The Hunger Games for second graders

Last week, all my second and third graders were asking me for The Hunger Games, which I don't have in my elementary school library. So I read them Hansel and Gretel. At first, I wondered why it popped into my head, but it makes weird sense: kids fighting for their survival in the woods, violent deaths, same initial letters.

And then this weekend I started reading The Uses of Enchantment, by Bruno Bettelheim. I know Maurice Sendak has called him "Beno Brutalheim" and I know that there are many more recent feminist discussions of fairy tales that I probably should read, but I wanted to start by seeing what Bruno had to say for himself, and I came across this passage, just a few pages into the book:

The acquisition of skills, including the ability to read, becomes devalued when what one has learned to read adds nothing of importance to one's life. We all tend to assess the future merits of an activity on the basis of what it offers now. But this is especially true of the child, who, much more than the adult, lives in the present, and, although he has anxieties about his future, has only the vaguest notions of what it may require or be like. The idea that learning to read may enable one later to enrich one's life is experienced as an empty promise when the stories the child listens to, or is reading at the moment, are vacuous.

That perfectly expresses my criticism of so many reading curricula, including the one used at my school.

I think this is going to be an important book in my professional life.

Double, Double, Books, Boys and Trouble

I recently did a RILINK workshop on literacy programs for boys, and I'm linking to the handouts here, since a number of people who did not attend were curious.

I read (parts of) a lot of books on raising and teaching boys in order to prepare for the workshop, and I've been mulling over these books ever since. (I was going to write a brilliant literature review of all the books, and then I discovered it had already been done better than I could have done it. Le sigh. I will confine myself to informing you that Michael Sullivan's Connecting Boys with Books relies heavily on The Trouble with Boys and The War Against Boys, which reveals something about his perspective.)

Most of these books present similar evidence for the crisis in boys' literacy:

• For the last 15 years, girls have consistently outperformed boys on standardized reading tests.
• Boys are at least twice as likely to be diagnosed with a disability that could affect their reading. And their writing.
  
• Boys are less likely than girls to go to college--the gap is even wider between African-American boys and girls.
• Boys are more likely to commit suicide or be diagnosed with a mental disturbance.

What's different about the books are the causes to which they attribute these worrisome statistics. I was interested to learn, in Raising Cain, that there are only two well documented differences between boys and girls that are caused by nature as opposed to nurture. One is that boys are more physically active. The other is that girls develop language skills earlier. (A lot of you are probably thinking, duh. But isn't it nice to have studies confirm our observations?)

This provides an interesting explanation for why elementary school boys are consistently behind girls in most indicators of reading ability: they naturally develop language skills later.

So here's my question: if it's biologically normal for boys to be behind girls in reading, then why are we freaking out about the reading gap and heaping pressure on boys?