Mt Abe

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Connecticut River old bridge

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My article on boys and literacy

Literacy in School: What About the Boys?
David A. Marsters, M.Ed
In my  position as Learning Center Coordinator/Reading Specialist I made a stunning discovery based on some hard data. But first you need to know some of what we do in the Learning Center. All day we have students, some assigned and some drop-in’s, with a diverse set of needs who are with us to get support on completing assignments, taking tests, or addressing specific skill deficits. So as I greet students, ask what they need, and how I can help there is one uniform response. You have probably guessed it by now. The boys, who, based on the research, should have the greatest deficits, universally disclaim any need for assistance. Quite to the contrary, most of the girls eagerly accept assistance. It took me a while to understand the impact of my approach with the boys and to find my way around their initial refusal. In the interim, as I caught on to the pattern, I started joking with the boys about it. Their response was often a wry smile of acknowledgement that there was no way they were going to admit they needed help. As we smile at each other, we each know that we have found some common ground. Thus another great lesson in the power of the language we use with students in the classroom.

This experience captures the essence of what I have learned about boys and literacy and especially boys who struggle with literacy. First, much of their approach to learning anything literacy related is impacted by their evolving sense of their maleness. Secondly, the desire for independence that burns in their souls makes it difficult for them to admit to the need for help especially in a mixed gender environment. Third, the language we use with boys must connect with the language in which they are fluent. This is the language of humor, of action, of respectful gibes and counter gibes. This is part of the process of negotiating our common understandings. When considering the issues related to boys and literacy, each of these issues must be considered. Of course, their history with literacy must also be part of the considerations. Before going into these issues in greater depth, I would like to take a quick look at what the data says about boys as learners in school.

In this article, I am referencing academic learning or learning in school to differentiate it from outside of school learning. There is no evidence that I have seen that these same boys who do not read are not fully capable of quite sophisticated learning in other settings. My favorite example happened the day some very well-educated and sophisticated New York friends drove off the road to Lincoln and came to rest at a very precarious angle in deep snow on a steep bank. Fortunately no one was injured. When asked who could extract the car, I recommended a wonderful young man I knew well who had dropped out of school. When he showed up with his wrecker, he went about hooking cables and positioning his truck with the required levels of bravado. When he started the towing the owners blanched, as it looked entirely possible that the car would roll and they turned to me with that “Can we trust him?” look. My response was that this man knows more about the physics of getting this car safely up the bank than any of us so leave him to his work. Indeed, the car came out smoothly; a clear demonstration of some pretty sophisticated notions of force, vectors energy, and gravity.)

There is an ever-growing body of research and literature about boys and academic learning We are learning more about boys and their specific needs in schools and in our culture. Read Garbarino’s Lost Boys , Pollack’s Real Boys or a host of other author and a sense of urgency about the condition of boys and masculinity in our culture today becomes quite evident. These authors and others speak with some consistency about education in the lives of boys and its impact on them. The literature is clear about the developmental differences between boys and girls:
• Through elementary and middle school, boys develop at a slower rate than girls.
• The average boy in the classroom is more active than three-fourths of the girls. (Kindlon & Thompson)
• The early teaching of reading is developmentally appropriate for girls but not for most boys. (Kindlon & Thompson)
The data about learning disabilities, special education, discipline problems, and ADHD are quite compelling though they vary some from source to source. In the following, I rely heavily on Kindlon & Thompson’s Raising Cain (1999), Gurian’s A Fine Young Man (1998) and Sebastian Kraemer’s “The Fragile Male” (2000).
• More boys are diagnosed with ADD and ADHD than girls at a ratio of 4 to 1.
• 60 to 80 percent of diagnosed learning disabilities are in boys.
• Girls out perform boys by as much as 10 percent in grades in England.
• Two thirds more boys than girls have been identified for special education.
• Some studies have found girls out performing boys at the fourth grade level in reading by 10 points. (Taylor)
• Grade retention (“staying back” is almost purely a male phenomenon.
• 90 percent of discipline problems in school are male.
• Most suspensions and expulsions involve males.
Looking beyond education, there is substantial evidence that boys are at great risk in our culture. Looking at dropout rates, criminal activity, and school violence perpetrators fills out the broad picture a little more. Indeed, while many of those writing about boys extend their concern for the health of boys (and masculinity) beyond school and learning. Our focus here is learning and specifically literacy.

