In the interest of procreation, I think we’ll adapt.
Men married women without college degrees for all those hundreds of years.
@nycparent12 indeed it was.
“I know you said you aren’t sympathetic, and many people clearly hold the same opinion based on the “likes”, but this is a real problem that has significant implications for our society in the future.”
The issue of diversity has had significant implications for our society for a long time. It isn’t just appearing now. Has something changed?
Interesting thread. At our high school, attitude/behavior is graded separately (called “employability”) and my son has a nearly perfect score. Yet at fall open house, his AP Stat teacher predicted that the girls would succeed in her class but the boys would not, because: “boys goof off.” Everyone but me thought this was hilarious. My son already had 5 math credits (through Calculus) so this was an elective. He dropped it after first semester and added a class whose teacher valued his contribution and didn’t besmirch his sex. >:P
@Much2learn, aren’t there two different issues here? One is whether gender/racial/ethnic diversity is a worthy goal. I assume most on this thread would agree it is. The second is whether there is a reason for the gender imbalance in college and, if I understand correctly, the male/female imbalance in standardized test scores and graded performance in class rooms.
^^ right, and in the context of the second issue, the extent to which the imbalances are due to social factors including spoken and unspoken expectations in the classroom from an early age.
Those stereotypes are hard on all boys because, believe it or not, they are not all identically- behaved lower life forms. They are actually as unique as women are and cross the spectrum of behavior. I wonder if people who are so eager to pigeon hole males are the same people who would never tolerate the same with regard to females. Those stereotypes are particularly tough on males who fall outside of traditional gender expectations.
My son has an English teacher this year whom I can’t stand. It’s a supplemental class to hone college writing skills. Every single writing assignment has related to the topic of gender from the lens of victimization of women, which is relentlessly boring and, frankly, offensive in a boys’ school. But the teacher is another one with the constant anti male comments. The capstone assignment is a 25 page paper on the topic of gender. The catch is that they can’t use any books as sources because “boys don’t read books.” Got that? In a senior English class in a prep school, she dismisses boys that way. I can say with absolute certainty that there are at least three boys, including my son, in that class who are big readers. So this whole year, the class read not one book or piece of literature together and was precluded from using any books in their research. The teacher teaching the other supplemental class is a man. That class has read read books and is free to use any sources of their choice for research. It’s really sad that it isn’t an expectation in our society that all individuals should be educated with dignity, and it’s tiresome to expect the sons to continue to pay for the sins of the patriarchs.
I also don’t agree that it’s totally cool for women to marry less educated and financially stable men. That really doesn’t happen at the top of the food chain where associative mating within a bubble just promotes inequality, because at the middle and bottom of the food chain women simply don’t get married because uneducated men who can’t contribute are a drag on their lives. I work in a top law firm and on my corridor there are currently three pregnant women. All attended top undergraduate schools and Ivy law schools. They are all stars. None plans to continue on the partnership track after motherhood and are open about being able to choose their right balance because their highly educated husbands make good money. This is a common experience among such women. Exercising their freedom to choose how to live their lives as they see fit because they have an educated, earning partner on their team. That freedom is very important to women of this generation, and we should see contributory, involved men as a very important and valuable part of our society. And not just for women. The dignity and success of men is a valuable and important goal all on its own.
…followed by a story about a female teacher who sounds truly awful, “another one with the constant anti male comments”?
Your child has had great female teachers, right? Or at least ones that assign reading and don’t disparage boys?
My son sure has, and we didn’t pay for his school.
S had a lot of really good female teachers and none of them made negative comments about boys. The only elementary teacher he had who favored the girls was a man.
I said “another one” because I was following a post with a similar story. Not a stereotype, two specific, personal examples in subsequent posts on a message board. Isn’t that what we do in a message board, share examples? I think the anti boy comments have become so ubiquitous that most people don’t notice them anymore. I was watching house hunters last night and the parents were talking about the small son being a doofus. Mom said “that’s a boy for you” and dad nodded. Not “that’s a toddler for you” but a boy. We see boys as idiots in all kinds of media and I don’t think it is healthy.
