DADvocate

I think this one lies with the parent. Home schooled kids come from a different pool of parents: those parents who are so concerned with their kids' education, that they secede entirely from public schools.

Which is cool, that's their choice and all.

But of the kids that remain, boys do worse. I still think it has to do with parenting. DADvocate, you are obviously well read. Your kids see you reading and probably have for some time. My Pops was like that, always reading the paper or some law books & stuff. To boys, the behavior of the father is so important, if they don't see their fathers read or if their fathers don't really express an interest that their sons read, their sons will be worse at reading.

As far as the female proclivity for fiction, have you ever seen a Cosmopolitan magazine that was based in reality? :)
 

At least to a degree, I have to agree with you about parents. Reading is the central academic skill which all others pivot around. If you read and comprehend well, learning other subjects automatically become easier to some degree.

My children's mother and myself have both consistently emphasized the importance of reading, helped with reading and insisted our children read well. I know lots of parents that don't.
 

Patrick - One important point however, if the problem was strictly parents there would be no significant reason for the difference in boys and girls reading performance when considering that in homeschooling situations there is no difference, all according to this study anyway.
 

Well, no problem is strictly parents, I just see it as the glaring overall foundation for discrepancies - especially the ones that affect demographic breakdowns.

Like I said earlier, parents who choose homeschool may not fit into the control group of this study, because almost the whole group is obviously dedicated to their children's education.

To answer JW's question: Because boys can pee anywhere. In my neck of the woods, we like to call that the 'master bathroom' pass. Heh.

But in truth, and I'll say this to my dying day, boys follow the examples of their fathers. If a boy has a well read and educated father, he is far more likely to read and participate in his own education because he's following his father's example.

It also has to do with the peer group. If a boy's childhood friends are well read and participating in education, that boy is far more likely to do the same. If all that boy's friends do is watch TV, play video games and roughhouse, and actively shame other boys their age against being 'teacher's pets' and 'geeks,' that boy will put much less emphasis on education - and the school will have a tall, tall order to engage that student.

That's been my experience, anyway.
 

Patrick, your experience has been much like mine. I often wonder how much some parents watch TV, and otherwise goof off. My kids have a PS2, XBOX, Gameboy, etc. but they rarely get used (about once a month).

We planted flower and vegatable gardens, camped, hiked, and much more so far this summer. I agree that parents are a more important ingredient and that homeschooling parents aren't representative.

Maybe this is why we need more fathers involved in their kids lives, especially boys, to provide the needed, hopefully positive, role models.

But I do think that schools could incorporate non-fiction that boys like in their reading curriculum. When I look back at what I read as a kid the stuff I read for school was almost all fiction and the stuff I read voluntarily was almost all non-fiction.
 

I don't know that the divide is necessarily between fiction and non-fiction as much as between "talky fiction" and "action fiction". Boys were plenty engaged in reading literature when they were introduced to the great adventure and comedic classics--Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn, Treasure Island, and if we really want to go back, the Odyssey and Iliad. In today's schools, the first three aren't taught, and the latter two are taught in a way that drops the exciting adventure and war stories in favor of talk about characterization and poetic method.

This method of teaching, which isn't as much "feminized" as "deconstructionist", absolutely kills great stories and treats all fiction as an essay in disguise. Take Hamlet, for example. The greatest play in the English language, and it's an exciting story of ghosts, murders, and betrayals. But if you teach in a stupid way, say by analyzing it with respect to moronic Freudian theory, you lose all the fun.

From what I've seen, male fiction readers are more interested in the plot and story, while female fiction readers are more interested in characterization and language use. The problem then is that the currently trendy methods of literary analysis focus far more on the latter more "feminine" qualities of writing.

In summary--if you want to get boys to read fiction, include more Twain, Stevenson, Tolkien, and Lewis, and less Morrison, Faulkner and Hawthorne.
 

ok, my dad started reading to me when i was 3 weeks old, showing me pictures and reading it out loud to me, and i adore books, my reading level at school was.. extremely high and i could understand difficult books. but at school they gave me "classics" like of mice and men, the grapes of wrath, wasnt my kinda stuff, i would read science fiction, fantasy, horror, mystery.

the choices the schools gave me were so boring, ok i read them completely through in a few days (used to get 8 books a week out of the local library and read them all in one week, and not thin books, but 500 600 page books).

parents dont tell kids or show them, that its good to read, i heard people say we have never read a book in our lives as if they were proud of it.. thats the problem..
 

"the choices the schools gave me were so boring,"

Exactly. It always seemed to me like you could pick a great author's worst piece of work and sure enough that's what we were reading in school. What do "The Old Man and the Sea", "Romeo and Juliet", "Something Wicked this way Comes" and "Alas Babylon" have in common? They're all written by writers I enjoy but they're all stories I despise. In high school I didn't know I liked these authors because I refused to read anything else by them based on these works.

To be fair though, my AP senior English class did cover the occasional great work of fiction like "Slaughterhouse Five", "A Doll's House", and "The Stranger" and once in Jr High we read a great novel in "To Kill a Mockingbird".
 

Luckily, in the 8th grade I had an English teacher (female) who, somehow, really made literature come alive for me. Although we had a few required readings, ususally we had great leeway in choices of reading material. Although I was already an avid reader she broadened my appreciation tremendously.

In the 11th grade I had this same teacher again. What a pleasure! She was the best teacher I ever had in any subject at any level including college. Fortunately, I saw her about a month ago and was able to tell her this.
 

teachers like that are rare, but it does seem that more and more books being promoted in schools, are feminised, dealing with the emotional content of the books, rather than, the historical reality.
 

The girls read better simply because they mature at a faster rate, are ahead of the boys till they are 11 years of age academically and then the boys start to overtake them if given the chance to. The problem is obvious that teachers 99.5% prefer girls to boys and are prepared to help them over and above the normal teaching skills.

the boys then get thoroughly fed up and give up trying.

I have come across teachers in my son's schools who admit quite freely they do not care for boys, so I asked one of them who passed that comment to me why was she teaching in a mixed school.

She made it quite obvious by buying the girls "large" pictures as a gift and the boys all got "small pictures" all for the same event.

To my mind it is the emasculating of the males and the de-feminising of the females that are causing most of the problems in schools and in the workplaces.