side note, I’m a little confused about how this would look.  If I understand it correctly, it can be more visual and hands-on.  This seems like it would give the students way of working through the story in a way that’s meaningful to them.

The other point that I definitely agree with is the idea that students should have more interactive activities.  In the example of the two English classes that were working on the play, the second class (where they had to act out portions) seemed much more successful.  I think having an interactive classroom is better anyways (not just for boys). I wonder though if that I the norm, because if they boys are afraid of looking incompetent, or foolish, would they do the interactive activities? I suppose that depends on the type of scaffolding that the teacher provides. What do you think?

Keira Chapter 6

Ugh! The last chapter was, for me, a big let down.

I did like this book, but I'm not sure I like the authors' conclusions. I'm left with quite a few questions.

First of all, I do kind of think that the authors were pretty invested, before the fact, in their "inquiry units"...and I'm not sure those impress me quite as much as the authors seem to think they should. My main reason: I don't love the idea of reading literature with an eye to finding evidence to use in a pro/con type of debate. Early college students have enough trouble doing justice to complexity; this type of training isn't going to make that problem any better. It could make it worse.

Next: In general, the authors say they end up believing that literature should be demoted from its special place in the high school curriculum. But...but...but: How does this conclusion fit with the fairly encouraging results they got from their story-reading protocols?

Also: Do Smith and Wilhelm adequately address the importance of rebellion in adolescent life? I don't think they do. At times, I suspected that "school" played an important role in the boys' lives as something in opposition to which they could define themselves. I don't want that to turn into a cop-out for teachers. But, still...I would have thought that this possibility might be discussed. I definitely remember thinking that the one girl I knew who wanted to be just like her parents was incredibly lame.

I may write more later.

Chapter 6

In this chapter the authors do a good job of summing up major key points in the book. One thing that is painfully obvious after reading this final chapter is that none of their conclusions have anything to do with males exclusively. Perhaps it doesn't matter, but it feels cheapened to me since the whole premise of this book is to focus solely on male student readership. What was the point? Why didn't they just do this study to include females, then, if these are the conclusions they are going to end with? Anyone have similar thoughts?


I was mostly underwhelmed by the conclusions because, for me, it didn't reveal anything "new." Maybe discussing it with you all will shed some light...


I did think that their statements about shifting from the "student-centered model" to a "learning-centered" model was interesting. Usually I hear about the student-centered classroom, while, shifting this to be a learning-centered classroom makes more sense to me (192-193).

Chapter 5

This post will most likely be pretty short because I, again, did not post right after reading and now have to go back through the chapter. (Ugh! Why did I not learn the first time?)


Some take-aways I got from this chapter:


1) Pick texts that invite the social (whatever that may mean--interaction, debate, connections, ect.). This will act as intrinsic motivation (147).


2) Teachers should choose texts that sustain engagement and embody the right amount of challenge. As I have said before...this is so much easier said than done since students will be at varying levels within a class and all have different interests. As we see from the way they read the various stories the researchers ask them to read, different students are engaged with different texts. Some like one story over another--they vary (as to be expected).


I thought is was pretty interesting that most of the boys tended to do story-driven readings when reading the given/assigned stories. This seems like encouraging news. The results are not devastating, most students are at the very least on the right track. Cup half-full view?


I agree with their point on front-loading reading. This is something that we talk a lot about in class and the authors' view on front-loading supports much of what we have already concluded. I think front-loading reading can also be used to achieve the authors' suggestions to "cultivate concern" for the characters in the readings (175).

Keira Chapter 5

This chapter focused on the boys' responses to four short stories. The big surprise, to the researchers, was that the boys not only overwhelmingly engaged with the stories, but did so in a notably story-centered way. They did not generally do merely "efferent" (to use a key word from a previous chapter) readings. They seemed to relate to characters as if they were real people, or at least relevant depictions of real people. They took the characters' moral and emotional experiences seriously. Smith and Wilhelm claim to be particularly surprised to learn that 19-20 of the boys were able to respond in this way even to the story ("My Sister's Marriage") that featured a female narrator and arguably a "girly" situation. For Smith and Wilhelm, the fact that the boys responded in this way has to do with the importance in their lives of the social. They form relationships pretty readily with characters because the social dimension of their lives is very important to them.

I have a few thoughts I want to share. The first is the least connected to the rest...but I have to bring this up. Did you notice that the researchers discovered that Mick could not read the stories? I did note earlier in the book that they described this boy as "functionally illiterate." Was it during this part of the study that they came to this conclusion about Mick? I suppose it's fortunate that we/ they don't encounter functional illiteracy *more* often...but still, I'm so troubled when I encounter it. I hope they offered to find some special help for this boy.

But, well...So my next thought is along these lines: Maybe these boys' English classes are not really as bad as they make them out to be. Maybe they're pretty decent, and that's why the majority of the boys really don't have any trouble doing story-centered reading. Maybe the boys have some sort of adolescent oppositional reason for making English class out to be some kind of enemy, when in fact it may be working for them much better than they will admit to the researchers. What do the rest of you think?

