This is a response to a blog posting about Jobs being half correct. half-correct in this case is a little like being "almost pregnant." I do not know what Jobs is doing for recreation these days but it is not helping his ego problems nor his brain. (Believe me I love all that he does-well most-for Apple and love these computers and ipods.) I was a school board member for 19 years and I used to buy into the myth of "can't fire" until I discovered that it is a myth. I am a teacher, and a union member, and I do battle with much of what the union stands for and many of the ways they distract from quality education. recently I was an Associate Principal and worked with an amazing Principal who made it clear that the meme of "can't fire" is a myth.

    What she demonstrated is that to get rid of ineffective teachers, which she did, you have to have the guts to carry out real and honest teacher evaluations, you have to collect good data, you have to follow legal and contractual procedures, and you have to keep your eye on whay you are doing this-for kids. Then the community may be in an uproar because this teacher has coached their kids for 74 years or because she was the most fun teacher in the school, some faculty will get uncomfortable and then there is the union. I would submit that of all of these hurdles, the union may be the easiest because what they can do is proscribed in contract and law. The other too are time consuming, sometimes heart-wrenching emotionally, and often political and subversive.

    Jobs seems to have put all his brain cells into the sexy iphone of the future while his understanding of public education remains in the dark ages. From what I read and hear, the "run schools as businesses" has been largely discredited which is one reason the school bashing business organizations have moved on to new things. We still live with the damage they perpetrated (most ususally with good intentions) as we see parents and students entitled to challenge any and every decision made about their students. How would the business community address the administrative time required to deal with combative parents who twist the rules and regulations even in the clearest of drug, weapons, and fighting offenses?

    I say all this in the context of my sense that schools could do much better. But we have spend decades rearranging deck chairs rather than seriously rethinking and restructuring the education endeavor. Even Bill Gates (dare I mention the name) is way smarter on schools than Jobs and has money where it can count. He said some time ago that 12th grade is largely irrelevant in most of our high schools. As a teacher and a parent of a senior, I could not agree more. I would love to be part of making schools more effective (and like to think that I am) but lets get on with the project and dump the platitudes and the out-dated harangues and focus on what kids need, communities need, and our country needs from our schools. People have started doing this, too bad Jobs missed that bus.

    There is a certain irony in the criticisms of Jobs and those of his ilk who have soapboxes that allow for sound bites and news bits but do not require accuracy or experience. Selling computers to schools does make one an expert in them. Perhaps a better credential would be having children in school, which he does not. The irony here is that the big and necessary change in how schools do business is moving from the anecdotal and occasional to real performance data to drive planning and decisions, a process Jobs has yet to pursue from his soapbox.

    Schools must change, unions must change and we all need to come together to recreate a vision and system that looks to the future of our students and our communities.

David Marsters

Literacy in School: What About the Boys?
David A. Marsters, M.Ed
In my new position as Learning Center Coordinator/Reading Specialist I made a stunning discovery based on some hard data. But first you need to know some of what we do in the Learning Center. All day we have students, some assigned and some drop-in's, with a diverse set of needs who are with us to get support on completing assignments, taking tests, or addressing specific skill deficits. So as I greet students, ask what they need, and how I can help there is one uniform response. You have probably guessed it by now. The boys, who, based on the research, should have the greatest deficits, universally disclaim any need for assistance. Quite to the contrary, most of the girls eagerly accept assistance. It took me a while to understand the impact of my approach with the boys and to find my way around their initial refusal. In the interim, as I caught on to the pattern, I started joking with the boys about it. Their response was often a wry smile of acknowledgement that there was no way they were going to admit they needed help. As we smile at each other, we each know that we have found some common ground. Thus another great lesson in the power of the language we use with students in the classroom.

This experience captures the essence of what I have learned about boys and literacy and especially boys who struggle with literacy. First, much of their approach to learning anything literacy related is impacted by their evolving sense of their maleness. Secondly, the desire for independence that burns in their souls makes it difficult for them to admit to the need for help especially in a mixed gender environment. Third, the language we use with boys must connect with the language in which they are fluent. This is the language of humor, of action, of respectful gibes and counter gibes. This is part of the process of negotiating our common understandings. When considering the issues related to boys and literacy, each of these issues must be considered. Of course, their history with literacy must also be part of the considerations. Before going into these issues in greater depth, I would like to take a quick look at what the data says about boys as learners in school.

In this article, I am referencing academic learning or learning in school to differentiate it from outside of school learning. There is no evidence that I have seen that these same boys who do not read are not fully capable of quite sophisticated learning in other settings. My favorite example happened the day some very well-educated and sophisticated New York friends drove off the road to Lincoln and came to rest at a very precarious angle in deep snow on a steep bank. Fortunately no one was injured. When asked who could extract the car, I recommended a wonderful young man I knew well who had dropped out of school. When he showed up with his wrecker, he went about hooking cables and positioning his truck with the required levels of bravado. When he started the towing the owners blanched, as it looked entirely possible that the car would roll and they turned to me with that “Can we trust him?” look. My response was that this man knows more about the physics of getting this car safely up the bank than any of us so leave him to his work. Indeed, the car came out smoothly; a clear demonstration of some pretty sophisticated notions of force, vectors energy, and gravity.)

