Boy singers and an earlier voice change

We all know that boys' voices change during adolescence. Now we're learning that the embarrassing tendency to squeak when speaking may be occurring ever earlier. Currently, a boy's voice starts to change around age thirteen, and a boy is likely to speak in his adult male voice by age fifteen.

Franz Hals - Two Boys Singing

But the voice change hasn't always come so early, as the Washington Post reports. Records from Liepzig's St. Thomas Boys Choir, which is 800 years old, suggest that in the first half of the 1700's, when J.S. Bach led the choir, most boys' voice change began at age 17 or 18.  Moreover, during wartime, when hunger was common in the city, the voice change began even later.  So maybe better nutrition accounts for today's falling age of male voice change.

On average, the pitch of a male's speaking voice falls by about one octave as he passes through adolescence. Singing teachers have assured me, however, that a boy's adult singing range cannot be predicted from his childhood range.  You can't assume that an alto will become a bass while a soprano will become a tenor.

Voice change can be a challenge for all chorus directors, not just those in an elite boys' choir like Liepzig's. As boys' voices become less predictable, they also lose some ability to sing on pitch and sing intervals correctly. Their vocal range may also simply contract for a while. Boys may become discouraged and drop out of a choir or school chorus. Directors of a middle school musical may find their male lead suddenly unable to sing the part. Girls may have to fill boys' roles because too few boys are willing to risk singing.

To me it's telling that we talk about boys' voices "breaking," not just changing.  Maybe the term reflects  our unconscious sense that our sons' adolescence is a loss -- loss of innocence, loss of closeness, loss of beauty and loveableness.

In the Land of Winter, the imaginary setting for my middle grade fantasy THE ICE CASTLE: AN ADVENTURE IN MUSIC, singing ability is each person's defining characteristic, determining social class and educational opportunity. Although I don't directly address how this society handles boys' voice change, I doubt that it does so with any great compassion. After all, there is no place in society for the visitor Ivan, who sings badly. And when Fort, a talented singer, finds his voice ruined by a botched throat surgery, his adoptive family throws him out of the house.

In some ways, THE ICE CASTLE is a parable of the passage through adolescence, where voice change is only one of many troublesome changes. Other signs of passage touched on in the book include increasing independence from parental control, learning to see beyond one's own excessive self-regard, and learning to delight in creativity and invention.

In reality, most chorus directors and singing teachers nowadays encourage boys to keep singing through the voice change. They allow boys to change parts or select music with a narrower range and less challenging intervals. Even if they decide to let the boys take a break, they assure them of their place in the chorus and welcome them when they return.

The choir directors of St. Thomas may rush to fill boys' heads and voices with as much musical knowledge as possible between ages 9 and 12, but that doesn't always work even with music.  Most parents and teachers know that adolescence comes upon our kids before we or even they are ready for it. All we can do is hold their place, keep teaching, and work to assure them that adolescence is a continuation of growth, not a sudden break from childhood.

The dark side of teen literature

Last week's Wall Street Journal presents a debate about the current state of young adult literature, which means books directed at ages 12-18. In an opinion piece called "Darkness Too Visible," Meghan Cox Gurdon laments today's fashion for dark, lurid, violent tales for teen readers. Gurdon worries that too much of current literature, driven by fashion and a desire for profit, may actually invite kids to wallow in degradation and misery. Novels about self-mutilation may encourage self-mutilation; novels about sexual abuse or incest may re-traumatize those who have experienced it.

National Book Award winner Sherman Alexie, author of The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, answers in a piece of his own called "Why the Best Kids Books Are Written in Blood." (Grumpy aside: I guess the Wall Street Journal believes in controversy but not in apostrophes.) Alexie's argument can be paraphrased as follows: "Come on, adult world, you're kidding yourselves. Bad things are happening to kids all the time. If you think you're protecting them from the harsh realities of life, you're way too late. They need someone who is willing to talk about their experience, someone to accompany them and give them a sense of hope."

I haven't read enough of the cited books to judge the justice of Gurdon's arguments. I can say that I seem to be one of very few people in the world who was turned off by what I felt was gratuitous violence in Suzanne Collins's otherwise masterful Hunger Games. I didn't like the part where the two protagonists rest safely atop a rock while listening to their rival being slowly eaten by mutant wild dogs all night long. (As an aside, one editor at a writing conference stated his belief is that the reason dystopias are so popular with young readers is that their chaos and cruelty is a direct reflection of readers' experience in the typical American high school.)

On the other hand, I loved Laurie Halse Anderson's Speak, which deal with a 14-year-old girl's reaction to date rape. The daughters in our mother-daughter book club were probably twelve when we read it, and it gave us mothers an opportunity to make an impassioned plea for them to come to us if they ever met such trouble.

