TED Talk Review: Let's Hear It for Boys

http://www.ted.com/talks/ali_carr_chellman_gaming_to_re_engage_boys_in_learning.html

One of the concepts we have emphasized so far, is the influence of culture on students and how they learn. From Teaching Reading in the 21^st Century: Motivating All Learners, we know that “The social and cultural backgrounds of students have a huge and undeniable effect on their learning. Unless we as teachers take students’ social backgrounds and modes of learning and thinking into account, little learning is likely to occur” (Graves et al. 2011, p. 11). Interestingly enough, we have mostly focused on how culture based on socioeconomic status or ethnicity has affected reading and learning in our discussions, perhaps forgetting one of the elements of culture that we will come in contact with wherever we teach—gender.

In her TED talk, Ali Carr-Chellman delves into some of the inherent differences between boys and girls, and explains how schools presently are not friendly to the culture of boys. I have heard in multiple statistics and classes that there is a significantly decreasing amount of men at college, though it hardly seemed like a catastrophic problem to me before. At the time, the low-key feminist in me was rejoicing, “Hooray! Girls get degrees!” but it wasn’t until Carr-Chellman brought up the greater problem, that education is not serving the male 50% of our country well.  Her talk is titled, “Gaming to Re-Engage Boys in Learning,” but it discusses so much more than that, from how drastic the differences between boys and girls are in suspension, expulsion, and ADHD diagnoses to how teachers and our school systems are pushing boys away.

I initially chose this TED talk because it reminded me of a child I know that I used to babysit. “Gaming to Re-Engage Boys in Learning” as a title spoke directly to him. School was not his area of expertise by any means. Getting through homework was always a struggle, and he was never remotely interested in or inspired by any of his projects. But give him a Playstation, Xbox, Wii, or even Super Nintendo controller, and he was incredible. He was always better than me at anything we played, even when it was a game I owned. I used to hide Crash Bandicoot from him because once he hit the power button, we definitely weren’t doing anything for the rest of the day. One summer, we spend the whole week after he got The Beatles Rock Band trying to beat it, only for him to eventually kindly ask me to stop playing because I was slowing him down with my sub-par scores. Something about games was so much more intriguing to him than anything else, especially school work. So naturally, when browsing TED talks and finding this one, I was pulled in by interest right away.

Ali Carr-Chellman’s talk proved to be far more diverse than I anticipated. She drew light on plenty of ideas beyond just gaming. She explained exactly how our school culture conflicts with boy culture. Her three main theories are that 1.) Schools’ zero tolerance for violence pushes them away 2.) They hate writing and 3.) There are VERY few male teachers. So where do the problems lie? Carr-Chellman notices that we essentially expect boys to behave as girls in classrooms, “Sit down. Be quiet. Do what you’re told. Manage your time, BE A GIRL.” The classroom regulations combined with the complete prohibition of the toys and subjects that interest them and no male teachers to look up to give boys the impression that school is for girls. Let me say that again, we are convincing our boys that education is a girl-thing. I probably would never have come to that conclusion on my own, but pieced together the way she puts her evidence in this TED talk, it is undeniable. We need to revamp education to be boy-friendly.

I have been trying to think about what we would do if it were another culture that was being told school wasn’t for them. For instance, if we were not including Mexican culture in schools with Mexican populations, what would we do? We would add readings about Mexican culture and food, add stories by Mexican authors, and go out of our ways to encourage them in learning English while not losing any of their Spanish. Maybe we, as mostly female teachers, are speaking only in a foreign language to the boys. Graves’ social cultural theory implores us as teachers to connect our material to the culture of our students, so what do we do for our boys?

As future teachers, this is something we ARE going to encounter, probably daily. One of the things Ali Carr-Chellman says needs to change is teachers’ attitudes about boys and boy culture. If you were teaching at a Columbus school with a large percentage of Somali students, would you try to include Somali culture in your lessons? Would you make adjustments to accommodate how they learn like you would for any other student? Yes, boys like guns and no, toy guns are not acceptable at school, but couldn’t we allow them to write stories about mysteries or cops or monsters instead of saying those are unacceptable topics? Can’t we as teachers respect videogames just as much as we would respect playing house or playing school as after school activities? Can’t we let them read stories about warriors or knights or even sports heroes? Think back to that boy I used to babysit, how could his school experience be different if he had a teacher that valued his talent in video games? Or even one that tried to include video games in her lessons from time to time? Would he be more intrinsically motivated to learn or more involved in his education?

