<p>zoosermom: It’s not a thing to agree on. It’s a fact. Dropout rates are higher at the HS and college level for males than females.</p>
<p>I wasn’t talking about test scores (I agree they are not black and white) but drop out rates. And I would like to know what policies we can implement to lower boys’ dropout rates, because as you said before, we cannot leave out half of the population.</p>
<p>intparent: I think that is the root of the problem. Maybe a tendency for overconfidence?</p>
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<p>Is it realistic to expect 5th and 8th grade boys to have a career “back up plan?” The idea of that is incredible to me. I didn’t even know what I wanted to do for a career when I was a junior in college.</p>
<p>I think they are probably going to change their career plans, but it is good for them to think about how they are going to reach their goals.</p>
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<p>I completely agree with this. Some members of my extended family live in a community that required a kindergarten readiness test. The D of one of my cousins didn’t pass it until she was 7. This was embarrassing to her parents. However, holding her back was the right thing to do. The test wasn’t about reading. It was about whether you had the fine motor coordination to use a pair of scissors, whether when instructed to sit in a circle and listen to a teacher read a book you did that or got up and started wandering around the classroom, etc. (I assume if you had physical problems which precluded you from learning to use scissors that would be taken into account.) Everyone recognized that it had nothing to do with how smart you are. I suspect that a higher percentage of boys failed the test.</p>
<p>Moreover, back at the dawn of time when my parents were in school, their community had start dates for school in September and January. The high school also graduated classes in December and June. So, if a kid wasn’t quite ready for school in September, (s)he could start in January instead of waiting a full year. If you needed to repeat a “grade,” you repeated a semester, not a full year. That meant that you weren’t THAT much older than your new classmates. If you were really having trouble with your schoolwork, then your teacher wasn’t forced to have you sit there a whole academic year getting more lost or switch you into the grade below where you might have equal trouble jumping into academics mid year. My dad skipped a semester in elementary school–that was also an option. From what my parents said, lots more people were held back a “grade” then and it was not that big a deal. It was viewed more like “You have to know your multiplication tables by the end of the first semester of fourth [or whatever ] grade. If you don’t, you redo the semester and master them” or “You have to be able to read by the end of the second semester of first grade.” If you didn’t, then you repeated the second semester of first grade–not the entire year.</p>
<p>In those days, a high school diploma was a real credential. Only a small minority went on to college. It was also better in terms of getting jobs to have 2 high school graduations each year. Instead of everyone coming into the work force all at once, the influx of job-seeking students into the local community was staggered. Then, as now, many jobs became available after the first of the year, and there was a newly minted “batch” of high school grads ready to take them.</p>
<p>I think that system makes a lot more sense than forcing everyone to start in September or wait an entire year and having everyone finish high school at the same time.</p>
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That’s not what I was responding to. I was responding to the contention that girls do better under any system. I don’t agree that that is true.</p>
<p>salander, is it overconfidence or a higher tolerance for risk? Boys tend to focus on the most satisfying possible outcome and take the risk of whatever may come from not achieving it. </p>
<p>What troubles me is that the children take the risks they do after being influenced by strangers who could not care less about them. Our system, which allows strangers who care only for profit to significantly influence children (including giving them unrealistic goals and expectations) through various forms of entertainment, including television, popular music, and the Internet, is apparently even more damaging to low-SES boys than low-SES girls.</p>
<p>austinareadad: That’s an interesting way of looking at it.</p>
<p>zoosermom: I should clarify with girls “do better” I meant drop out of HS and college at a lower rate. In the large majority of the OECD countries (each of which has different educational models), with one exception, women dropout rates are lower. It’s in one of the links I posted above.</p>
<p>Of course, the OECD only includes middle income and wealthy countries.</p>
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I was responding to Sorghum, not you at all.</p>
<p>Never mind, then. I am sorry about the confusion.</p>
<p>Is it realistic to expect 5th and 8th grade boys to have a career “back up plan?” The idea of that is incredible to me. I didn’t even know what I wanted to do for a career when I was a junior in college.</p>
<p>lol…at that age, my son was telling me that he was going to be a Laker like Kobe. </p>
<p>I can understand that kids at that age have unrealistic ideas (many girls want to be vets cuz they love animals), but the difference I think is having parents who are (behind the scenes) instilling the importance of education.</p>
<p>I will probably take some flack for what I am about to write. I think the issues with boys seeing education as unmasculine starts earlier than middle school. In the US elementary schools have very few male employees of any type. At the elementary school where my kids attended (1,000 students, K-5) there were a total of 4 male employees in the entire school. A PE teacher, a music teacher and two custodians. Nearly every adult in the school was female.</p>
<p>That allows women to make the rules that make sense to them without the balance that men provide. Boys see school as a “girly” place that is dominated by women. All of the rules are made by women and seem more suitable for young girls than for young boys. </p>
<p>By the time they get to middle school some boys are already done with education.</p>
<p>Proudpatriot can you give examples of existing school rules that a woman would make but a man wouldn’t? That a man would need to “balance” because it only makes sense to a woman? Just curious.</p>
<p>I am talking mostly about things that require boys to sit still longer than they are capable, lack of movement in the classroom, lack of opportunities to be boisterous, lack of hands on activities, etc…</p>
<p>One of our boys went to an all-boys middle school. He had mostly male teachers. What a difference the experience made for him, compared to his older brother’s experience in a co-ed middle school. </p>
