Hal Young's Blog, page 61

Boys! Don't Settle for Stupid!

The problem of books and boys has been in the news lately.  It's a known fact that boys generally read less than girls and seem to enjoy it less when they do read.  Teachers and librarians have worried about it for years, and some of their suggestions border on desperation.  Should we embrace comic books and potty humor?  Some schools and libraries already have.  Here are your tax dollars at work …

A sampling of online catalogs in larger North Carolina cities uncovers hundreds of titles, everything from books about cartooning to Asian teen romance comics and educational titles like The Manga Guide to Calculus. Enter the term "manga" at the website for the Public Library of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County, and over 600 entries come up in this one category of comics.

"A solid quarter to third of what I circulate is graphic novels," said Meg Harrison, the teen services coordinator for the Forsyth County Library [Winston-Salem, NC]. "Most of my readers are boys. If it's in manga or comic book format, they don't care if it's targeted for girls — they'll read it."

So if you start them with Japanese romance comics and Captain Underpants, somehow they get a taste for Shakespeare later on?  I have to think content matters.  I've read my share of superhero stories and other fluffy stuff, but not as a school assignment, and not as the preferred, promoted format.

We don't think boys should settle for stupid stuff, even when they're young.  Thomas Spence had an excellent op-ed in the Wall Street Journal recently:

Education was once understood as training for freedom. Not merely the transmission of information, education entailed the formation of manners and taste. Aristotle thought we should be raised "so as both to delight in and to be pained by the things that we ought; this is the right education." …

This kind of training goes against the grain, and who has time for that? How much easier to meet children where they are.

One obvious problem with the [pandering] philosophy of education is that it is more suited to producing a generation of barbarians and morons than to raising the sort of men who make good husbands, fathers and professionals. If you keep meeting a boy where he is, he doesn't go very far.

And the content issue extends beyond avoidance of the disgusting – we ought to be realistic about the interests of boys, outside the gross-out variety.  Even while promoting the use of comics, the Canadian Council on Learning got this much right:

"Boys are much more likely [than girls] to enjoy reading science and nonfiction books, informational texts, and 'how-to' manuals," the authors wrote. "They are also more likely to enjoy fantasy [and] adventure stories …" 

So what do we do?  Here are some ideas we found helpful with our boys …

Set the Example:  Do your children ever see you reading a book for pleasure? No, really – a book, not the newspaper, not online.  I used to do my Bible reading on Bible Gateway or The Blue Letter Bible, — both useful websites, by the way – and carried my PDA to church (Multiple translations in my shirt pocket — cool, huh?)  But then I realized my children couldn't tell at a glace whether I was deep in the Scriptures, or deep in my email and to-do lists.  I went back to the big, solid study Bible as a testimony to my kids.  Let them see you pick up a book for fun, too.

Read to Them.  We know we're supposed to read to the little ones – try reading aloud as a family sometime.  We've gotten tremendous enjoyment out of sharing classics like The Chronicles of Narnia, Little House on the Prairie, and The Swiss Family Robinson (we wore out a copy!)  Even the teenagers will hang on for the next chapter.  Great fun, and it keeps us off the Internet in the evenings.

Introduce Them to Worthwhile Stuff, Early.  And not just the classic children's books like the ones above.  There are some great biographies and histories written on a grade-school level.  The Childhoods of Famous Americans series is good, and even now I enjoy the Landmarks series of nonfiction titles – they're better than Wikipedia for a quick overview of a subject! That's just scratching the surface.  Sarah Clarkson has a new guidebook, Read for the Heart: Whole Books for Wholehearted Families (you can get it from Apologia).

Our own list of favorites includes, in no particular order,

Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth

Ralph Moody, Little Britches (the series)

J.R.R. Tolkein, The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit

Rudyard Kipling, Captains Courageous

Grace Livingston Hill, The Witness

John Bunyan, Pilgrim's Progress

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity and the Space Trilogy

Josh McDowell, More Than A Carpenter

R. M. Ballentyne, The Coral Island and The Gorilla Hunters

Everything by G.A. Henty! 