Still, the books I'm talking about are all award winners, and it's quite possible that other books out there are much more exploitative and much less helpful to readers. I'll have to keep reading before I can make any blanket judgment. And while I applaud young adult writers who have the courage to write about life the way it is, I hope the tide of dark vision won't submerge everything. There are more subtle and even more innocent tales worth telling as well.

Cute Eats Cute, a book review

Cute Eats Cute by C.B. Murphy is a cynical, funny, and surprisingly tender-hearted social satire and coming-of-age story. In a Minneapolis suburb, community discord over whether hunters should cull a burgeoning deer herd in the local nature reserve becomes a vehicle for dissecting a multitude of modern America's social divisions. Talk radio, New Age religion, eco-sentimentalism, pop psychology and macho hunter culture all come under Murphy's microscope.

Fifteen-year-old Sam's hippie parents want him to call them Jeff and Elissa, but they agree on little else. Elissa is an eco-feminist, a vegan, and a newly converted Wiccan, while Jeff, an officer with the Department of Natural Resources, swerves ever closer to a manly hunting culture. Sam and his band of high school friends are convinced that killing deer is cruel and harmful to the earth, and they decide to Do Something. The Something escalates from street theater to sabotage. When Megan, the object of Sam's lust, asks him to infiltrate the hunters' camp, Sam finds himself bouncing wildly among people with different belief systems and affiliations.

Sam's undercover mission allows Murphy to poke fun at a medley of characters, from the activist lesbian who wears a gas mask for her Environmental Sensitivity to the bow-toting Christian Hunters of Men. A family eco-therapist urges Sam to pass through an initiation and be on the lookout for a spiritual guide, but Sam can't figure out whether to follow a radical ecoterrorist who may or may not be advocating human sacrifice. Meanwhile his parents are on the verge of divorce, his friend Ryan always says the least helpful thing, the alluring Megan thinks he's gay, and Holly, the fourth member of their gang, gets pregnant. How does a girl who would do anything to stop the murder of deer reason about abortion?

In Murphy's pitch-perfect and very funny dialogue, characters talk past each other as if they're speaking code and never seem to arrive at truly common understanding. Sam's observations of the people and places around him are astute, but his own teenage cluelessness and confusion come through with increasing clarity. From its hilarious beginnings, the book moves almost imperceptibly to a more serious level where Sam has to make real choices with real and at times disastrous consequences. A strong action climax brings the book to a close, and if Sam's emotional confusion never entirely clears, maybe that's just a realistic reflection of what it means to live in a greyish, imperfect world. This book was great fun to read, and I recommend it highly to teen boys and adults.

Fifty books a year?

Distressed by results of international reading tests, Michael Gove, British Education Secretary, would like students to read fifty books a year, starting at age eleven. He complains that expectations are too low, so that in preparation for school-leaving exams or GCSE's, many secondary students will be assigned only two books over the course of a school year. Gove wants to see kids reading a book a week.

The inspiration for this idea came from the Infinity School, a KIPP charter school in Harlem with a mainly Hispanic and African-American student population, of whom 80% are poor enough to qualify for free or reduced-price lunch.

How much of a change would it be for 11-year-olds to read 50 books a year in the US? Let's say the average book length was 40,000 words. That would be 2 million words of book reading a year, enough to put students close to the top of the distribution of current readers. (As I've discussed in an earlier post, Fourth grade readers at the 90th percentile currently read about 2.4 million words a year, while middle children at the 50th percentile currently read only about 600,000 words a year outside of school.)

A book a week might require 40 to 50 minutes a day of valuable time taken away from video games, television, or doing the dishes, but it would almost certainly result in gains in vocabulary, comprehension, and background knowledge. To me, fifty books a year sounds like a goal worth embracing.

What Do Boys Like to Read?

My last post discussed the well-recognized fact that, worldwide, boys lag girls in reading skills. Some observers place the blame for at least part of boys' underperformance on the kinds of books served up in school. According to these critics, elementary teachers and English teachers, who tend to be female, assign books that appeal to girls--fiction that focuses on character development, feelings, and literary style. Boys, say the critics, prefer humor, action, and non-fiction.

The pattern of gender differences in reading preference extends to other countries as well. With a quick scan this evening, I found:

* A study of Greek 5th and 6th graders reporting that girls preferred human-interest stories while boys preferred comics and action stories.

* A study of English secondary school students discovering that boys would rather read (and performed better on tests about) a passage on spiders than one on leaving home in wartime.

* A pair of studies from Canada claiming that boys are more interested in
"cartoons, comics, news, sports pages, science fiction and fantasy stories, hobby, craft, and special interest books."

* An Australian study showing that boys preferred mystery, fantasy, and adventure, while exhibiting a strong dislike for poetry.

