Ever prepared a presentation for an audience of adults, and found yourself facing rows of resentful-looking pre-teens clicking at high-speed on their electronic devices like they really don’t want to be there?
The irony is, I do presentations for kids a lot, but this one was scheduled for adults at a library, and it was on boys and literacy. Some parent in need of a break from her kids had dumped them there on the understanding it was a program for boys.
Oh joy, thought I, I get to turn my prepared talk completely on its head as I go, a challenging exercise in thinking on one’s toes if ever I’ve met one.
What to do? I quickly dumbed down some of the vocabulary: “reading” instead of “literacy,” “tend to” instead of statistics that showed a majority, and “you” instead of “boys.”
I figured I’d lose them no matter what I did, because the topic wasn’t really up their alley. But you know what? By the end of the presentation, they’d laid their electronic devices aside, and the questions they asked at the end were both intelligent and proof that they’d gotten the message.
What was the message? Boys don’t tend to read as much as girls, and this hurts their grades at school. The more one reads, the more likely they are to get into college and earn more at good jobs. More dads, uncles and grand-dads need to read to boys for the role-model factor. And although boys still tend to be better than girls at science, they’re no longer doing better than girls at math, and they’re behind in reading and writing skills – something they can reverse by reading just fifteen minutes each day. And so on.
They get it, moms and dads of boys. And they’re actually interested in their future and how it connects to reading. They’re especially interested in what they’re still better at than girls 🙂, so help them keep that edge by finding them some science books, okay?
To read up more on boys, literacy, learning and success, check out my book for parents and mentors of boy: Jump-Starting Boys: http://www.amazon.com/Jump-Starting-Boys-Reluctant-Learner-Success/dp/1936740397/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1415401901&sr=1-1&keywords=jump-starting+boys
