I think it’s easy to say that adolescent boys prefer to be disconnected, disinterested, and stubborn. However, Michael Smith and Jeffrey Wilhelm drill a revealing peephole through the walls that boys seem to build up around themselves in “Reading Don’t Fix No Chevys.” In fact, Smith and Wilhelm reveal that boys tend to be greatly connected, interested and eager to learn, they just tend to do it in ways that are not preferred by or customary to adults and females.
Each chapter is ended with a brief bio on each of the participants of Smith and Wilhelm’s study. These little character sketches are vital supplements to the report because they allow the reader to get to know the students involved as individuals and not just abstract subjects in a study. Getting to know the individuals helps Smith and Wilhelm drive their points home and emphasizes the bottom-line conclusion of their book: in order to instill an appreciation for reading and writing in male students, teachers need to “tap the funds of knowledge that students have at home” (200). And the only way to tap those “funds of knowledge” is for a teacher to get to know each student’s values, interests and strengths. Some of the boys had intense dedication to their hobbies outside of school but displayed complete disinterest in school activities. They aimed high and achieved their goals in skateboarding, movie-making, rapping, political campaigning, music composition, and a host of various impressive activities, and yet many of them failed to perform adequately on school assignments.
An interesting conclusion Smith and Wilhelm make is that teachers need to find ways of connecting students to the characters in their assigned reading. Because the boys repeatedly emphasized the importance of relationships (“the importance of the social [42]), and because a vast majority of the students displayed great engagement with the characters of stories assigned in an exercise, Smith and Wilhelm tentatively conclude that teachers should cultivate concern for characters in order to encourage “positive reading experiences” (175) for boys. One way to achieve this is to use a “frontloading activity” (176) before assigning readings to students. The example Smith and Wilhelm present is one that a teacher used for “The Devil and Tom Walker.” Students were given cards upon which were written various priorities (friends, intelligence, new car, etc.) and were asked to rank their priorities. Then students were told to accumulate as many priority cards as they could from other students in the class, bartering and persuading where need be. Finally, they were told to write which trades they would never make in real life and which ones they absolutely would make in real life. This activity made students realize that made trades every day and so when they read the assignment, “they regarded [Tom Walker] as a fellow human being who faced some of the same issues they faced” (176). This is a great suggestion that illustrates the effectiveness of “tapping into the funds of knowledge that students have.”