What about American boys? Accelerated Reader is a program that encourages students to choose their own books and then awards points when students complete a brief quiz on the book. Points are weighted for the length and difficulty of the books read, and students are encouraged to stretch themselves. In 2007, Accelerated Reader's database of over 160,000 secondary school students reported that ten of the top twenty books chosen by boys were fantasy (with a heavy preponderance of Harry Potter books), while the other ten looked suspiciously like books assigned for class: Romeo and Juliet, The Crucible, Animal Farm, The Great Gatsby, and the like. Note that no non-fiction books make the list, with the exception of A Child Called "It" by Dave Pelzer (which I understand has been revealed NOT to be non-fiction.)

Now, Accelerated Reader may actually distort reading choices if not enough high quality non-fiction books have been assigned points and listed. But at least one scholar has suggested that boys' choice of fantasy reveals their longing for action, invention, and heroic male characters not found in the standard school fare. This same scholar bemoans the fact that boys' "tastes and reading skills have not been developed for mature fiction, biographies, and historical nonfiction in self-selected reading."

What are we to make of all this? First, I think it's important NOT to tell boys that some kinds of reading are bad and don't count. When I was a child, my mother refused to let us read comic books. As a result, whenever we went to friends' houses I would hole up in one of their bedrooms tearing through comic books as fast as I could. It made me a boring playmate and unwelcome guest. My own son Damian read all the Calvin & Hobbes comics so many times that he could quote a fitting comic for almost any occasion; it didn't seem to damage his literacy any.

At the same time, I do think it's important to keep encouraging young readers to try new genres. In fourth grade Damian's class had a "Book Bingo" grid with spaces to fill with free choice books chosen from within a multitude of specified genres, from science fact to biography to fantasy to poetry. Damian managed to fill in four and half grids before the year was over.

Kids' magazines often have good, short informational text written in an accessible way. Boys will often follow their favorite teams in the sports pages. And an attentive parent can always keep eyes open for snippets on the Internet that might be of interest (I forward these to my sons). Another trick is to ask our sons to find something out for us on the Internet. Purists may complain about Wikipedia as a source of information, but it's certainly a source for informational reading that's more challenging and rewarding than Captain Underpants.

So look for humor, violence, heroism, mythology, action, mystery, strong male role models, science and sport stories, and a chance for boys to gain specialized knowledge. Still, let's be careful not to stereotype boys. There are some, after all, who love poetry, drama, and the subtleties of character. Let's just keep talking with them about what they're reading and strive to keep books and other forms of print a natural part of their lives.

[For previous posts on the topic, check here and here.]

Raising Children Who Love Reading

One of the greatest gifts we can convey to our children is the love of reading. When my children were very young, I used to promise them, “Once you learn how to read, you can learn anything.
Once you learn how to read, you’ll never have to be bored again.”

Along the way, through reading and experience, I picked up a few more ideas about raising children to love reading.

1. First, of course, is to read aloud to them. Read books over and over. Talk about the pictures and what’s going to happen next. Let them “read” the parts they’ve memorized aloud to you.

2. Silly sound games prepare your children for reading by helping them with phonemic awareness, the ability to distinguish different sounds in words. For example, while cleaning the fish bowl, you can think of rhymes for fish, even nonsense ones: bish, dish, lish, wish, kish. Or you can spend a morning talking in Pig Latin (“Ere’s-hay ome-say uice-jay!”) or replace the start of each word with a W sound. Clapping out syllables as you say them can also help.

3. Letting children read in bed is a great way to make reading a privilege. What child wants to go straight to sleep on a summer evening? Reluctantly agree to let them read. “Oh, all right, but just one more chapter. Then I want you to turn out your light.” Long before my youngest son could read, he wanted to look at picture books in his crib before settling down to sleep. Sometimes there were so many books in the crib I wondered how he found room to sleep, but he grew up an early and avid reader.

4. If reading is a great effort for your child, short reading experiences may be a good place to start. Notes in a child’s lunch, written riddles, and treasure hunts are all ways to motivate reading.

5. If your reader likes stories but is unwilling to read independently, shared reading can work. Take turns reading each other pages from an easy reader. Another trick, with a slightly older child, is to read a book aloud to the middle of an exciting part, and then get called away for some other chore. The book is there, the child is aching to know what happens next . . . she may just pick the book up and keep reading.

6. Choose books together at the library. Try to help your child get a good sense of his own taste in books. Tempt him to stretch a little with books you think he’d enjoy, but let him check out plenty of silly books, easy books, or books he’s read before. I don’t know how many times my son read Shag, the Last of the Plains Buffalo. His sisters teased him, but he grew up a reader.

There are plenty of other tricks for raising kids who love reading. I’d love to hear other ideas, and I may add some more of my own soon.