There is an ever-growing body of research and literature about boys and academic learning We are learning more about boys and their specific needs in schools and in our culture. Read Garbarino’s Lost Boys , Pollack’s Real Boys or a host of other author and a sense of urgency about the condition of boys and masculinity in our culture today becomes quite evident. These authors and others speak with some consistency about education in the lives of boys and its impact on them. The literature is clear about the developmental differences between boys and girls:
• Through elementary and middle school, boys develop at a slower rate than girls.
• The average boy in the classroom is more active than three-fourths of the girls. (Kindlon & Thompson)
• The early teaching of reading is developmentally appropriate for girls but not for most boys. (Kindlon & Thompson)
The data about learning disabilities, special education, discipline problems, and ADHD are quite compelling though they vary some from source to source. In the following, I rely heavily on Kindlon & Thompson’s Raising Cain (1999), Gurian’s A Fine Young Man (1998) and Sebastian Kraemer’s “The Fragile Male” (2000).
• More boys are diagnosed with ADD and ADHD than girls at a ratio of 4 to 1.
• 60 to 80 percent of diagnosed learning disabilities are in boys.
• Girls out perform boys by as much as 10 percent in grades in England.
• Two thirds more boys than girls have been identified for special education.
• Some studies have found girls out performing boys at the fourth grade level in reading by 10 points. (Taylor)
• Grade retention (“staying back” is almost purely a male phenomenon.
• 90 percent of discipline problems in school are male.
• Most suspensions and expulsions involve males.
Looking beyond education, there is substantial evidence that boys are at great risk in our culture. Looking at dropout rates, criminal activity, and school violence perpetrators fills out the broad picture a little more. Indeed, while many of those writing about boys extend their concern for the health of boys (and masculinity) beyond school and learning. Our focus here is learning and specifically literacy.

Boys’ evolving sense of their own maleness and individuality seems, based on both the literature as well as my own experience, to be in conflict with their early introduction to literacy. There is, what some have called, a “feminization” of instruction in the elementary grades. Boys have little access to male teachers or other male role models. Learning tasks are generally geared to the girl’s development, not boys. Activities like extended seat time, series or sequences of oral instructions, designated reading materials, and fine motor activities are difficult or even foreign for many boys. In addition much of the language of instruction is oriented towards feelings and emotions. There is strong evidence that boys not only lack the facility for the language of feelings (a condition which even has the name alexthymia [Kraemer]). Boys also find it unmasculine to engage in discussions of feeling or emotions. Taylor also notes that boys are drawn to different texts than girls and often read for different purposes.
There are steps we can take to engage boys in literacy activities (with thanks to Taylor).
• Men can take every opportunity to model reading. Boys need to see that men read and read for many different reasons.
• Provide a variety of texts for boys to read with strong non-fiction choices.
• Give boys a sense of agency around their reading by providing them with choices of texts.
• Provide boys with opportunities to read and discuss texts with other boys.
• To get boys engaged with texts, provide opportunities for them to read about issues or problems about which they have some feeling. This allows for “reading for inquiry [which] is different than reading for comprehension” (Taylor).
• Provide for more physical activity related to literacy. Acting out a plot or character, creating charts and posters, or utilizing technology may encourage engagement.
• Maximize opportunities for boys to demonstrate competence by drawing upon the information they know and their problem-solving skills.
• Teachers need to build relationships with boys that center on boys’ interests and expertise. (As a non-hunter, I never expected I would spend so much of my fall listening to detailed hunting stories.)
• Under the bravado of the “boy code” more often than not lies a high level of sensitivity. Sometimes we need to see boys through dual lenses. The bravado is paired with the fear of humiliation.
• On the other hand, we must resist the “boys will be boys” or the “little prince” syndromes. Pollard found that responses to boys are often at either end of the spectrum of responses-we either demonize them or let them off as “boys will be boys.” Neither response is appropriate nor helpful for boys. (One particularly astute young man saw some of the research on my desk and quipped humorously “Now you are going after boys will be boys? Not fair.” )

This morning I was explaining to a young man in the Learning Center about this article. We were discussing what works for him when he is assigned reading. He answered that he reads books that are about things he knows and he will reread those books many times. One can surmise that the rereading provides a strong sense of competence and expertise for this young man, a feeling not often experienced by him in school. He then summarized beautifully when he said “doing it and reading it are two different things.” What I hear in this statement and what I hear often from boys is request for a connection between the reading and the doing.

Addressing an issue like this invites generalizations and stereotyping. Clearly there are boys who like to read and are comfortable as readers in school. Yet it is also clear that adolescent boys as a group would benefit from rethinking our classroom approaches to literacy. I offer these suggestions with the full knowledge that other teachers have more strategies for addressing the gaps in male literacy and that many teachers have put in great time, energy, and expertise to assure that all their students have literacy skills.

It seems amazing (always) that the transtion to the beginning of the end of summer comes so quickly. This summer that transition was even more sudden when we went from the heat wave that smothered most of the country to 40 degree mornings here in the Vermont mountains. It has been a wet summer here-so wet farmers are struggling to get hay in and many crops have failed to flourish. In Vermont we complain about most weather but fall probably the least. While summer is easily my best season most folks like the cool, clear days, the brilliant foliage colors, the cool nights and even the occassional wood fire to keep the cold off.

I have never quite figure out whether my own dislike of fall had to do with natural rhythms or school calendars. As a student, I hated to see the end of summer and head back to the misery of schools especially when they were boarding schools. So which is it? Nature's shortening and cooling days, or the past trauma of leaving home and heading back to meet head-on with the school failures (theirs and mine)? perhaps a little of each but it is difficult to sort out.

I am pleased to find myself amongst people who want to change this culture and who want to do it with heart and spirit. Yesterday I was soaking wet in NYC with my 92 year old aunt while we looked for this tiny Japanese noodle house where we were to have lunch and this morning I awake on the other coast in So Cal under a beautiful blue sky looking out over the Pacific. The travel part was not great but trying to keep the connections between where I have been, where I am is always interesting in both a physical and metaphysical sense. And then there are the quotes from Rumi and Wendell Berry to consider......an auspicious start to the day.