Boys’ evolving sense of their own maleness and individuality seems, based on both the literature as well as my own experience, to be in conflict with their early introduction to literacy. There is, what some have called, a “feminization” of instruction in the elementary grades. Boys have little access to male teachers or other male role models. Learning tasks are generally geared to the girl’s development, not boys. Activities like extended seat time, series or sequences of oral instructions, designated reading materials, and fine motor activities are difficult or even foreign for many boys. In addition much of the language of instruction is oriented towards feelings and emotions. There is strong evidence that boys not only lack the facility for the language of feelings (a condition which even has the name alexthymia [Kraemer]). Boys also find it unmasculine to engage in discussions of feeling or emotions. Taylor also notes that boys are drawn to different texts than girls and often read for different purposes.
There are steps we can take to engage boys in literacy activities (with thanks to Taylor).
• Men can take every opportunity to model reading. Boys need to see that men read and read for many different reasons.
• Provide a variety of texts for boys to read with strong non-fiction choices.
• Give boys a sense of agency around their reading by providing them with choices of texts.
• Provide boys with opportunities to read and discuss texts with other boys.
• To get boys engaged with texts, provide opportunities for them to read about issues or problems about which they have some feeling. This allows for “reading for inquiry [which] is different than reading for comprehension” (Taylor).
• Provide for more physical activity related to literacy. Acting out a plot or character, creating charts and posters, or utilizing technology may encourage engagement.
• Maximize opportunities for boys to demonstrate competence by drawing upon the information they know and their problem-solving skills.
• Teachers need to build relationships with boys that center on boys’ interests and expertise. (As a non-hunter, I never expected I would spend so much of my fall listening to detailed hunting stories.)
• Under the bravado of the “boy code” more often than not lies a high level of sensitivity. Sometimes we need to see boys through dual lenses. The bravado is paired with the fear of humiliation.
• On the other hand, we must resist the “boys will be boys” or the “little prince” syndromes. Pollard found that responses to boys are often at either end of the spectrum of responses-we either demonize them or let them off as “boys will be boys.” Neither response is appropriate nor helpful for boys. (One particularly astute young man saw some of the research on my desk and quipped humorously “Now you are going after boys will be boys? Not fair.” )

This morning I was explaining to a young man in the Learning Center about this article. We were discussing what works for him when he is assigned reading. He answered that he reads books that are about things he knows and he will reread those books many times. One can surmise that the rereading provides a strong sense of competence and expertise for this young man, a feeling not often experienced by him in school. He then summarized beautifully when he said “doing it and reading it are two different things.” What I hear in this statement and what I hear often from boys is request for a connection between the reading and the doing.

Addressing an issue like this invites generalizations and stereotyping. Clearly there are boys who like to read and are comfortable as readers in school. Yet it is also clear that adolescent boys as a group would benefit from rethinking our classroom approaches to literacy. I offer these suggestions with the full knowledge that other teachers have more strategies for addressing the gaps in male literacy and that many teachers have put in great time, energy, and expertise to assure that all their students have literacy skills.

Wordle – Beautiful Word Clouds

Check out this website I found at wordle.net

Buddhist Wisdom

He who experiences the unity of life sees his own Self in all beings,
and all beings in his own Self, and looks on everything with an
impartial eye.

Csikszentmihalyi: Ten paradoxical traits of the creative personality.