“Gaming to Re-Engage Boys in Learning” is much more than a plight to allow video games in schools, it’s a plight to allow boy culture, real, genuine, playing-in-dirt, sword-fighting boy culture in schools, because if we don’t, we are going to lose them more and more every year. It’s just like Sir Ken Robinson said in his TED talk we watched—kids are in a highly stimulating environment all the time because of technology. We need to make school equally as stimulating. In a country that prides itself in education for all, Ali Carr-Chellman points out that we may not be fairly educating all, just because of a culture clash, and I couldn’t agree more. Culture is has “a huge and undeniable effect” on how our students learn, so why not give teaching to their culture a try? Take the time to watch Ali Carr-Chellman’s TED talk, “Gaming to Re-Engage Boys in Learning.” It had a huge effect on me, and I think it will for you too. I couldn’t recommend it more highly.

Graves, M. F., et al. (2007). Teaching Reading in the 21st Century (5th Edition). Boston: Allyn and Bacon.

1st Grade Phonics Meets 6th Grade Math

So you’re teaching Math in a 6^th grade classroom, how does 1^st grade Reading affect you at all? This week’s reading from the Graves textbook focuses on how primary students start to become readers, from pronouncing sounds to learning the alphabet. This might not seem obviously connected to middle school classes, other than Reading of course, but the two might be more connect than we think right away.

Of course there is the obvious connection: If students don’t learn to read properly in the primary grades, doing their reading for their classes by the time they reach middle school is going to be a struggle, both frustrating for the student and you as a teacher. But how can the methods Graves describes to teach phonics and letter recognition be related to upper grades? My theory is this, most students in my future classroom will already have a pretty strong foundation in reading, but there is no such thing as too strong of a foundation. Maybe I won’t be helping students with phonological awareness activities or letter-sounding, but writing and reading can easily fit into my classroom. Maybe instead of reading a story book aloud, I could read a more complicated story problem aloud and treat it as if it were a book. Graves mentions about stopping mid-book to, “Briefly define the new vocabulary and model one or more strategies. You might ask a question, clarify something that is difficult to understand, make a prediction, or solicit questions and comments from the children” (175), which is completely applicable to solving story problems! If I treat story problems as a story, stopping to ask questions or explain confusing statements, reading story problems is certainly a way of reading aloud. It might not seem the same, because we would be focusing on elements of our math problem, not how to say and spell words, but my 11 year old students would be getting some of the same reading benefits that 6 year olds get from being read to by their teacher.

This is precisely what Chapter 2 of Creating Literacy-Rich Environments for Adolescents was emphasizing—connecting subjects in a visible way to students to follow and learn from. It gave the story of how one high school created connections in how classes were taught by keeping things consistent from class to class in terms of note taking, vocabulary, writing, and other elements of school. Imagine, if I started every Math class with a story problem, and English started class with a poem or short story, and Social Studies started class with a first-person account of what they would be studying that day, every class would start the same way, with reading aloud!
Reading out loud as a class isn’t the only possible connection. Beginning readers are encouraged to practice their writing, even when they don’t know how to spell words “properly.” Isn’t that just like the math concept of showing your work so teachers can see your thought process? What about having an exit slip in a math class or a “crystal ball” prediction during science lab to get students writing? (Ivey & Fisher 47) It may not be the most apparent connection in the world, but I think the way we teach and reinforce basic reading skills is completely related to how we teach different subjects to older students.

Graves, M. F. (2007). Teaching Reading in the 21st Century (5th Edition). Boston: Allyn and Bacon.

Ivey, G. &. (2006). Creating Literacy-Rich Schools for Adolescents. Alexandria: ASCD.

What Motivates You to Read?

