Post: Call for Copy: Books for Boys

Posted by Crag Hill on 3/14/07

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InLand Needs Your Writing

Call for Copy: Boys and Reading: How Do We Get Boys to
Wrestle with the Pages?

A generation ago educators identified an achievement gap
between boys and girls in math and science. Boys were
taking and excelling in more science and math classes than
girls. With dedication, commitments across districts and
states, careful revision of curriculum, the gap closed. Now
when you peek in a calculus class you are apt to see as
many girls as boys.

Today, schools have another achievement gap educators must
address, one that has undermined English classes for
decades: Boys lag behind girls as readers. In Idaho, they
score lower than girls in reading and language usage on the
ISAT starting in the third grade and they never catch up.
In addition to standardized test data, English teachers
have tons of anecdotal evidence of boys’ attitudes toward
the study of literature: Boys are less likely to enjoy
reading or identify themselves as committed English
students than girls, attitudes that often affect their
behavior in the classroom. How can we turn this around? How
can we get boys to wrestle, to tussle, to tumble, with
pages of novels and biographies and essays and poems?

Some possible topics include:

What are books that your boys, at home and/or in the
classroom, read voraciously? What are books that get
squirming boys to slow down in their chairs? What books do
boys recommend to other boys? Mini-reviews welcome!

What strategies have worked for you to get boys reading
more than they have before? Over the course of a semester,
how do you encourage boys not only to read their favorite
writers/genres, but get them to try new writers? How do you
gets boys talking about books with other boys?

If you were to write books for boys, what would your story
be? How would you approach writing a book geared toward
male readers?

Besides books, what else do your boys read? What topics do
your boys read and talk about?

Send essays, classroom strategies, stories of success and
struggle, poems, surveys of your male readers, interviews…

Send articles to Crag Hill at 1111 E. Fifth St., or by e-
mail at hillc@sd281.k12.id.us

Deadline: March 30, 2007

InLand is a magazine that serves the interests of
approximately 350 K-College Language Arts educators in
Idaho and Eastern Washington. Readers love articles that
enlarge their understanding of a topic.

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Call for Copy: Books for Boys, 3/14/07, by Crag Hill.