YA Guy Reports: Why Girls Aren't Reading

My daughter used to love to read.

Voraciously. As a pre-teen she read just about anything you put in front of her, though she favored fantasy series: Harry Potter, Narnia, The Shadow Children, Percy Jackson, The Hunger Games, The Maze Runner. When she entered her teen years, she started reading realistic fiction: Sarah Dessen, Gayle Forman, S. E. Hinton. She loved the classics--Lord of the Flies, Catcher in the Rye--and some modern classics, including Life of Pi and The Perks of Being a Wallflower. When she met YA writers Erin Bowman and Kat Zhang at a workshop for young writers, she was so jazzed she ran right out and gobbled down their books as well. As the daughter of a writer, it’s perhaps unsurprising that she read so much. But it was still impressive.

And then she started high school.

She doesn’t read anymore. Oh, she reads what’s assigned (currently The Odyssey for English, a book about leukodystrophy for Biology, and newspaper articles for Social Studies). But pleasure reading has shriveled to near nothing.

As I see it, there are two main reasons for this.

--First and most obviously, the amount of homework she has every night and weekend leaves virtually no room for leisure reading. She averages four hours of homework per weeknight, five per day over the weekend. Some weekend days, she does nothing but homework. And much of the homework is repetitive, boring drills: once you’ve proven twenty times that you can summarize a chapter, you really don’t need to summarize any more chapters. But the teachers don’t see it that way, and neither does the school district. And so reading for pleasure takes a back seat to working out three hundred identical algebraic formulas to prove yet again that you can work out algebraic formulas.

--Second and somewhat less obviously, high school--or at least my daughter’s high school--strips the fun out of reading, making it yet another onerous, meaningless chore. It’s bad enough that ninth graders are reading The Odyssey (a book I first read in college, and that my current college students struggle with)--but was it really necessary to use a stodgy, antiquated prose translation of Homer’s epic poem? With so much great literature for young people out there, both classic and modern, what on earth is the point of making young teens slog through a three thousand-year-old behemoth for which they can’t possibly have any associations or context?

We obsess endlessly about why boys aren’t reading. We don’t talk so much about why girls aren’t reading. (Indeed, when I Googled "why girls aren't reading," I got the same articles about why boys aren't reading.)

Based on my experience, I’d have to say girls aren't reading because high school beats the love of it clean out of them.

YA Guy Hosts... Ryan McBriar!

Proving that young guys love to read, teach, and write YA, here’s a guest post from Ryan McBriar about the experience of incorporating NaNoWriMo into his high school English classroom. Full confession: Ryan was one of YA Guy’s students way back when. Great to have you on the blog, Ryan!

Picture this: a crowd of eighteen high school freshmen filling a classroom. They descend on a mobile laptop cart without being prompted (releasing their assigned computer, finding their most comfortable spot in the room) and write. For sixty minutes, the only sound (aside from the occasional brag about word-count goals) is the tapping of keys.

I can’t take sole credit for this phenomenon. I decided at the beginning of the school year to challenge my first-ever Honors English class with the task of writing a novel in thirty days. This challenge came courtesy of the wonderful National NovelWriting Month Young Writers Program.

An Old-West assassin. A wrongly-accused convict. A seafaring pirate. A novice witch. A fallen football hero. These character types (and more) populated the novels written by my Honors class, a testament to the amount of creativity and passion young people will bring to writing if given (mostly) free reign and a little push.

Taking advantage of an online word-processing program, students were required to share excerpts of their novels-in-progress with me throughout the month, and I noticed something for which I hadn’t necessarily planned. Aside from just sharing their writing with me, they were sharing their novels with each other, and sometimes with students in different classes. Suddenly, sprouting up around my class was a small community of writers who were not only excited about but proud of their writing, so much so that they wanted peer reviews.

A lot of prep work went into getting students ready for this project, but I think the most valuable lesson came in mid-October. I introduced the coming month of frenzied creative output by first discussing with my class the qualities that make a novel good or bad. I required students to bring in an example of a good novel they had read and present it to the class to support their opinions on plot, character development, word use, structure, and a variety of other novel elements they found most important in the books they loved. Student volunteers generated posters of these good novel attributes and this became one of our guiding lights throughout the outlining and eventual writing process.

This book-sharing activity, done so early in the school year, exposed students to what their friends were reading and me to a slew of new YA fiction that allowed a sneak peek at their individual interests. I found that what high school students desire from both the fiction they read and the fiction they write is what all accomplished readers and writers want: compelling, complex characters; well-structured plots; clear but challenging prose.

An optional task over the summer for my first experimental NaNoWriMo subjects was, after editing (and in some cases completing) their first drafts, to take advantage of the program’s opportunity to receive five free copies of their published novels. I’m eager to see how many students have novels to show me on the first day of school this August.

At the end of the school year, one of my wrap-up activities is a course evaluation. I make it anonymous so students can tell me aspects of the class they found both positive and negative. The most recurring positive on my Honors English evaluations was NaNoWriMo. When the evaluations came in, any doubts about running the project again next year vanished. Like any seasoned writer knows, my job now is revision: how do I make this experience even better for my next group? I can’t wait to find out!

Ryan McBriar is a teacher and writer originally from Pittsburgh, PA. His first published short story “Writer’s Block” can be found in The Big Book of Bizarro, at www.burningbulbpublishing.com. Ryan currently lives in Warren, PA and teaches high school English in nearby Corry. When he isn’t teaching, Ryan enjoys spending quality time with his wife and young son. Ryan loves Halloween, anything scary, and obsessing over books, movies, music, and television. His ramblings on some of the previously mentioned topics can be found here: http://thoughtsfromtheblackrock.blogspot.com/