From what I have read in my classes and learned in real life, motivation is one of the most complicated and difficult areas for future teachers and current teachers alike. There is something ever so complex about how to inspire so many different minds in your classroom or future classroom. With all the various theories and speculation about motivation, it is hard not to get overwhelmed. As a future middle school teacher, I found both of the readings valuable and was able to take information from both of them to apply to my future classroom. Kelly Gallagher’s “Nine Reasons for Reading” chapter was geared towards an older audience and the Graves Chapter 3 felt as though it was geared towards a younger audience.

With “Reading Reasons,” I tried to really consider how these reasons to read that high school students came up with will apply to my classroom of slightly younger students. Some of them would be more difficult to relate to them than others. For instance, explaining to a group of middle school students that reading is necessary for college is much less applicable than explaining that it is going to be particularly important in high school, and emphasizing that reading is hard, but we need hard things in our lives might not be something they are interested to hear. I was thinking about teaching Math, since I don’t know at this point if I will end up in Math or Reading, and the reason that reading is important financially really hit me. I would love to do a class project with allowance tracking or even pretend class bills. We could create a classroom community where students had to research funding and spending, but in a simpler way than with high school students.

With the Graves chapter, I was really thinking about the students that will be in my classroom. They with be ages 9-13, so opinions on reading may have already formed. They might also have in mind if they are a “good reader” or a “bad reader.” I hope that I can create a fresh start environment for my students where they can all be good readers and all can love to read. In that, there was one little line that really hit me on page 54, “Perhaps the best books offer an experience that is similar to looking through a window at twilight. At first you see through the window into another place, but, as the light gradually fades, you end up seeing yourself.” My students will be at a time in their lives where everything they knew about themselves and their world is starting to change. With that quote, I realized that I can help them learn about themselves and their world through the books I have them read. Maybe the best way to motivate my students is to have them divided into book groups, where each group is filled with students who are different from each other, but by the end they will all be reflecting on the book and themselves together, once it’s dark and the window reflects themselves. I think motivation can seem daunting, but the trick is finding what motivates us now, and when we were children, and I think Graves has it, it’s finding literature that allows us into another world, different from our own, but leaves us thinking about our own lives, no matter the age.

(2003). Nine Reasons for Reading. In K. Gallagher, Reading Reasons: Motivational Mini-Lessons for Middle and High School (pp. 15-38). Portland: Stenhouse Publishers.

Graves, M. F. (2007). Teaching Reading in the 21st Century (5th Edition). Boston: Allyn and Bacon.

Cultural Identity and Reading

There are some things in life that shape who we are and how we view the world, though we may never notice their presence or effect on us, like socioeconomic status, gender, race, and culture. To some, the definition of culture may be as simple as our ethnicity or society we live in, but to me, culture is all of those things and more, ranging from age to education. When I think about my personal culture, I notice that it takes me a while to form my identity because culture is so multifaceted. I am female, white, from a middle-class family, where both parents work for a car company, my parents are still together, I am a college student, I am an Ohioan, more specifically a Toledoan, I am Catholic, I have an extremely close extended family, I am an oldest child, and I am a musician. Based on that description of my culture, I think you can find many of my identifying qualities, and you may also notice that there is no one with a cultural identity quite like mine. This identity affects everything I do, how I do it, and how others see me. One effect is has is how I read.

To be completely honest, most of my reading is academic, which comes from the “college student” part of my cultural identity. This means that generally speaking, most reading I do is for information at this place in my life. Looking back, however, there were times when reading was more than a means to pass exams and write papers. Even a few years ago in high school, I genuinely enjoyed reading, even for classes. I went to an all-girls high school (another part of my cultural identity), but we still read all of the classics—white, male literature. Occasionally, my teachers would make their best effort to throw in anything of literary merit written by a woman, like Toni Morrison’s Beloved. We, as a class, noticed that we were more excited and more engaged when reading books by female authors. We appreciated the characterizations more and the descriptions of emotions. Unfortunately, this was not the norm, meaning that most of the time, I am reading something that I am not particularly culturally connected to as a girl, which makes it less exciting to read and less relatable. Why is it that all of “the classics” are written by white men? Are there other works we should add to the classics to make reading more culturally relatable to everyone?

