The Education Wonks
I'm not convinced.
Aren't males falling behind across all subjects, not just reading and writing? It is possible to offer politically correct maths and science but not to an extent that would seriously affect students' enthusiasm for the subject in a way that correlates with their gender.
Boys don't work as hard as girls for two main reasons: first, parents now have lower expectations of them and second, they are more attracted to activities such as computers and sports that distract from schoolwork.
I would suggest that, instead of buying into the culture of victimhood and wailing about their needs being neglected, males take the high road and get off their asses and work harder until they catch up.
Which is exactly why I have my 6th graders reading 'Hatchet', an adventure/ survival story.
I actually don't care much for the book- I would rather read House on Mango Street, or Number the Stars, but my boys (and girls!) love it. I have felt that boys are getting the short end of the literature stick for awhile now, so I try to do what little I can (like your district, books are NOT in the curriculum, but I break the rules a little because I think they are downright criminal) to make up for it.
Good story and a big problem. I had previously read this:
Playground America - Boys or Bullies
Where the writer suggests it starts in kindergarten. My son was a straight A student until the last 2 years of school where he decided to dumb down because he was being picked on for being too smart and I didn't find out until 2 months before his final exams. (we are 7,000 miles apart) I went to Australia and made him work hard for a month and he passed all his exams and got an offer for university.
So, as in everything, there are multiple reasons for something happening, in this case, boys doing poorly.
--It is possible to offer politically correct maths and science but not to an extent that would seriously affect students' enthusiasm for the subject in a way that correlates with their gender.
Of course it is. If your female teachers hate you, never call on you, tell you that your ideas or your interest in violence or sports or action are repellent, how often are you going to participate or listen in ANY subject?
Generally speaking, women teachers have been taught by feminists, and feminists don't like boys. They find them too difficult to handle. They find them violent and uncontrollable. They punish them at every turn.
And generally speaking, women teachers are bad at and dislike math and science to such a degree that it's very very unlikely boys are getting any science or math ed in the first place.
re: boys being distracted: YES, and in a prior culture, that was no excuse for not working. now it's an effective way to keep the boys from learning as much as the girls.
I'm sorry but I have to disagree with the anonymous comments above. Feminists do not hate boys. I can vouch for that as a feminist parent of a son.
Boys do not necessarily have to like violence and computers that is a stereotype.
Women teachers are excellent at math and science (which I should know as a female science teacher).
I find those comments offensive and stereotypical and just plain wrong.
I work with predominantly minority boys, and they do not place a value on education for the most part. Not because they are minority and not because they are boys, but because the families in the area place little value on education. I think it's a societal problem.
That sort of anonymous comment is extremely offensive to teachers everywhere.
Female teachers hate boys?
Feminists hate boys?
Women are bad at math and science?
I won't dignify these sorts of comments with a response until the person dignifies themselves with an email address.
Jessica & phc,
I won't defend the points raised by anonymous but I will speak in my own voice to some of the undercurrents that I think he is tapping into.
Post-modernist gibberish is the intellectual foundation of feminist thought and both Po-Mo and feminism have found a ready home in Education faculties. The works of Carol Gilligan were pivotal in focusing attention on the issue of girls' academic performance. The curricla reforms of the '89 era by both NCTM and NCTE were designed to equalize outcomes towards designated groups. So, I think it is a fair line of reasoning to pursue questions about the influence of feminist thought in shaping current pedagogical approaches. As was noted in the recent New Republic article on this topic, the feminist scholars who are investigating gender performance differentials propose that boys become more like girls and that the curricula remain intact. They wipe off the table the proposition that there could be neurobiological differences in how boys and girls process information, especially in childhood and adolescence.
Over the last generation we've witnessed introduction into the schools of the philosophy of group cooperation and in some instances the active discouragement of direct competition. As any neutral observer of young boys will note the competition for hierarchical status is paramount in shaping their lives. The desire to be better at something than one's peers is being replaced with the need to cooperate with your peers and this certainly plays to the stereotypical female strengths. Please, keep in mind that I'm approaching this in a scientific manner and thus speak in terms of probabilities, rather than anecdotally, so of course, I'll readily concede that you'll find both boys and girls who are outliers. If you're interested in leveraging off of this point on feminist ideology I'd be pleased to more fully make my point in subsequent comments, but let me move on to the issues of cross-disciplanary numeracy, teaching practices and other issues.
Of course, one of the obvious places to look for change agents is at the reading lists that boys find disproportionately uninteresting. Loaded with sociologically and ideologically agenda driven literature, rather than engaging literature, boys aren't as interested in reading about family dysfunction, sexism, and other 'isms.
We see things like social studies classes spending as much time on the changes in women's fashions during WWII and the implications of this to women's roles as the men were off fighting as they do to the actual battles of the Pacific theatre. The actual troop and ship movements, the tactical and strategic decisions that were undertaken and their immediate implications as well as the outcomes that resulted from the decisions. The de-emphasizing of the broad military sweep, which many boys find intellectually engaging, in favor of exploring the development and flux in women's roles in society is a result of changing emphasis in curricula. To think that changing the content to favor an ideological slant more favored by feminist scholars wouldn't have any impact is naive. I'm not saying that the men's perspective is the default position, but if we're going to revalue different aspects of our history then we need to actually debate the why and the costs that follow. The why is quite clearly embedded within the philosophy of not giving short shrift to women's roles, but the costs are not neutral, not when we see boy's disengaging and not playing their supporting role of finding this history as engaging as the feminist ideologues, who pushed it into schools as part of their transformative agenda to re-engineer gender roles, imagined they would then it's time to reconcile agenda to reality.
