Boys Writing, or Trying to Write

NAEP Shows Most Students Lack Writing Proficiency

24,100 8th graders and 28,100 12th graders responded in 2011 to two 30-minute writing prompts that asked them to persuade, explain, or convey experiences.

Overall, only 27% scored at or above the proficient level.

Females outperformed males at both grade levels.

In 8th grade, 37% of girls scored proficient or above, compared with 18% of boys.

I am sad, but not surprised. Boys are wired for more instant feedback and gratification, plus a distaste for over-flowery language, or descriptive, stylistic prose. I know, that is a sweeping generalization and would never hold up in a journalistic venue. 

I would have to say, "In my experience..." or "From my perspective.." But this is my blog, a cross between a textbook on teaching and a journal on innovative but very messy learning curves put to paper.

So boys often say that they can "talk to the prompt" but not respond to it in writing. They think it is because it takes longer, grammar is looming, and spelling leaps out to be addressed. While those are all true, what is also roadblocking them is formal register, which I have written about here before. Both school and work operate at two levels: the consultative and formal. Consultative is a mix of formal and casual register. Example: “I can’t accept the assignment the way it is.” I love Ruby Payne's work on this, in her research on poverty. I was helped greatly by studying her books and hearing her speak when I was doing staff development in rural farmlands of CA.

No simple answers. [But I have many answers! - as those of you who know me are aware of]

Many frustrated parents. Homework is a nightmare for these boys who resist writing, and need coaching about communicating in print in the formal register. In my sessions with such boys, we have to talk it out in their own comfortable oral language, then transfer it to paper, putting faith in their powers of working memory, and THEN spice it up with transition words and synonyms for what just came out of their mouth.

"Describe what your math group did to come up with their answer today, in one paragraph." Actual assignment of a 7th grade boy today. And how is this, from yesterday: "Give three reasons why the cultural system of Mesopotamia experienced periodic breakdowns. Explain how geographic features contributed to these."  Geez.

Many of my kids think good writers are those who sit down and write a novel in a day. 

Many analogies are made, every night, by exhausted parents, to their 9-17 year old sons, about long-term gratification in sports, or electric guitar, or even gaming. They are trying to prevent power struggles. Or portray the amount of work and revision that goes into a piece of art, mastering an athletic skill, or fine-tuning a career path. Best analogy to writing assignments? Composing a song. 

I haven't decided what I think of this new book, and this author who claims to have the switch that turns boys onto writing. A colleague went to his seminar this summer, and said it was all very over-simplified, touting giving boys permission to write gross, violent, fantasy pieces, and that will magically make them skilled at writing other genres. OH!  

Really! If that worked, then why teach any genres at all?

BOY WRITERS: Reclaiming Their Voices

(from an interview with Ralph Fletcher, the author)

According to my research, many boys yearn to write what they read--fantasy. Yet for various reasons many teachers are

hesitant to allow them to do so.That's too bad. Teachers often say to me: "But the writing they do isn't very good!" I reply:

"So what? Let them take a crack at it. At least they're engaged."

I think we could find lots of other genres that would appeal to boys including:

--humor especially spoofs and parodies

--sports commentary

--scary stories or horror

--graphic novels or comics

Well, that doesn't seem like it would prepare them to write a paper in college on the history of architecture, or an interpretation of a tort in pre-law. Or even get a decent score on the NAEP test, above.

Hmmmm.

Alphabet Soup

So what does all that alphabet soup mean in a neuropsychologist report?  

I get that question a lot from parents, as they attempt to decipher the recent stapled diatribe on their child's brain processes. I forget how overwhelming it can be to see all that information about your child, and how badly a parent would want to cling to "fixing" it all. 

I tell them to talk to other parents, get online to get definitions of the acronyms, but don't spend too much time online, or you will find yourself sucked into the vortex of mommy blogs of special needs kids. Great reading, but too many pieces of advice about kids you have never met, so it feels thrice removed.

