It's a Guy Thing, But Some of Us Don't Understand

We all know that there are significant differences between males and females, even though any senior working on a prom date might not want to say them out loud. And without going into one of those seedy arguments found elsewhere on this site, I have to take on one of those differences today: ye olde gender gap in reading and writing.

Boys, the girls are kicking your butt, eating your lunch (ok, they’re gently removing it from you, and while they might take a dainty bite or two, they’re not eating the whole thing), taking you out to the standardized testing woodshed. Their passing rate on the CAPT reading tests has exceeded yours by as much as 17 percentage points in the last three years, and they’re always 5-6 percentage points higher in writing.

A whole lot of people out there who speak educationalese say that middle school boys lack male role models in the language arts, that because so many of their teachers are female, reading and writing are seen as less than masculine pursuits. Pish posh.

They’re just looking at the wrong role models. Middle school guys (and parents), you read about these role models on the sports pages all year long. You think that watching All-State wide receiver Kevin Macari stretch out to catch a fifty-yard bomb from Matt Milano is beautiful? You should hear Kevin with a microphone in his hand reading T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” in the school lounge.

Want to mock people who love to play with the sounds of language in their free time? Make sure that 6’6” 250 pound frame of Rams lineman Jack Atchue is out of earshot. He and his basketball teammate Graham Bradley are a lethal performance poetry duo.

Speaking of basketball players, if you’re looking for captains Scott O’Brien and Chris Rama during period 4, you’ll find them in their AP English class. First semester, you could have also found them in the poetry elective they took on top of AP English. And if there’s a cherry that goes on the top of this sundae, Scott, who some of you might also know as soccer captain and lacrosse standout, is the sports editor of the Courant, adding a third writing course to his load.

Of course, you don’t have to play a court sport to love language. All-State swimmers are among the most energetic, enthusiastic poets at NCHS, and Christian Higgins, a qualifier for the 2012 Olympic swim team trials, doubles up on his English classes, taking both Poetry Reading & Writing and Creative Writing in his final semester of high school.

Freeze the water and start skating on it and you’ll find ice hockey captain Tom Krieger, whose essay on how to miss a penalty shot is a model of humor writing that I use in my sophomore English classes. Two of last year’s captains, Andrew Leslie and Bo McGinnis, sent me pieces of their writing this year even after they had graduated.

If you’ve only recently started reading the newspapers, you’ve probably read about the bone-crunching style of lacrosse played by senior captain Joe Costigan. Not only did Joe excel in his Literature of the Holocaust and Creative Writing classes this year, but he took his sophomore research process so seriously that he ended up teaching research process to his junior English class.

And to take this piece of writing macho into the final inning, look at baseball captains Cameron Armstrong and Alex Farina. Cameron missed a few critical weeks of school early in the year, and made up the work he missed with an imagination and clarity that would have made you think he was in school every day with alternate day tutoring sessions. If you think Shakespearean sonnets are for sissies, make sure you don’t step into the batter’s box against Alex; if his fastball doesn’t shatter your helmet, he might read you one of the sonnets he has chosen to write this year.

The point is this, boys: don’t wait until your junior or senior year to realize that real men read and write. Yeah, we teachers can tweak the curriculum, we can offer extra help for boys, we can beg you to work with us; but the truth is, a lot of you just need to change the way you think about being a guy, and reading and writing.

When you do, you’ll realize that having a great academic reputation among the people who know you can be even more satisfying than having a great athletic reputation among people who don’t.