published by 
teenage boys and high school english (Foreword)
by Bruce Pirie - award winning Ontario, Canada high school English teacher who has written numerous articles in professional journals and has conducted workshops and delivered speeches at regional, national and international conferences.
published by
Foreward by Deborah Appleman
Teenage Boys and high school English. Before this phrase became the title of Bruce Pirie’s important new book, it was a combination of words that often worried the hearts of English teachers everywhere.
Three weeks into my own career of teaching high school English, I found myself calling my younger brother in desperation. It was the first time in our lives that I had ever asked him for advice. (Shame on me.) “What did you like to read when you were in high school?” I implored. “My male students hate everything I pick out.” “Try anything by Tolkien or Louis L’Amour” he offered. “They worked for me. And try being well, more cool and less lady-teacherish. That would help, too.” Of course, his advice didn’t hold true for every boy. But to me, my brother had insider knowledge, a secret key to a club to which I could never belong. My lack of membership in that club and my ignorance of gender issues in teaching English made me, for the first few years of my high school teaching career, a better teacher of teenage girls than of teenage boys.
From text selection to classroom management, the presence of teenage boys in high school English classes gives my preservice English education students the most pause. “Can I teach The House on Mango Street?” they ask. “There are 18 boys and 6 girls in that class.” “The girls seem to be accepting me as a teacher but the boys are not buying it. What should I do? “How can I make journal writing seem relevant to boys?” “What do boys like to read, anyway?” “How can I create classroom discussions where male and female voices can be equally heard?” “Why do so many of my boy students seem bored with whatever I do in English class?” “Do boys hate poetry, or am I choosing the wrong poems?”
In my recent visits to high school English classes across our country, I’ve noticed disturbing trends that confirm our growing concern about the match between our current literacy instructional practices and the interests and achievement of adolescent males. Advanced Placement or “college bound” English classes are too frequently primarily female, while ”remedial” reading classes are disproportionately filled with boys. What is it about our practices and our curricula that have failed to engage half of the student population? And, what can we do to stem the negative discourse that has become commonplace when people speak of teenage boys and high school English?
We are riding a new cultural wave on concern about boys and literacy. Tomes about boys abound, from the reactionary (Hoff Sommers’ The War against Boys, 2000) to plaintive (Biddulphs, Raising Boys, 1997) . Most recently, Smith and Wilhelm (2002) offer a provocative exploration of literacy in the lives of young men and suggest how we might alter our instructional practices to make them more responsive to the needs, expectations, and the predispositions of young men. As Smith and Wilhelm argue: “If boys are not embracing literacy, we want to think hard about what we can do to help them” (p. xx). Smith and Wilhelm also caution us not to echo the polarized language of the “gender wars” but to think deeply and carefully about individual males students and their literacy lives. In this book, Bruce Pirie gives us the tools to do just that.
In Teenage Boys and High School English, Pirie begins by offering a compelling argument for why it is important to concern ourselves with the literacy achievements of adolescent males. Despite the common and often stridently stated sentiment that boys belong to a younger subset of the still privileged class of males, Pirie argues powerfully that we need to examine our literacy practices so that boys will feel that our English classrooms are safe, fair and productive places in which both teenage boys and teenage girls can thrive and grow.
Pirie’s points are effectively animated by lively “classroom visits” that ring achingly true. Readers will recognize the poignant portraits of teachers and students negotiating the turbulent waters of adolescent identity and literary knowing with texts like Catcher in the Rye, Lord of the Flies and Hamlet as their shaky yet durable bridges. Pirie brings to life the unarticulated yet real worries of teachers who often notice the teenage boys in their high school English classrooms but don’t want to admit the patterns that they see, even to themselves.
Perhaps the most important contributions of this book are the practical strategies Pirie offers to teachers. These wise suggestions are grounded in well-researched theory and tested by Pirie’s own practice. For example, Pirie offers the use of drama in the English classroom as a way of deflecting and redirecting the energy of students in the classroom. Similarly, he provides a way of thinking through writing essays from “the ground up” that might be more compatible heuristic for the way many boys like to think. To avoid common adolescent male aversion to the notion that writing poetry is a feminine expression of feelings, Pirie advocates using published poems that are tied thematically to another text that is under study. As you read this book you will discover many, many straightforward strategies whose genius lie in their simplicity and in their acknowledgement of some of the learning preferences and stances of teenage boys.
In the opening paragraphs of this forward, I confessed that in my early days as a high school teacher I was a better teacher of girls than I was of boys. If I had been able to read this book, that might not have been true for long. Pirie delivers on the promise he makes in Chapter 1 to provide readers with a “richer understanding of what it means to be a teen-age boy today and a deeper appreciation of the qualities boys can bring to the English classroom.” He gives teachers a glimpse into his own successful practices and provides us with the tools to create our own set of strategies as well. His final chapter, aptly titled “an Infinity of Possibilities,” offers us a way to reconsider the gendered elements in our practices, in texts, and in the degree to which we may be complicit in the construction of our students’ interpretations of gender and identity. Thanks to Pirie’s courageous and insightful contribution, things are beginning to look up for teenage boys in their high school English classrooms. And when things look up for high school boys, we all benefit.