My next thought is: I do genuinely feel impressed by the subtlety with which Smith and Wilhelm have managed so far to handle their topic. It would be so much easier to say something simpler about catering to students' already established interests (You know: teach boys action-packed stories with masculine heroes). What they are actually saying is much more complex. It's more along the lines of: Boys can respond to characters and situations different from their own, but it would be a good idea to put more thought into sincere acknowledgement of their interests and literacies, to deal with fewer topics and texts but in more depth, and to make explicit reading strategies--and, also, make more explicit connections between topics.

But, as they note: The fact remains that the boys did pretty well with stories they read "cold"--with NO front loading, no instruction on strategies, and no explicit connections made to previous instruction. Do Smith and Wilhelm think they just did an awesome job of selecting very good/ relevant stories? What do you others think? I have not read the stories in question, but they sound not terribly unlike material I read in high school.

Keira Chapter 4

I found I was able to take most of the boys' complaints about school and schoolish learning seriously, and ended up feeling that some of the complaints had to do with issues I felt willing and able to address as a teacher. I was a little surprised, but actually pleased, to learn that one of the complaints had to do with what the boys perceived to be insufficient depth. They *wanted* to understand things in more depth, but the felt that school tended to jump too quickly from one topic to the next (107). Relatedly, they felt that *connections* between topics were underdeveloped. "Robert," a tenth grader, talks about the problem this way:

...after we finish reading, we just go on to something else. We go on to something else to do. Like, she'll give us some different work. After we read, we just close the book and do different work. (107)

The superficiality and discontinuity was related to the boys' feeling that school didn't give them a feeling of competence and control. According to Smith and Wilhelm,

These boys argued that school leaps from topic to topic, and that textbooks in particular do not provide the basis for the deep understanding that was important to a sense of competence and control." (107) 

I have a few thoughts here. First of all, it really does help me to see this picture of the problem from the angle that Smith and Wilhelm are taking because I think (perhaps like many people my age) I might be inclined to think that young boys (and to some extent girls) currently have such fragmented attention (related to media overload, internet surfing, etc.) that they won't value depth and continuity. It's actually extremely encouraging to think that maybe they in fact *do* value these things, and I'm thoroughly willing to do what I can to make connections explicit and to allow for as much depth of inquiry as possible.

One possibility I will raise, however, is that people with very fragmented attention may fail to recognize connections that teachers do earnestly attempt to develop. Without actually observing the boys' teachers, I'm reluctant to condemn their work. Still, it's extremely valuable, in my opinion, to note that the boys did seek depth of knowledge and connection between topics. Helping classes work better for them would surely involve good strategies for checking in with them about whether they were able to follow/ pick up on/ make connections. A bit of repetition and a lot of explicitness in this connection would probably (though not definitely) pay off.  

It's good for me to see a possible connection between the lack of a feeling of competence and control and a lack of depth and continuity. I had been a bit worried that the key to giving the boys a feeling of competence and control might be to dumb down and make generally more shallow the topics of study. The very possibility of that got my back up, and I felt unwilling to cater to the boys if that's what was going to be involved. I'm glad to see that there is another, much more palatable, way of understanding (and potentially solving) the problem.

Another problem with school on which the boys tended to agree was that the teachers, they felt, didn't (as Rev put it) "know you, care about you, recognize you" (99). I am a little surprised at the possibility that teachers' connections to their students might be as weak as the boys suggest. I was frankly STUNNED to read of Marcel's failure in Spanish. Marcel was a native Spanish speaker. *How* could his teacher fail to address this issue very directly? I know we don't always know which of our students actually speak Spanish at home, but if I thought there was any possibility that that might be the case, I would ASK. "Do you speak Spanish outside class? Where? How well? With whom? Since when?" If the answer is "with all my family and since BIRTH" I would for SURE find some way of individualizing the challenge of the class. I know it's possible that I'm underestimating the problems that this particular teacher may be dealing with, but: Holy Cow! That one example did sure seem to me to suggest that some teachers didn't really know who their students were.

For my own part, I'll admit to having hated high school by the end. But I can't say that my teachers didn't know me or bother to make any connection. (It's kind of funny to realize this, but I guess I'm actually facebook friends with my grade 12 English teacher.) There was, of course, some variability. Teachers of subjects in which I made the most effort took the most interest (there's a bit of a chicken-and-egg question there), but I even had at least one gym teacher who bothered to ask which sports I *did* like, and she went out of her way to include some activities I favored, and really praised me on the rare occasion that I did excel athletically. I think I maybe even got an "A" in my last semester of gym. (I was generally a C+ student in that subject). I guess I'd concede, though, that my school was relatively easy on the teachers. It wasn't riddled with social problems.