My son has and has had amazing female teachers. my daughter is an amazing teacher to boys this year. Part of what makes an amazing teacher is giving and earning respect. I had a teacher when I was younger, who is now a neighbor of mine, who was so anti girl it would be shocking now, although it wasn’t then, which shows how far we have rightly come.
And we don’t pay for my son’s school either. He had something special that made this generally wonderful school take a chance on a kid from a white trash family. And we are very glad, but no institution run by humans is perfect, so . . . I am going to speak to the teacher at the end of the year. All of the assignments are posted in an online portal, along with her comments, and I plan to show them to her so she can see how they look when standing alone. I think there is a real aspect of male bashing in her class, but I also think she is a miserable human being who would be nasty to girls if she taught in a coed school. But her choice of assignments does reflect a bias.
I think we can do better than examples. We can look at peer review studies of what happens in classrooms. Otherwise, I just writing about girl hostile teachers and you’re writing about boy hostile teachers.
Examples:
Teachers call on boys more frequently than girls;
Teachers give boys more extensive feedback;
Teachers punish boys more severely than girls for the same infractions; and
In mixed-sex groups, boys take leadership roles and girls defer to their decisions.
http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/dec97/vol55/num04/Challenging-Gender-Bias-in-Fifth-Grade.aspx
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/02/150226110454.htm
^^ This! Precisely and exactly that. Thank you.
The implication of this, however, I take issue with. In my experience and observation, no, you get pretty much all combinations (+pigeonhole♀/+pigeonhole♂, ‑pigeonhole♀/‑pigeonhole♂, +pigeonhole♀/‑pigeonhole♂, and ‑pigeonhole♀/+pigeonhole♂) pretty much anywhere you look.
Where were you at the beginning of the year? I would have had a chat with the teacher as soon as I realized there was a problem and moved up the food chain to the school board, if necessary.
I respectfully disagree because (although I was not really clear in my writing), I was thinking about here on CC, which is not the same as the general population.
Protecting my kid from potential retribution that might have impacted his college applications and GPA. The woman is spectacularly nasty and dogmatic. Much more important to me to discuss this with her afterward than risk problems in his college applications. Also, it wasn’t clear until much later that this was going to be the path for the whole year, we thought it might have worked out differently in the second semester. And she is actually an excellent teacher of the nuts and bolts of college writing in all of its facets. Her comments are nasty and IMO sometimes appropriate, but in terms of writing, she is dead-on correct and informative. Your decision in the same situation could have been different.
S2 is interested in STEM and we decided to keep an open mind and booked visits at several LACs. They all had significant gender imbalance. The very first one we visited we had this insufferable female SJW tour guide who spent most of her time denigrating STEM and yakking endlessly about her Genocide Studies major w a minor in dance.
We snuck away mid tour, went back to the hotel and CANCELLED the visits to ALL the schools w similar profiles.
If LACs want to attract more boys, they need to recruit more boys to work in Admissions.
I would go further than just. Send the admissions office a note stating why you and your son were turned off by the tour guide/campus environment and ask what they are going to to do to fix it. A closed minded admissions office will ignore it, but to a receptive one, it can be very useful to know why potential students voted with their tuition dollars to stay away.
Seems rather an overreaction. I mean, I’d never assume that the Universities of Maryland and Virginia are utterly the same from my experiences as a student at the former, so why assume that, for example, Dickinson and Lafayette are the same from a tour at one of them?
(And that’s leaving aside the overextension from one student to an entire college, but at some level it makes sense—this is a student who’s been hired to be more or less an official mouthpiece, so yeah, I get that bit.)
@GMTplus7 that seems over the top. We encountered plenty of make tour guides and males in admissions at virtually every LAC we visited.
I think if the LACs really do want to get males into their colleges, they do need to keep offering more majors that appeal to males. And it’s not stereotyping. It simply is generally true that males are, generally, more attracted to STEM majors than females. But of course, not all of them are. My D went to Dickinson recently and sat in on an English class with about 12 students. She said the majority were males. The beauty of the LACs is that nowadays, you can study virtually anything there that you can study at a research university, but you get the smaller and more “intimate” enviroment.
@GMTplus7 Sounds like you picked the wrong LAC. There are many that are more balanced across the genders and are very strong in STEM. I’ve visited dozens of LACs and would gladly share impressions with you if desired.