<p>The all-boys school had a teaching approach geared to the learning style of boys: No bull$h1+ arts & crafts projects for math class-- yes, can you believe it: older brother had to do stupid arts & crafts projects for MATH class.</p>
<p>There was mandatory athletics after class time EVERY day, and there were plenty of opportunities for creativity. But the outlets for creativity were focused more on designing and constructing things that work (like a real catapult for chucking pumpkins, or a cardboard & duct-tape boat that they had to paddle in and race across a lake) than designing and constructing things that are “pretty”. </p>
<p>The school also EXPLICITLY taught the boys study SKILLS, and not just the study material.</p>
<p>Well, GMT, that sounds like it would have been perfect for both of my daughters, who despised busy work. One of them is actually in a creative field as a career and does all sorts of relevant group work and presentations, and whatnot, but still hated these same irrelevant things in math or science class.</p>
<p>I really think going back to no-nonsense education would benefit a lot more girls than you might think, and if it would work for the boys, too, maybe that’s a reasonable direction.</p>
<p>As for the men in the schools. There are a lot of them at all levels in our area, but we pay our educators very, very well, at all levels, too, which might be a contributing factor, and even with the men, there are still these stupid mathart projects. Grammar grades in math, etc… :rolleyes:</p>
<p>Poetgrl, your examples are exactly what I mean. There are common sense things that can be done to help boys and also some girls. Make the start date based on maturity, attract more men to teAching, eliminate some of the more subjective assignments. Have some flexibility in homework. My son has a teacher who does something that has worked very well on many different levels. She assigns the homework on the website on Sunday evening and requires that all four assignments for the week be turned in in one shot by email by 9 pm on Thursday. This is great because it respects that different kids have different schedules, that different kids pace differently, so she trusts them to get where they need to go as they see fit. Simultaneously, since it is a lot of work, putting it off till Thursday is utterly miserable, which discourages procrastination. But also at the same time, if a kid has a bad week or is sick or has an EC event, they don’t get penalized or have to stay up late on the nights that they really can’t do homework. For the first marking period she gives extra credit to incentivize the new way of doing homework, but after that she takes nothing late without a medical note or major emergency. She has almost a 100 percent completion rate of all her classes of all boys.</p>
<p>proudpatriot-- Recess and play times are being cut in the interest of having more time in the classroom for academics. In my school district, they even cut the 10 minute homeroom. I don’t think needing to run around and be active are inherent to only boys. And I don’t think those rules were made because the person in charge is a woman and that a woman would never make rules the opposite of those, and that a man would never make those rules as well.</p>
<p>I recently read an article about how the ADHD diagnosing rate in France is relatively 0, based on not only how doctors approach/treat a situation, but more so how parents raise their kids and the culture in France. </p>
<p>“And then, of course, there are the vastly different philosophies of child-rearing in the United States and France…From the time their children are born, French parents provide them with a firm cadre—the word means “frame” or “structure.” Children are not allowed, for example, to snack whenever they want. Mealtimes are at four specific times of the day. French children learn to wait patiently for meals, rather than eating snack foods whenever they feel like it. French babies, too, are expected to conform to limits set by parents and not by their crying selves. French parents let their babies “cry it out” if they are not sleeping through the night at the age of four months.”
[Why</a> French Kids Don’t Have ADHD | Psychology Today](<a href=“http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/suffer-the-children/201203/why-french-kids-dont-have-adhd]Why”>http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/suffer-the-children/201203/why-french-kids-dont-have-adhd)</p>
<p>That includes boys and girls.</p>
<p>Young kids in general like to run around and play. Yes, I do believe it’s important for kids to have influences in their lives of adults/role models of their sex. But the “problems” with boys and school aren’t because a woman is in charge/women dominate the atmosphere. If boys see school as feminine/immasculate, why don’t we instead teach boys that 1) nothing is wrong with anything/anyone being feminine, 2) things don’t have strict feminine-masculine categories. Painting and glitter and playing house are not “girly” activities. Just like playing with Tonka trucks and smashing blocks and playing football aren’t “boy” things. Adults tell kids (explicitly or implicitly) that “boys do/like this” and “girls do/like that”.</p>
<p>GMTplus7–Why do arts and crafts have to be BS and stupid? A lot of kids learn by hands on–that includes building things that work but also poster projects. Nothing wrong with making a poster or doing another project illustrating times tables or any other math concept. Grading and effort shouldn’t be focused on aesthetics, yes. Nothing wrong with a boy constructing something “pretty”. Pretty isn’t a bad thing and something never to be attributed to or of interest to boys. That thinking is further solidifying the masculine-feminine dichotomy (men do this…women do that… glitter is for girls…)</p>
<p>CPUscientist, would you be ok with girls being taught that there is nothing wrong with being masculine? With being encouraged to do more active or even competitive work? Projects where pretty doesn’t earn a bonus?</p>
<p>Boys are different from girls and the entirety of your post, although well intentioned, shows exactly the problem faced by boys. Theeremis a pervasive assumption that the way of girls is the default and the way of boys is deviant.</p>
<p>By middle school, voluntary glitter is girly.</p>
<p>Crying it out is child abuse.</p>
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<p>I think this is a really good point. Society enforces this outdated, black and white dichotomy from very early on and not only does it have the potential to negatively affect school performance, but it also contributes greatly to rape culture and other issues. </p>
<p>I also agree that men are not taught to value education the same way women are. Most womens’ sports (golf and tennis and maybe a few others being the exception) pay significantly less than the male versions. Thus, female athletes are hardly ever glorified to the extent male ones are.</p>