Boys Will be Boys,eh?
February 6, 2002
8:07 a.m.
Lisa and I have talked for years about whether there is a gender gap in schools. I don't think there has ever been a question as to whether males are more aggressive in the classroom, and so I don't doubt all the studies that showed that boys get most of a teacher's attention in a classroom atmosphere. Lisa would point to that and say there was a gender gap, as if that was the most obvious thing in the world. But I don't think along those lines. Since the days I've been in school, girls were always considered the smart ones. They just were. I went to an inner-city public school in Louisville, Kentucky, that I'm sure is not a lot different than most other public schools. Maybe boys got the classroom attention, but girls made better grades. The national honor society was, as I remember it, heavily laden with girls. The class valedictorian was a girl (though the class president was a golden-haired boy). The advanced classes were slightly weighted toward the female side. This was back in the late 1970s. Every year, the newspaper her prints a list of the top students in each high school class in Columbus (there are two). Each year, there are between 5-7 girls, and 3-5 boys. Just because a boy gets more attention than a girl in the classroom does not meant their education is suffering. It could happen that way. I'm sure individual cases of it happen. But I believe that girls and boys learn differently, and so a single point of order (such as who get's more of their teacher's time) may or may not make a difference in the overall systemic view of things. I do not present this concept with tons of scientific data behind it. I could certainly be wrong. But it seems to fit the data my experience has gathered over the years. So it was with a great deal of interest that I read this story in Salon. Take your time with it. It's worth thinking about.   One of the questions that the article asks toward the end is why advocates of boys don't speak up. This really got me to laughing. Come on. Does anyone actually think that a politically minded individual can survive in this world by supporting the cause of boys in the classroom? Just feeling persnickety today, I guess.  Daily Persistence is © Ron Collins |
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