Csikszentmihalyi: Ten paradoxical traits of the creative personality. :
1. Creative people have a great deal of physical energy, but they?re also often quiet and at rest.
2. Creative people tend to be smart yet naive at the same time.
3. Creative people combine playfulness and discipline, or responsibility and irresponsibility.
Despite the carefree air that many creative people affect, most of them work late into the night and persist when less driven individuals would not. Vasari wrote in 1550 that when Renaissance painter Paolo Uccello was working out the laws of visual perspective, he would walk back and forth all night, muttering to himself: ?What a beautiful thing is this perspective!? while his wife called him back to bed with no success.
4. Creative people alternate between imagination and fantasy, and a rooted sense of reality.
5. Creative people trend to be both extroverted and introverted.
6. Creative people are humble and proud at the same time.
7. Creative people, to an extent, escape rigid gender role stereotyping.
This tendency toward androgyny is sometimes understood in purely sexual terms, and therefore it gets confused with homosexuality. But psychological androgyny is a much wider concept referring to a person?s ability to be at the same time aggressive and nurturant, sensitive and rigid, dominant and submissive, regardless of gender. A psychologically androgynous person in effect doubles his or her repertoire of responses.
8. Creative people are both rebellious and conservative.
9. Most creative people are very passionate about their work, yet they can be extremely objective about it as well.
10. Creative people?s openness and sensitivity often exposes them to suffering and pain, yet also to a great deal of enjoyment.
(via via)

from Austin Kleon Blog

Seth Godin’s “Really Bad Powerpoint”

The “I” in this is Seth Godin, not me. I borrowed this from an RSS feed a while ago.

Really Bad Powerpoint
I wrote this about four years ago, originally as an ebook. I figured the idea might spread and then the problem would go away–we’d no longer see thousands of hours wasted, every single day, by boring PowerPoint presentations filled with bullets.??Not only has it not gone away, it’s gotten a lot worse. Last week I got a template from a conference organizer. It seems they want every single presenter to not only use bullets for their presentations, but for all of us to use the same format! Shudder.??So, for posterity, and in the vain hope it might work, here we go again:
Really Bad Powerpoint
It doesn?t matter whether you?re trying to champion at a church or a school or a Fortune 100 company, you?re probably going to use PowerPoint.
Powerpoint was developed by engineers as a tool to help them communicate with the marketing department?and vice versa. It?s a remarkable tool because it allows very dense verbal communication. Yes, you could send a memo, but no one reads anymore. As our companies are getting faster and faster, we need a way to communicate ideas from one group to another. Enter Powerpoint.
Powerpoint could be the most powerful tool on your computer. But it?s not. Countless innovations fail because their champions use PowerPoint the way Microsoft wants them to, instead of the right way.
Communication is the transfer of emotion.
Communication is about getting others to adopt your point of view, to help them understand why you?re excited (or sad, or optimistic or whatever else you are.)If all you want to do is create a file of facts and figures, then cancel the meeting and send in a report.
Our brains have two sides. The right side is emotional, musical and moody. The left side is focused on dexterity, facts and hard data. When you show up to give a presentation, people want to use both parts of their brain. So they use the right side to judge the way you talk, the way you dress and your body language. Often, people come to a conclusion about your presentation by the time you?re on the second slide. After that, it?s often too late for your bullet points to do you much good.
You can wreck a communication process with lousy logic or unsupported facts, but you can?t complete it without emotion. Logic is not enough.
Champions must sell?to internal audiences and to the outside world.
If everyone in the room agreed with you, you wouldn?t need to do a presentation, would you? You could save a lot of time by printing out a one-page project report and delivering it to each person. No, the reason we do presentations is to make a point, to sell one or more ideas.
If you believe in your idea, sell it. Make your point as hard as you can and get what you came for. Your audience will thank you for it, because deep down, we all want to be sold.
Four Components To A Great Presentation?First, make yourself cue cards. Don?t put them on the screen. Put them in your hand. Now, you can use the cue cards you made to make sure you?re saying what you came to say.
Second, make slides that reinforce your words, not repeat them. Create slides that demonstrate, with emotional proof, that what you?re saying is true not just accurate.

