<p>Girls with ADHD are under diagnosed. It’s not uncommon for girls with the primarily in attentive variety to make it to junior year in HS without the assistance boys get. We tend to diagnose based on how it effects others and not the kid. That said, boys are probably over diagnosed. </p>
<p>I’m not sure if our schools are serving either sex particularly well at this point, personally. However the latest craze of social programs inside schools has watered down the educational mission too much, IMHO. The teachers need to be freed up to teach the basics. To boys and to girls. The food/social justice/clothing/social worker missions have taken over what ought to be the primary purpose of teaching. I think this makes the teachers jobs impossible. JMO. </p>
<p>We are asking too many extraneous things of our schools This is confusing things enough that teachers are at odds with stuff they shouldn’t even have to think about. If all they had to worry about is how well Johnny is learning to write and not how well he is sitting still and getting along with Sally, it would be better for all concerned.</p>
<p>What a great post, poetgrl. We ask our teachers to address a host of social ills, but there’s only so much time in a day. And let’s remember that standards of learning and even specific methods of instruction are handed down from on high - from state boards of regents or boards of ed. Teachers do not get to choose what they’ll teach, and sometimes not even how. </p>
<p>This is an era of high-stakes testing, with teacher evaluations tied into student performance. If you’re trying to teach the state-mandated curriculum, prepare 25-30 kids for the annual state assessment, maintain some kind of classroom order, and do the myriad other things we expect of our teachers - it’s only common sense to reward the behaviors that make your life easier. And often those behaviors are considered more feminine than masculine.</p>
<p>I am the parent of a girl who would make a light saber out of anything and a boy who thrives on the structure of a calm and orderly classroom. My daughter is completely disorganized and messy. My son is neat and always makes his bed. One of my friends has a daughter who has been in trouble for fighting at school. The girl’s brother is polite and well-behaved. Another friend has a daughter who, at age six, is self-confident, defiantly colors outside the lines, and would ride roller coasters if she were allowed to. The girl’s brother is quiet, shy, meticulous in his coloring, and scared to get on a merry-go-round.</p>
<p>These are only a few examples of boys who thrive in traditional school environments as much, if not more so, than their sisters – many of whom can’t sit still or who get in trouble. I could name dozens of such situations, my teacher friends could name hundreds, and my friends across the country could name thousands.</p>
<p>Why do people insist on perpetuating stereotypes? If there is a problem in schools with addressing certain students’ learning styles, talk about it that way rather than labeling certain behavior as “boy behavior”. I’m a strong believer in nature being just as influential as nurture, but nature doesn’t mean there is inborn “girl” or “boy” behavior, just that there is some amount of inborn behavior, period.</p>
<p>FYI, the school meals program was originally instituted sometime after WWII after a government study found one of the key reasons for around 25% of draft-age men being rejected(4-F) for military service in that war because they failed to meet minimum height, weight, and health standards was due to childhood malnutrition. </p>
<p>While it later became associated with social justice, the initial motivation was to ensure a larger pool of draft-age healthy young men for military service in case there was another war.</p>
<p>As in any profession, from the medical field to car mechanic and everything else, some are better than others. It’s the same with teachers. To some it comes naturally and some are actually gifted as teachers. Others are simply okay and you will always have some downright bad ones.</p>
<p>The best teachers transcend all the gender issues. They have those styles were both boys and girls are able to learn from them. They have little or none of the discipline problems other teachers might have with the same group of students.</p>
<p>When our son was in middle school, there was a lot of discipline problems. It wasn’t being addressed properly by the principal or higher administration. Several teachers had severe issues in their classrooms. There were two teachers, one a man and one a woman, who had none of those problems. They were respected by the students but not feared. Something in their teaching styles snuffed out the discipline problems before they arose.</p>
<p>There are too many factors to take into consideration for me to agree to a blanket statement like ‘school has become too hostile to boys’. Some teachers have no clue there is any difference in the learning styles of boys and girls. Certainly, parents are their child’s best advocate. You should be aware of what’s going on their in their school life without being the helicopter parent. However, make sure you are truly making decisions in the best interest of your child rather than try to prove a point to the teacher or the school district.</p>
<p>People always blame the schools and the teachers, but there is no institution in society that is more reflective of the community than the school. We can usually find the root of school problems in wider community attitudes.</p>
<p>One big problem is the virtual elimination of recess and opportunities for physical movement during the school day. Recess has been curtailed for two reasons. One is the attempt to Taylorize schools and make them more efficient by cramming “learning” into every moment (thus hopefully maximizing test scores linked to school rankings and real estate values). The other, and probably more important, reason is that kids playing outside in relatively autonomous ways get occasionally hurt emotionally and occasionally injured physically. The school does not want to have shrieking parents descending on them and suing. Our current legal and cultural climate poorly tolerates the natural anarchy of recess.</p>
<p>Schools reflect the increasingly risk-averse nature of the overall society, its unwillingness to tolerate contingency. I don’t think that schools are being wrecked for boys because they’re run by women more often than not.</p>
<p>Men are complicit in the way schools are run to maximize industrial efficiency at the expense of physical free time. I remember a school board meeting where a father, dressed in Duke sweatshirt, hat and key lanyard, got up and started harrumphing about how the school should be run like a business. That attitude is not associated with women particularly.</p>
<p>“As measured by PISA, we are actually one of the top countries in the world in k-12 education.”
-You can continue believing this, your personal choice…I (an many others who acttually have an experience with other education systems) can only LOL at this…and then there is a college and a huge gap between the academic level at the best HS’s and the academic level at the average / low ranked local college…actually thinking about it, you do not need to have more experience than that to assess the level of k-12 in the USA.</p>
<p>^No report makes sense to me, but again, others can believe ALL you can get your eyes on…I will make conclusions only based on my experience and experience of those around me, you can use reports, no issue, I simply do not care.</p>
<p>momfromme: <i>Lots of gender stereotyping here.</i></p><i>
</i><p><i>DS was not a rough and tumble boy. He could sit quietly and concentrate on something for awhile, before other kids his age could.</i></p>
<p>Yes, I have one of those as well. His sister, the ADHD queen…not so much.</p>
<p>Nonetheless, I do see a difference in the gender bias to how it was when I was in school. Then, high achieving girls were the anomaly, because of course “everybody knew” boys were better in math, sciences, etc. Now my son is reporting to me that his teachers have much lower expectations for him and for his male classmates than for his female ones. That surprised me, but when I started watching interactions, he was correct.</p>
<p>poetgrl: Girls with ADHD are under diagnosed. It’s not uncommon for girls with the primarily in attentive variety to make it to junior year in HS without the assistance boys get. We tend to diagnose based on how it effects others and not the kid. That said, boys are probably over diagnosed. </p>
<p>This is correct. And there has been research which indicates that, with hormonal shifts that occur around menarche, inattentive-type ADHD often starts to manifest more as mixed or hyperactive. Which would explain the upswing in identification in late middle and high school (especially given the time lag between when a problem is noticed and when it is finally labelled).</p>