My day started out with coffee, a jolt of anger and aggravation when I read Dr. Helen’s post Boys are Just “Defective Girls”. Dr. Helen wasn’t slamming boys, nor was the Newsweek article she mentions.
By almost every benchmark, boys across the nation and in every demographic group are falling behind. In elementary school, boys are two times more likely than girls to be diagnosed with learning disabilities and twice as likely to be placed in special-education classes. High-school boys are losing ground to girls on standardized writing tests. The number of boys who said they didn’t like school rose 71 percent between 1980 and 2001, according to a University of Michigan study. Nowhere is the shift more evident than on college campuses. Thirty years ago men represented 58 percent of the undergraduate student body. Now they’re a minority at 44 percent.
Here’s a news flash for the writers and readers of that article: Today’s schools are structured to include inherent bias against boys. Further, the ADHD card tends to be played much more quickly with a boy than a girl. Why? Because boys tend to manifest hyperactivity in physical ways and girls don’t. (I understand that this is a generalization and there are exceptions, but far fewer than the rule) Girls are much more inclined to be outwardly compliant (and passive-aggressive sometimes) which fits much more in lockstep with the current educational system’s goals, methods and procedures.
In eighth grade, Sticks was awarded an “F” in math, which I challenged and ultimately discovered that the teacher failed to record the proper credit for homework and tests. He really had a low C when I produced the papers with her written grades on them and forced her to compare with the grade book. He really should have had an A, but of course, the homework grade did him in. Perfect test scores and top 1% standardized test rankings didn’t get him any farther than a C-. It wasn’t till he made it to high school and was discovered by his teachers that he went to a solid A and Honors Math and Science. More on that in a different post.
What follows is my analysis of the ‘boy bias’ in our schools. It comes from having 2 boys and 1 girl in the public school system with astonishingly different results by gender, as well as going through the public schools in a different time and age, and talking to lots of parents of boys and girls with similar experiences.
- Boys need to be competitive – If you want a girl to succeed, give her lots of positive encouragement and reinforcement, even responsibility. If you want a boy to succeed, give him an opportunity to compete. Don’t play around with the politically correct ‘everyone is equal’ stuff. Let ‘em out and out compete with each other. You’ll definitely have their attention and get results. Competition doesn’t have to be cutthroat and it will be a part of their lives anyway. Give them the opportunity to use that competitive urge to learn.
- Boys need lots of physical activity – Boys need to MOVE. And not just in a structured PE class. They need the time to run around, play hard, run some more, and play, particularly at the younger ages. Most boys will not sit still and many boys need to learn by physically manipulating objects, getting ‘under the hood’ so to speak.
- Boys have ZERO patience for repetition, redundance, and boredom – Neither do girls, but they do a better job of dealing with it than boys, and are more likely to be chosen by the teacher to help out other kids who aren’t getting it because they are different and often more effective communicators. Boys, on the other hand, will simply refuse to comply, get frustrated, get angry, get loud, get hyper, and get pegged as troublemakers as a result.
- Too much emphasis is placed on homework as a benchmark of success instead of performance – This goes back to the ‘competitive’ issue. After sitting in school all day, boys do not deal with coming home and leaping into a pile of repetitive work. Particularly when they’ve done it in school all day! I understand the studies that extol the value of homework as a life skill, but I disagree. A better life skill would be finding new challenges and learning opportunities if they demonstrate mastery in the classroom.
By the way, I don’t blame teachers for the built-in bias. They just become the conduits through which the policies are implemented. The elementary teachers don’t decide how long recess will be, or lunchtimes. That’s all decided by administrators. Teachers are coping with kids coming from all different situations, English-speakers vs. non-English speakers (especially in California), balancing the requirements to teach to the test standards against the individual needs of the students, and doing so with little support, a smaller paycheck, and a whole lot of extra work. It’s not the teacher’s fault — they’re going to gravitate toward the kids who offer the paths of least resistance.
This should scare us. All of us. Our kids, male and female, need to love to learn. That has been my overriding goal for all of my kids – that they love the process of learning, stretching their minds, discovery. When our boys are consistently receiving the message that their particular learning style doesn’t fit and efforts are made to shove them into a pigeonhole that’s so narrow and tight they are constrained, they will hate school. And by extension, they will hate learning.
What has your experience been? Got any ideas, theories, other thoughts to add to this? Let’s start a list.
Technorati Tags: ADHD, education, gender bias