In composition classes, we've seen a move towards the keeping of journals where the students are encouraged to write about their feelings, frustrations, hopes and dispairs which doesn't engage boys as deeply as it does girls. This emphasis on journals has to, of course, have a cost and the time for developing journal writing comes at the expense of expository writing and the development of skills necessary for effective argumentation.
In math classes we're seeing points being awarded for busywork like handing in homework which have equal weighting to mastery of fundamentals and process. Further, we see teachers awarding points to partial, though incorrect work, and penalizing correct, but incomplete answers. Thus, students, boys and girls, who develop shortcuts to problem solving, or who can jump through intermediate steps in their heads without having to work the problem on paper, are penalized even though the answers are correct. This greater emphasis on busy work and methodical work has increased over the last few decades and I find it oddly coincident that as these reforms took shape that boy's scores started their declines. I think that this is highly suggestive of a causal relationship, but certainly not a definitive conclusion.
In science classes, we've seen efforts to deemphasize the need for mathematical concepts. The spread of literacy across disciplines and the retreat of numeracy is a fairly new trend. We're seeing some teachers awarding points on math exams for proper spelling in order to encourage the perception that literacy is an essential skill not simply confined to english classes. In terms of numeracy, we see less emphasis in social studies classes on statistical facts and graphical representation of demographic data. The void is of course replaced with more ideologically aligned exposition. Now certainly there is still some data presented, but an examination of textbooks and subject matter across decades sees less stress on numeracy and more on literacy and ideology.
Look, I could go on for quite a while on this topic, but I'll end it here, and would be happy to respond to any rebuttals anyone feels like presenting.
TangoMan,
I actually agree with the fact that boys are currently being socialized out of the educational institutes we have set up. Your points are absolutely valid, and very well-spoken.
What is not valid is that female teachers and/ or feminists hate boys AND that women are bad at math and science. These are direct negative attacks that are ridiculous.
I am a feminist, and I wear that proudly, but I certainly don't hate boys. I try incredibly hard in my classroom to ensure that boys have an equal chance at success because I do feel that our educational systems are biased towards female roles.
I also take great offense to the comment that women are bad at math and science. Some of the most brilliant scienctists I know are women.
phc,
That's why I didn't want to defend those assertions.
Now, where anonymous writes that feminists hate boys I see feminists wanting to change boys. This is aptly illustrated in the recent New Republic piece: (which is definitely not anti-feminist)
What little research has been done on this shift in the gender gap falls roughly into two camps--the feminists and the pragmatists. . . . The feminist viewpoint is summarized . . . [and] effectively asks: Why can't boys be more like girls? Boys are locked into a masculinity box, the feminist researchers say. Most boys stay inside that box, living by a macho boy code that precludes developing the "language of feelings" needed to express themselves or relate to teachers. Boys who break out of this box are doomed to a life of teasing and being bullied. In other words, young boys never get sufficiently acquainted with their feelings to write A-rated essays.
Drawing on their feminist understanding of the world they see the perpetuation of male "ways of knowing" to be something that works against their ideological interests, and therefore to be eliminated. I wouldn't categorize it as hating boys, because many feminists are also mothers of boys, wives to their husbands, and daughters to their fathers and it's not boys or men that they hate, but they do have a desire to redefine male character. The problem, as I see it, with too many schools of feminist thought, lies with their fundamental Po-Mo premises which assume that gender identity is entirely socially constructed. With that premise in hand it becomes plausible to advocate that boys should indeed become more like girls and that this can be wholly engineered in the social realm. The problem is when empirical data is showing that this re-engineering of gender identity isn't taking root and yet there is little or no effort to examine the feminist axiom that gender is socially constructed and the conclusion that follows, which is that the problems boys are experiencing can easily be solved by having boys be simply more like girls, (because as we see girls are excelling under the new educational regime,) is not modified or abandoned.
Now, where anonymous ascribes hatred of boys to feminists, I ascribe misguided philosophical premises which lead them astray and allow them to foster unintentional damage in pursuit of ideological ends that may be blocked by biological/genetic constraints.
women are bad at math and science.
While the average performance of boys and girls on math and science are nearly identical, and when you look at a country's population under a normal distribtion, most of us are grouped as average, so a good working defintion is that in schools, there really is little difference. However, what we see when we look at variance is that it is usually the case that the top math scorers are boys, but also the worst performers too. Most certainly this variance doesn't define every situation but the lopsidedness really starts to increase as we get out beyond 2 SD.
Did anyone else catch this post from the latest Carnival? The author perfectly illustrates some of the points I was trying to make:
He didn’t wake up one morning and suddenly discover that he could understand math. He’d understood it all along, sometimes so well that the homework just became a boring, uninteresting grind. He could prove his mastery of the material consistently on tests, but that pesky homework grade just kept dragging him down and the stigma came with the math class as a freshman.
Later, she writes:
He didn’t NEED the extra credit because he still had the highest grade by .005 points, and he intended to keep it there because he was so competitive with the boy who was just nipping at his heels.
Imagine that! Using competition as a motivating factor instead of placing the emphasis on PC cooperation. And using competition to affix a form of status. Why, that's so damn retro.
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