Talking about pollution in Houston? Instead of giving me four bullet points of EPA data, why not read me the stats but show me a photo of a bunch of dead birds, some smog and even a diseased lung? This is cheating! It?s unfair! It works.
Third, create a written document. A leave-behind. Put in as many footnotes or details as you like. Then, when you start your presentation, tell the audience that you?re going to give them all the details of your presentation after it?s over, and they don?t have to write down everything you say. Remember, the presentation is to make an emotional sale. The document is the proof that helps the intellectuals in your audience accept the idea that you?ve sold them on emotionally.
IMPORTANT: Don?t hand out the written stuff at the beginning! If you do, people will read the memo while you?re talking and ignore you. Instead, your goal is to get them to sit back, trust you and take in the emotional and intellectual points of your presentation.
Fourth, create a feedback cycle. If your presentation is for a project approval, hand people a project approval form and get them to approve it, so there?s no ambiguity at all about what you?ve all agreed to.
The reason you give a presentation is to make a sale. So make it. Don?t leave without a ?yes,? or at the very least, a commitment to a date or to future deliverables.
Bullets Are For the NRA?Here are the five rules you need to remember to create amazing Powerpoint presentations:

1. No more than six words on a slide. EVER. There is no presentation so complex that this rule needs to be broken.
2. No cheesy images. Use professional stock photo images.
3. No dissolves, spins or other transitions.
4. Sound effects can be used a few times per presentation, but never use the sound effects that are built in to the program. Instead, rip sounds and music from CDs and leverage the Proustian effect this can have. If people start bouncing up and down to the Grateful Dead, you?ve kept them from falling asleep, and you?ve reminded them that this isn?t a typical meeting you?re running.
5. Don?t hand out print-outs of your slides. They don?t work without you there.

The home run is easy to describe: You put up a slide. It triggers an emotional reaction in the audience. They sit up and want to know what you?re going to say that fits in with that image. Then, if you do it right, every time they think of what you said, they?ll see the image (and vice versa).1

Sure, this is different from the way everyone else does it. But everyone else is busy defending the status quo (which is easy) and you?re busy championing brave new innovations, which is difficult.
Posted by Seth Godin on January 29, 2007 | Permalink
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� How to give apresentation from A Servant’s Journal?No its not just about using powerpoint. Seth Godin writes in his blog about really bad powerpoints. Ive pondered about what the differences are between an ok presentation and a very good presentation. Steve Jobs is one of the best keynote… [Read More]
Tracked on April 12, 2007 at 08:46 PM
� Seth Godin on Powerpoint from Storydriven?I’ve been looking for this post since I began this blog – it sums up everything I’ve said (but with much more authority). Read it. Learn it. Live it. Love it. (And it goes for Keynote, too.) One of the [Read More]
Tracked on April 17, 2007 at 10:27 AM
� Few Slides on Life from MediaBlog?Le Grand Content examines the omnipresent Powerpoint-culture in search for its philosophical potential. Intersections and diagrams are assembled to form a grand ‘association-chain-massacre’. which challenges itself to answer all questions of the univer… [Read More]
Tracked on April 17, 2007 at 02:36 PM
� Powerpoint Presentations: Where are thosewords? from Ashish Kuriakose’s Blog?I bought Seth Godins idea on presentations the first time I read it. And I have strived to follow his rules every time I make one. But problem arises when I have to make presentations for others. I follow the same rule and when I show it to them… [Read More]
Tracked on April 21, 2007 at 03:15 AM
� An awful presentation from Mike’s thoughts?I haven’t thought about what makes a presentation good or bad until I read the blog posts by Seth Godin’s blog post [Read More]
Tracked on May 04, 2007 at 08:33 AM
� Powerpoint revisited… from Tom’s blog?I found this site dedicated to the use of powerpoint from a semi-military (hence the service patch idea) view point, Jim Placke’s PowerPoint Humor. Well worth a visit if you are forced to present / endure countless powerpoint presentations.It would [Read More]
Tracked on June 02, 2007 at 08:13 AM
� Godins riff on really badPowerPoint from Great Presentations Mean Business?Oldie but a goodie. Thanks Scott Monty for the reminder that this has been eating a hole in my blog about bookmarks file!!! … [Read More]
Tracked on June 19, 2007 at 09:25 PM