Another aspect of my cultural identity is that I am a future Math teacher. That being said, the Introduction to Ivey and Fisher’s Creating Literacy Rich Schools for Adolescents connected to me personally because of the many references to Math teachers regarding the phrase “Every teacher is a teacher of reading.” I did not like how they played the Math teachers as the enemies of reading in every class because to me, that is unfair stereotyping. In my opinion, Math can incorporate reading, writing, and speaking, it is just more difficult to involve it than it would be for a Social Studies class. It is my hope that I can bring reading into my future classroom by having students write explanations or story problems and share them with each other, as well as by bringing in creative projects that could even involve interviewing people about how they use math in their jobs or brief history presentations about where the math we’re learning came from. It is also my hope that English teachers can promote Math, and Science teachers can promote Music. All the subjects have their connections, and it would be beneficial for the students to have that intertextuality in the back of their brains to take their learning outside the classroom.

Ivey, Gay and Douglas Fisher. (2006). Creating Literacy-Rich Schools for Adolescents. Alexandria: ASCD.

Literacy Backgrounds

Reading and literacy at this point in my life are expected of me. I am very much expected to be able to read textbooks for class, street signs and directions, cookbook instructions, and facebook updates, and tweets. That being said, for as much as I need and use my reading ability, I haven’t spent any particular amount of time considering how or when I learned to read. I do remember that for me, reading has always been a family affair. My parents and extended family read to my sister and me often, probably too often in our opinion at the time, and we were asked to practice our reading out loud at home. Because I am from a family that values reading, Amy Suzanne Johnson’s research on the literary history of the Jones family draws my attention to the reading process, both as I experienced it and as the women of the Jones family did in her article, “The Jones Family’s Culture of Literacy.” Johnson spent time interviewing the Jones family of Pinesville to uncover how reading and the process of learning to read occur in their household. In her research, she discovered that the Jones view literacy very highly, with one kindergarten teacher in the family and extended family who all take considerable time to read to the younger generations. While Pinesville may be a small southern rural town where African Americans have historically been discouraged from literacy, reading is emphasized as a necessary right and gift for this family. From writing letters to each other to reading the newspaper and from reading the Bible at church to reading story books at home, these women, Harriet, Sally, and Lola demonstrate to young KiKi that reading is a large part of their life, which influences KiKi’s attitude towards reading.

While the Jones family was creating an encouraging learning environment for KiKi to learn to read, not all families place importance on reading or display positive reading habits in their own lives for their children to observe and follow. I have never really considered the dramatic impact that a home environment can have on a child’s ability to read at such a young age. More eloquently, “The Social and cultural backgrounds of students have a huge and undeniable effect on their learning” (Graves et al. 2011, p.11). What kind of differences could arise from a difference in background? A positive reading background may mean parents or babysitters who read to the children from a young age, parents from higher socioeconomic statuses or with higher level jobs where children hear a more diverse vocabulary, or children who are encouraged to have and use their own library cards. A negative reading background could look more like a home where parents come home from long hours exhausted and turn on the television rather than read books, parents with limited vocabularies or who don’t speak English at home, or children who do not visit their public libraries. These differences could even be more subtle and certainly more varied, but either background is likely to have an effect on how the child learns and views reading.

The complication comes with how to teach students from all upbringings. Teaching two students with completely different childhoods regarding reading cannot yield the same results. These preexisting differences that children may not even know are present require teachers to take the time to learn about the literacy history of the families, even on a basic level, to better teach the children in their classes. My fear is that they aren’t. While it has been a while since I was undergoing the process of learning to read, I do not remember much differentiation based on preexisting differences. How can children living in New Mexico read and comprehend a story on a standardized test about building a snowman the same way a child from North Dakota? How can a child whose family only speaks Spanish at home be expected to know as many vocabulary or spelling words as a child from an English speaking family? How can a love a reading be instilled in a child who goes home to a family that never reads compared to KiKi from the Jones family, who reads every night? They’re tricky questions, but questions that need to be addressed regardless. Everyone deserves to learn to read, but not everyone is going to learn the same way or in the same timeframe, and that is the important thing to remember. Hopefully, as this semester continues, we will learn about how we can accommodate for these differences in our future students.

Graves, M. F., et al. (2007). Teaching Reading in the 21st Century (5th Edition). Boston: Allyn and Bacon.

Johnson, A. S. (2010). The Jones Family's Culture of Literacy. The Reading Teacher, 33-44.