Essentially a report is a document that can help you get your child some help at school, confirm the intuitions you have had all along, and pave a road to reasonable goal-setting. A child with slow processing and RAN Scores (Rapid Automatic Naming) should not spend a time trying to get good at timed tests, for example. 

Also used for an IEE - Independent Educational Evaluation - when the school refuses to do testing on a student for special education.  Districts have to pay for these if indeed a learning disability is found. Most importantly [insert self-promotional statement here], a good teacher or learning specialist will be able to unravel the jargon of a report into an intervention plan. 

Receptive and Expressive Language are what I look closely for when demystifying a child's writing struggles. And, of course, attention and working memory. This is where the "L" of SLP comes in. A good Speech and Language Therapist can be an excellent resource for writing instruction, if they have attended numerous conferences on their own, harvesting nitty-gritty tricks outside of their formal training. Written expression is not in the coursework of the average program.  Good SLPs understand that writing instruction is multi-layered, have read research for fun, and touch deeply into kids who need more than a Socratic approach to writing, aka public school writer's workshop. 

Lots of journaling and ideation and breaking open creative pathways is a perfect journey for adults needing that boost, and feedback on their writing. But children need that, AND so much more. They need sentence drills, almost the equivalent of the fluency drills in well-known Multi-Sensory Curriculums.

Just yesterday I worked on having a student create sentences over and over that had certain parameters set by me, and he has come a long way in our summer work but has a long way to go. So many more things there are to "automatize" in writing mastery than in reading proficiency. 

Alphabet soup to me means getting kids excited about the fact that out of 26 letters we can create a million words.

The Pendulum of Parenting

Parenting is a subject which I think I know a lot about, yet I have no direct biological experience of. 

[Just steparenting. And being a nanny in my 20's. It so happens that the little girl in my charge has grown up now and tracked her nanny down. She still lives in Seattle and we are connected. Okay time for an "Awwww!"]

The reality is that I work with students, but the true "client" is the parent, and I have a lot of communication with them. Many times i find myself on hot coals, dishing out tips delicately, on hot topics like preventing power struggles, not pushing too hard, not giving in too much, how to discuss learning disabilities with kids, or their brain, and then there are sleep patterns, social skills, and nutrition. Like I said: Tender Topics. With some parents, I feel they are on their best behavior with me, but my intuition screams about what is most likely the reality at home:

The touchy parenting topic comes up in our Learning Specialists Consulting Group, (which is supposedly quarterly, but...well...). We end up delivering all sorts of tips to our clients for how to be a parent, a teacher, a coach, and a cheerleader to their child. And it only works if the parents are curious about how to improve as people, parents, and family members, and are curious about their child. (as opposed to having an agenda). At our professional gatherings, we end up swapping parent stories, since they are so much a part of the results equation, then espousing quippy suggestions about how to interact with anxious parents, marshmallow parents, or disorganized parents.

When all goes well, in the tutoring situation, we are on the same page about what the child needs, the parents establish warm and humorous rapport with me, and fine-tunes it with their child, so that they use their time wisely in between sessions. And then there are times when it does not go so well. That is when I bring out articles, handouts, or quickie memorable gems, like "When the outcome isn't important, give your child the power to choose. When it IS, make yourself clear, and decide, and don't waver. No apologies. No negotiation." 

I get some of this from my gut, and a lot of it from LOVE & LOGIC. Their premise is about preventing battles using choices and natural consequences. Their marketing materials make it seem, of course, that harmony will reign and that every waking moment will look like this photo, but I DO love the humble nature of the creators of the program: a father and son team who did not always collaborate!

I see all kinds of parenting in my private practice, and sometimes I broach the subject of suggesting they do something concrete to prevent power struggles, establish a "tone" in the home for learning, motivate without candy, and be engaged without being overbearing. That brings me to the pendulum. I steer parents into the center as much as I can, with compassion and humor.