Gomes on Powerpoint

PORTALS By LEE GOMES

PowerPoint Turns 20,?As Its Creators Ponder?A Dark Side to Success?June 20, 2007;�Page�B1

One of the most elegant, most influential and most groaned-about pieces of software in the history of computers is 20 years old. There won’t be a lot of birthday celebrations for PowerPoint; the program is one the world loves to mock almost as much as it loves to use.
While PowerPoint has served as the metronome for countless crisp presentations, it has also allowed an endless expanse of dimwit ideas to be dressed up with graphical respectability. And not just in conference rooms, but also in the likes of sixth-grade book reports and at PowerPointSermons.com.
As it happens, what might be called the downside of the culture of PowerPoint is something that bemuses, concerns and occasionally appalls PowerPoint’s two creators as much as it does everyone else.
Robert Gaskins was the visionary entrepreneur who in the mid-1980s realized that the huge but largely invisible market for preparing business slides was a perfect match for the coming generation of graphics-oriented computers. Scores of venture capitalists disagreed, insisting that text-based DOS machines would never go away.
With major programming done by Dennis Austin, an old chum, PowerPoint 1.0 for Macs came out in 1987. Later that year, Microsoft bought the company for $14 million, its first acquisition, and three years later a Windows version followed.
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Are you a PowerPoint user? Share your tales of PowerPoint uses and abuses.
Mr. Gaskins and Mr. Austin, now 63 and 60, respectively, reflected on PowerPoint’s creation and its current omnipresence in an interview last week. They are intensely proud of their technical and strategic successes. But to a striking degree, they aren’t the least bit defensive about the criticisms routinely heard of PowerPoint. In fact, the best single source of PowerPoint commentary, both pro and con, (including a rich vein of Dilbert cartoons) can be found at RobertGaskins.com, his personal home page.
Perhaps the most scathing criticism comes from the Yale graphics guru Edward Tufte, who says the software “elevates format over content, betraying an attitude of commercialism that turns everything into a sales pitch.” He even suggested PowerPoint played a role in the Columbia shuttle disaster, as some vital technical news was buried in an otherwise upbeat slide.
No quarrel from Mr. Gaskins: “All the things Tufte says are absolutely true. People often make very bad use of PowerPoint.”
Mr. Gaskins reminds his questioner that a PowerPoint presentation was never supposed to be the entire proposal, just a quick summary of something longer and better thought out. He cites as an example his original business plan for the program: 53 densely argued pages long. The dozen or so slides that accompanied it were but the highlights.
Since then, he complains, “a lot of people in business have given up writing the documents. They just write the presentations, which are summaries without the detail, without the backup. A lot of people don’t like the intellectual rigor of actually doing the work.”
One of the problems, the men say, is that with PowerPoint now bundled with Office, vastly more people have access to the program than the relatively small group of salespeople for which is was intended. When video projectors became small and cheap, just about every room on earth became PowerPoint-ready.
Now grade-school children turn in book reports via PowerPoint. The men call that an abomination. Children, they emphatically agree, need to think and write in complete paragraphs.
Still, the men don’t appreciate PowerPoint being blamed for crimes it didn’t commit. Mr. Gaskins studied a vast collection of presentations before designing the program. Bullet points, he says, existed long before PowerPoint.
While the two certainly know how to use PowerPoint, neither consider themselves true power users. They don’t even know many of the advanced features it has come to sport. They also have no patience with cubicle warriors who, in the guise of doing actual work, spend endless hours fiddling with fonts. And they like telling the joke that the best way to paralyze an opposition army is to ship it PowerPoint and, thus, contaminate its decision making, something some analysts say has happened at the Pentagon.
Both left Microsoft in the 1990s and now pursue personal projects. Mr. Austin attended every day of last week’s Apple developer conference, keeping up with the kids. While the two agree there is probably room for a PowerPoint-like program for building high-end Web sites, neither has any desire to create it.
Not being the self-promoting type, neither of the men are particularly bothered about being much less famous than their creation. Whenever they do tell a stranger what they did in life, they usually hear how much the person can’t live without the program.
If they have a lament, it’s that complaints about PowerPoint are usually not about the software but about bad presentations. “It’s just like the printing press,” says Mr. Austin. “It enabled all sorts of garbage to be printed.”
As Mr. Gaskins puts it: “If they do an inadequate job with PowerPoint, they would do just as bad using something else.”
?�Email me at Lee.Gomes@wsj.com.
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More thoughts on Relevancy

