Lois Petersen Becomes Life - Alaska Library Association

AkLA Conference Reports
Michael Sullivan Hits Home with Librarians at AkLA
with his presentation on “Mars and Venus in the Library”
Merrie Mendenhall and Laurie Cowgill (AkASL grant recipients to the AkLA Conference) both found Michael Sullivan’s
presentation at the AkLA conference to be valuable. Read these excellent summaries to find out some disturbing
statistics and some good ideas for connecting boys with books.
by Merrie Mendenhall
As storytellers or librarians,
we have boys’ attention until
about the age of seven. According
To Michael Sullivan, this is the age
where we start to lose them as readers
to peer pressure, the challenge
of schoolwork, and sports activities.
Reading is no longer a pleasure, but
becomes work in the second grade.
It is not surprising that the reading
level for boys averages a year and a
half behind girls at the lower levels
and as much as three years by high
school.
Boys externalize (girls internalize),
have a Home Depot approach to
life via manipulation of the rules
(girls accomplish by committee),
and read in isolation (girls read in
social groups). Their failure rate in
US schools is twice that of girls. So
how do we get serious about making
a reading program or library setting
more conducive to participation by
boys and less (albeit unconsciously)
gender-biased toward girls?
As one of the very few male children’s
librarians in the country,
Sullivan has a number of suggestions.
First is to see the situation
from a boy’s point of view. With so
few male role models early in their
lives (mothers, female librarians and
teachers are the overwhelming majority
of care-takers), they often have
to second-guess their own concept
of what it is to be male. They have a
tendency to be louder, more physical
and boisterous than girls. In a library,
this is seen as inappropriate behavior.
p. 16
As librarians assisting them to find
reading titles to their own liking,
we need to have titles that are full
of sound, motion, color, and kinetic
energy, much like the boys themselves.
They should never be asked
what grade they are in because they
are already far behind the girls. The
question should be “What do you
like?” instead. Make them feel welcome
by letting them behave like
normal kids by having a designated
area for them to unwind, move furniture,
eat food, sit on the floor, or tear
up pieces of paper into tiny bits. A
responsibility lesson to go with this is
that everything needs to be picked up
and returned to normal as a condition
of letting them be themselves for
a while.
Boys like non-fiction, especially those
that deal with animals, science, and
the natural world. They lean toward
sports and action situations in fiction.
They go for edgy comedy, fantasy
and scientific genre, and prefer writing
in any form by male authors.
They will read text that does not flow
continuously, like comic books, web
pages, magazines, and newspapers.
Studies have shown that reading
non-fiction is more likely to prepare
the reader for social and financial
success but is less likely to increase
communication and language skills,
the kind of benefits that girls get from
their preference for fiction dealing
with social situations.
In his book, Connecting Boys With
Books, Sullivan has a number of recommendations
for titles that have
greater appeal for boys. For irreverent
speech and verbal roughhousing,
he recommends authors such as Jon
Scieszka (Sam Samurai and
Summer Reading is Killing
Me) and Dav Pilkey (Captain
Underpants series and Dog
Breath: The Horrible Trouble With Hally
Tosis). Anything near bathroom humor
is a go.
In sports and adventure stories, boys
hope to find clues to their own futures.
Authors like Matt Christopher
(Soccer Cats series), Gordon Korman
(The Chicken Doesn’t Skate and the
Everest series), and Chris Lynch’s
Gold Dust have plots that make them
seem less like work than novels
about personal relationships. Action
books set in the wilderness often include
personal struggles that involve
moral decisions and do well.
Fantasy books have clear delineation
between good and evil and right
and wrong. Heroes choose a correct
source of action to reach their goals.
J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series,
Eoin Colfer’s Artemis Fowl, and Phillip
Pullman’s Dark Materials are examples
of worlds with clear rules in
a chaotic world.
Finally, Sullivan advises that audio
books can provide attainment of
almost all educational benefits of
reading, lacking only the skill of
spelling as part of the experience.
They can be listened to in an isolated
setting. The approach to encouraging
boys to read is to find the humor, let
them assert with limited knowledge
or chance of success, and appeal to
their logical approach of a desire to
put things into categories and make
them understandable. Structure
speaks to boys looking for these
things in an unsure world.
The Puffin, Spring 2006 v25, #3