Chapter 4

On page 95 the authors note that one of the boys, Zach, "refused to read on vacation." As Chloe and I talked about in our meeting last night, so do I. I do not think that this is necessarily a bad thing, or something that should be indicative of literacy level or skill. I just wanted to point that out--I think that reading can be pleasurable, but whether or not it is done for that reason isn't necessarily a reflection of whether or not it is done and done well in school when it is required. In reality, many of these boys are going to get through school because they need to/have to. They are going to do the reading because the reading is assigned. I'm alright with that as long as they are actually doing it. I would prefer if the authors focus on how to get them to do assigned reading (which they do in the rest of the chapter) than whether or not these boys are going to be life-long novel readers, because, frankly, I don't care all that much. Great if they are. If they aren't, that's fine too.


I think that what we have been talking about in class has a lot to do with this chapter. The boys clearly were not willing to take on a task that they felt completely incompetent in. In my last post I griped about the difficulties of being able to meet each and every student at their correct level of challenge. Perhaps doing some metacognitive work on difficulty and creating a dialogue about competence and reading difficulty would have helped these boys to feel competent enough to take on reading tasks.


I was surprised that the authors found that so many schools did not necessarily encourage students to express their opinions, or, give them ample opportunity to do so. It's strange to me because I feel like this is a given. I imagine that having the weight of responsibility to teach a certain curriculum in these schools must be a part of that.


A lot was covered in this chapter and I'm obviously not going to be able to address all of it, but one point I did want to address was this discussion about the boys' "notions of reality" (124). It was important for the boys to engage in reading and learning that applied to their own lives or their immediate surroundings. The authors state, "Though the boys constructed their notions of reality differently, they all privileged what they considered to be the real and discounted what was not." My question is: How can we use this information and practically apply it in the classroom if our students' notion of reality varies so much? Are book clubs and giving students some choice the solution to this? Or do we need to do more? If so, then what are we to do?


Something I am still confused about from this chapter is SRIs. I am still confused about what this process would entail. Is anyone able to clarify? So the students are supposed to cut out pictures from magazines to go along with the story they are reading, but, I am completely lost on what they are actually supposed to be doing with these cut-outs. And how would we use this activity? Would this be in-class or a project that would be turned in? I am just having a really hard time picturing how this entire activity would be done or how it would be laid out.

Chapters 2 & 3

Chapters 2 & 3

Chapter 2, Going with the Flow, gives us a window into the motivations and desires of guys in their natural habitat.  The “flow” state referred to is that state in which self-consciousness is abandoned, and mental concentration becomes single-pointed.  This chapter helps us look at the circumstances in which boys experience this state, and why this state does not always occur within a reading context.  

Among other things, boys have a sensitivity to reading that seems to be highly emotionally bound: they want to feel an element of control, but still feel some challenge.  If the reading is too simple, they will become bored.  If it’s too difficult, those in this study indicated feelings of disengagement.  Likewise, how they reach the flow state within their own hobbies is by having the freedom to choose their actions.  Even in reading activities, if they are choosing it of their own free will, they are more likely to enjoy the reading act.  However, when the reading is assigned, the sense of control is removed, and the reading becomes work.

Additionally, when observing the subject’s preferred hobbies, we can see how feedback directly influences the flow experience, and how clear immediate feedback rarely occurs within school assignments (novels), but does occur more so in informational readings.  This once again reaffirms some of the stereotypes of male readers.  What is further highlighted is the engagement around efferent reading.  

For teachers this can be tricky, as the researchers point out that the flow state achieved in a particular context cannot necessarily be mined by teachers for use in another context.  Metaphors might help students understand the connection, but it’s unlikely that they will feel the connection, and therefore not be given to it.  So how does a teacher factor in all of these various factors?  Do they base assignments around Ss likes and dislikes?  Analyze student genre preference for curriculum creation?  While it is not so clear cut, and no common text could ever be effective for a classroom of different students, understanding the conditions in which students enter into a freer state of mind can help shape the approaches taken by teachers when creating and administering assignments.

Chapter 3

Chapter 3 provided a lot of food for thought.  Titled, Do the Right Thing; The Instrumental Value of School and Reading, the researchers brought to light student tension in response to the view of reading versus the application of it.  What struck me is that most of the interviewees had internalized a view of reading as positive and “something you should do,” but they just didn’t want to do it.  Their “profound belief in the importance of school” seems at odds with the preface for this study, even.

Judging from what we’ve studied in class, it would seem possible to harness this type of attitude similar to how the teacher who made Death of a Salesman relate to sports (in a sport-oriented high school).  Still, is there a magic bullet in all cases to make an assignment personally viable?  Obviously not, and I feel like this exemplified teacher may be an exception to the rule (but who am I to say, having no experience with high school classes?).  

Anyway, contrasting with students’ proclaimed respect for other case studies who were well read was an opposing view that just reading wasn’t enough: that creating social bonds and having real world experience was equally or more important.  Is there any way to cross these views in a classroom and integrate them into a reading assignment?  Where do street smarts meet academia?  

I guess I’m still left with just as many questions as when I started this book, although I am intrigued by the candor of the researchers and test subjects.  When we get into the pedagogical side of things, I’ll be curious how the approach will differ from current teaching trends, or if it will reinforce modern practice (as the book is from 2002).