(By the way, Vision Forum has Henty on sale this week — see their website here!)

Those are some ideas.  What have your boys found fascinating?

"Highly recommended" byChurch Libraries Journal

"Raising boys is not an easy task, but the Youngs talk about practical aspects of doing so and include a biblical worldview to face the challenges presented. Each chapter includes notes. The content includes financial training, culture, being polite in a masculine manner, work, Christian male role models, and even choosing a college.

The Youngs are parents of six boys and two girls. They speak and write on parenting and homeschooling, education, and family policies.  Some readers will take issue with their stance to raise boys to be leaders and allow them to participate in gun safety, weapons, and missions at a young age (Hal was military trained). However, their insight into cultural views of raising confident, strong, godly men is sound and biblical. As a mom of four boys, I highly recommend this book."

Church Libraries Journal, Fall 2010, p. 24

If your church library needs a copy, simply place your order here with discount code CHURCH. 

Ask about special pricing for church bookstores and Sunday School classes, too!

"Highly recommend" fromChurch Libraries Journal

"Raising boys is not an easy task, but the Youngs talk about practical aspects of doing so and include a biblical worldview to face the challenges presented. Each chapter includes notes. The content includes financial training, culture, being polite in a masculine manner, work, Christian male role models, and even choosing a college.

The Youngs are parents of six boys and two girls. They speak and write on parenting and homeschooling, education, and family policies.  Some readers will take issue with their stance to raise boys to be leaders and allow them to participate in gun safety, weapons, and missions at a young age (Hal was military trained). However, their insight into cultural views of raising confident, strong, godly men is sound and biblical. As a mom of four boys, I highly recommend this book."

Church Libraries Journal, Fall 2010, p. 24

If your church library needs a copy, simply place your order here with discount code CHURCH. 

Ask about special pricing for church bookstores and Sunday School classes, too!

Welcome to the Hip Homeschool Hop

Hello to all the new folks visiting us today from My Home in the Smokies while we're sponsoring the giveaway on the Hip Homeschool Hop! We hope you'll take a look around while you're here, especially if you have boys. Check out our new book, Raising Real Men: Surviving, Teaching and Appreciating Boys for real, practical help from the parents of six boys in a row. You can read a sample chapter first, too.  We've also got workshops CDs  on topics from bulk cooking to marriage with lots about homeschooling. And don't miss the resources for boys, including our new Hero Tales from American History audios.

We're so glad you're here! I hope our site is a blessing to you –

Hal & Melanie

Catan Game Opens the Old West

Our family enjoys board games from time to time, especially old standards like Monopoly, Clue, and Scrabble. We also enjoy history, geography and trains. Our friends at Timberdoodle sent us a board game that combines them all, and we've added a new game to our list of favorites!

Settlers of America: Trails to Rails is made by the developers of the Settlers of Catan series. The game is designed for three or four players, and the massive game board makes it easy to play as teams (we pair younger players with older ones like, ahem, me). Like the original Catan, the concept is fairly simple — players start in the eastern U.S. and settle their way to the Pacific. Players start at existing cities, send settlers to found new ones, then build railroads along the wagon trails to transport goods from place to place. Settled territories produce resources of wood, cattle, grain, ore and coal which supply further expansion.

There are some interesting facets of the game. For one thing, while money and resources are used in the game, accumulation of wealth isn't the goal – you win by delivering goods to a certain number of cities. You have to gather resources to expand. Settlers need cattle, grain and wood, reasonably enough. Moving a wagon requires grain (fuel for the ox). Trains need coal, on the other hand, and tracks require ore (for the steel rails) and wood (for crossties). Very logical and straightforward. There are some surprises built in which prevent too much stockpiling along the way, and the resource cards stay in pretty constant circulation.

