Gender gap, cont.
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Well, the weekend news about yawning grad-rate gaps between boys and girls sank like a stone in the mainstream press. Now comes this small but earnest effort to bring boys/young men to college – from veteran reporter and education blogger Richard Whitmire, who says that by 2015, twice as many girls as boys will attend American colleges. (For an oddly-titled counterpoint, consider the Sun’s daunting college-tuition economics primer.)
It’s no news that the gender gap starts early and widens over time. Jon Sciezka, former teacher and kid-lit rock star, created GuysRead.com to help teachers, parents, and boys find compelling alternatives to traditional narratives — think nonfiction and bathroom humor for starters. If you’ve got a reluctant boy reader on your hands or a daughter whose literary appetite spans beyond the conventional “girl” books in libraries and bookstores, take a look. Sciezka’s anthology of guy-writer and -illustrator recollections alone is fantastically entertaining and inspiring, too, for avid fans of Professor Poopy-Pants and his happy ilk.
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