The pendulum is what I observe, and parents are sometimes blind to, and most teachers talk about. Parents at one extreme end approach kids with a "They will find their way" mentality, often coupled with "I don't want to label them," and, at its worst, "I don't use any negative consequences." These are what I call Marshmallows. 

A version of this is the parents who simply have their kids run the show, and they insist on not interfering. They are trying so hard not to raise their voices, or be stern or punitive, that the children run the household. These are what I call Rotweiler Owners, because I have been in households where the dogs run the place. It is apparent the minute I arrive. In this case it is the kids. 

And finally, the Hover-ers. I don't use the term, "helicopter" because that implies that the parent is pressuring their child to succeed, or micromanaging them, but that is not always part of the mix. Sometimes they are simply so intertwined, anf blur the boundary between them and their child, that they apologize on behalf of their child, prompt them while they are speaking, help them so much with HW that the child does not get the satisfaction of independence, and oh, they worry. These parents are professional anxiety-ers. And remember that ADHD morphs into Anxiety, so genetic apples falling from trees are at play here. Drill Sergeant parents is what the media calls one sub-category of these.

So.....either I have a healthy distance from the maternal (and often genetic) tug, and am using that bird's eye view of the parent-child fabric of emotions so as to offer deep wisdom, or I am pompous, off-base, and would be better off keeping my mouth shut. The plethora of articles in the past year about these pendulums (with differing names and nuances) is a testament that I am not so far off.

In the Ideal World...Teaching like Homeschoolers

We should suspend the regular English curriculum for a semester and teach “Reading and Writing.” Every student would produce an essay each week and spend time at the teacher’s desk being edited. We would hire or train teachers to do what my first editors did: Cross out cute phrases, ask what I was trying to say, break overlong sentences into pieces, ask for specific examples, replace inactive verbs with active ones, and so on.

Deep Feedback and Deep Word Use

....Was reading a Mother Jones article about private vs. public universities and how well they teach writing, critical thinking, and the like. Of course there is the familiar argument about how we can't really teach sophistication, and the differences in how your papers are attended to, and by who (professor or TA), but what pranced out at me was mention of how paltry the actual deep feedback is, for written assigments, with  budget cutbacks.


That is what is sorely needed - a mentor, a teacher, a trusted adult, with whom to talk about your writing with. Sigh!


Pity the middle school Language Arts teachers, who subscribe to Educational Journals, read the articles that their guest in-service providers hand out, take summer intensives in how to better teach writing to hormonal media-soaked pre-teens, and YET, they don't have the time to really spend with them, one-on-one, discussing the revisions needed in their writing, create deep goals for their writing improvement, and simply have time to READ all those papers! Okay run-on sentence award there, for me.


Someday there will be a way to tape record comments of a teacher while they skim a paper, with some futuristic mind-reading software, and the student then uses those to create a revision, which then gets read by a Grad Student who is doing an in-service project as part of their teacher certification.  In the meantime we need smaller classes and great teachers and bigger budgets and (refrain of song repeats here)

And how I wish this Scrabble sentence were true!

This summer I am also awash in reflections on the Vocabulary Deficit. For BOTH the students whose families have "means", as well as the foster kids who I am overseeing the interventions for this summer, I see serious gaps in vocabulary, as we read fiction, non-fiction, and everything in between. I am shocked at the limits of their understanding of academic language (aka "book words" or the ability to draw from sophisticated lists of synonyms for what they are reading - or what they are writing).


I mean, I don't spend time with them on a word like "cabaret" or "arid" but when a soon-to-be 7th grader doesn't know what "finite" or "prohibitive" means, we may be headed for a roadblock or two in assigned readings in 7th or 8th grade. Duh. 


Oh, if I am in a thunderstorm kind of day, July mood, with fewer clients than I would like to have this month, and cleaning even the tops of door jambs to pass the time, forgive my melancholy. But the vocabulary gap is real. As is the dearth of adult feedback to our budding next generation of writers. 


As one of my favorite bloggers says, "Today I don't have any upbeat tips, just words strung together to make you think, and smile."