The following is an email I sent to our wonderful tech people regarding a proposal to eliminate student access to the network and the internet from their own laptop computers.
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        I just read the change in access rules established for next year and wanted to respond to them. First, I fully-well not really fully-understand on some level the challenges of open access to all comers in the school. I am sure there are those who have taken that privelege way beyond what is reasonable and ethical and even legal. I also believe that the current situation could put both of you and others in complicated and messy situations regarding enforcement and protections. So with that in mind, I have a some thoughts about this situation. Let me frame these thoughts with the conceptual framework in which I have been thinking about what education in general and MT Abe specifically. (Actually, and this is a big aside, I am starting a campaign to end senior year as we know it. I believe it has, in the words of Bill Gates, become largely irrelevant and seems to be little more than a holding pattern for many seniors during which we tend to treat them much the same way we treat ninth graders almost completely ignoring the reality of their (too) sophisticated lives of cars, sex, jobs, etc. So that year needs to be seen as a transition year organized to support students in relevant mostly out-of-school learning.) In my mind the use of information technology fits in the high relevancy category wherein many students are more advanced in the use of technology than much of our curriculum and many of our teachers.

        Students know how to harness the opportunities of the internet and many of them, as you know, spend hours doing it outside of school. I am concerned that those who have computers who are making sophisticated and largely appropriate use of technology will come up against another impediment to the use of tools they know well in favor of some that may be irrelevant to them. Presently our filter system sometimes blocks students from legitimate and useful sites and information and I know this filtering is a tricky and difficult situation. From my perspective, many of these kids are way ahead of many of our faculty in their use of the internet and technology. While the curriculum seems stuck on word processing, spreadsheets and the much abused powerpoint (google Edward Tufte for some great insights on this) students are blogging, mind-mapping in Inspiration, building websites, creating animation, and working with photoshop. Internet is not necessary for this but certainly seen as “the norm” for completing such work. This morning I read an article in “Wired” magazine about the lead guy in the band Linkin Park and his wife who were terrorized by identity theft and stalking through the internet. The over zealous fan was found after consdierable sleuthing at the highly secure Sandia Nuclear Labs where this woman spent much of her day on the internet doing this. When informed, the highly secure lab punished her but did not limit her access to the internet because they saw that access as absolutely necessary to research. I wonder if our filters and our closing wifi access is another step in the irrelevancy of school in contrast to student lives outside of school.

        One more thought. It seems to me we should be supporting and inviting students to use their own computers in school as it has certain advantages. It frees up school computers, it provides portability and flexibility of use, and possibly makes the technology more pervasive. I know that the data about schools that have provided laptops for all students is inconsistent but certainly there have been some benefits. They must have figured out some benefits of such expansive distribution of technology and the dangers that might accompany the networks.

        Clearly I have not come up with any solutions here but I would be happy to help in the development of safeguards that do not further limit student access in the form and manner that we all access the online world everywhere else. Please let me know how I can help! I feel it is important to continue to strive for relevancy in what we do for and with students.

David Marsters

white lilies

white lilies

Originally uploaded by dmarsters.

I am hungry to see the signs of spring (which this is not except that they remind me of easter lilies) emerging from the deep snows we enjoyed here in the Green Mountains.