We enjoyed the way the game unfolded. Every turn starts with "production," where every player collects the resources found near his cities – so every player is involved at every turn. More cities equals more resources, but you have to be strategic where you settle; I ended up with loads and loads of coal, but a permanent dearth of cattle. The hexagonal territories roughly correspond to states and regions of the U.S., with more grain in the midwest, coal in Appalachia and regions of the west, wood in the south and pastureland around Kentucky and so forth, so you get a general feel for regional products. City locations are approximate, being determined by the honeycomb pattern of the trails, but close to reality in a general way. Trading, movement, and building follow production, and the network of rails and cities spreads gradually across the country.

There are some unexpected lessons, too. For one thing, you see why parallel rail lines developed across the wilderness; there are rewards for being the first to connect a new city, and costs for using other players' rails en route. I found myself sitting back at several points with a real-life problem, balancing the resources on hand, possible routes of expansion, and weighing the real possibility of sudden calamity that could undermine my next move. Still, the game isn't cut-throat like Monopoly, focusing on the race to provide services and goods rather than plotting to bankrupt your opponents.

The first time I played it, one of the older boys explained the rules (he'd played it for the first time the week before). Catan's website has a helpful tutorial, "Professor Easy's Quick Guide," which may speed your set up the first time through.

Catan's other games have an avid following, and I can see why. This is a good, thoughtful way to spend a rainy afternoon or a weekend evening – it took about three hours for four players to finish. Our crew gives Settlers of America: Trails to Rails a solid eight thumbs up.

(We tested with players aged 13 and up, but younger players enjoyed it in team play. Warning: There are about 280 pieces and 119 cards involved, so you'll need to keep an eye on toddlers. A good jostle will scramble the game but good!)

Lea Ann Garfias is Surprised by Raising Real Men

Over at Whatever State I Am, Lea Ann Garfias writes,

As a mother of three real boys for over 12 years now who has read her share of books on rearing the male species, I did not expect to be surprised by the Young's take on child rearing.  But I was.  From the moment my husband began reading aloud the introduction to me on the sofa, we knew this book was unique. Every night we didn't fall into bed exhausted from the challenges of constructively corralling our boys' energy for good use, we...

Carnival of Homeschooling

Hello to all our first-time guests at Raising Real Men, our blog dedicated to training up sons who stand strong to fulfill God's calling in their lives!  We had a lot of submissions for this week's Carnival, and due to a family issue at the last moment, we are a few hours late getting the Carnival posted. Our apologies to all of you!

CARNIVAL OF HOMESCHOOLING

September 14, 2010

Renae at Life Nurturing Education is bravely climbing "Middle School Mountain" with the help of friends who share...

Arrrggghhh Hope ForTeenage Boys & Schoolwork

Probably one of the most common questions we've gotten as we speak all over the country is "How in the world do I get my teenage son to do his schoolwork?" As the parents of these guys:



we've been there! There are days I've felt like jerking them (and me, too) bald-headed.

We've found that as boys enter the teen years they get very impatient with the endless (to them) preparation. They want to do real things. They want to be men.They want to know what's the purpose of this stuff. Here's how w...

Boy Scout earns medal for saving teacher's life

Fernando Espinosa, 17, of El Paso, Texas, is receiving the Boy Scouts' Honor Medal with Crossed Palms, its highest award for bravery and service. 

Espinosa was walking a teacher to her car earlier this year when another vehicle bore down on them in the crosswalk.  He managed to push the teacher to safety but was struck by the car himself and suffered head and leg injuries; the teacher suffered fractures to her foot. Both are still recovering from the accident.

The Honor Medal is awarded to...

The Carnival of Homeschooling is Coming Here!

We'll be hosting the Carnival of Homeschooling next week (September 14) and we would love to see some submissions about homeschooling boys, raising boys, living with boys, books for boys and resources for boys! To enter, go to the instruction page, send submissions to the forwarding address CarnivalOfHomeschooling@gmail.com, or enter with the blog carnival form.