<p>It is wishful thinking that schools will tailor education to "individuals" - there are an average of 30 kids per classroom at our high school and the teacher teaches and the kids listen. I do think that just schools reached out to help young women who were not keeping up with the guys, they need to reach out to young men if they are having trouble. They need to reach out to any group of students having trouble.
Does anyone know what happens in college and graduate schools? Are more women doing well in university settings than men? I ask because in college students have much more choice in their curriculum. I wonder if young men start doing better when they can take the courses they want to take. I truly do not know the answer.</p>
<p>Ah, I missed Garland's post since it appeared as I was commenting on the immediately preceding one. I, like Marite, endorse it completely. The explanation for the performance difference has to be multi-factoral. And as I've argued before on this thread, it has to start with individual variation in mind both within and across the sexes.</p>
<p>I think one factor may well be "modern" distractions, in particular computer games. Boys definitely seem to be more drawn to this than girls (but again, it's not universally true). My son certainly was capable of being mighty distracted by this, but he never had computer games in his early years, though he did have early access to computers and spent time learning to write computer programs including primitive sports games, and he was very absorbed by fantasy baseball (and used the computer to manage his teams in Excel). He was perhaps something of an underachiever in the sense that his top 10% GPA was inconsistent with his top 1% SAT's. But he was smart enough that he really didn't need to spend a lot of time on his school work, and so perhaps didn't suffer as much as other kids from these distractions.</p>
<p>Now his life work has grown out of his distractions -- doing baseball statistics for a living. And in this work, he's on the computer all day, profiting, so to speak, from his addiction to games (even when this also takes him to playing internet poker).</p>
<p>Seeing students as individuals is a wonderful thing. Our public high school teachers see an average of 150+ students per day. They have tremendous demands on their time. At the private school where my son graduated, there were only about 150 students in the entire school, class sizes were 7-12, and the teachers as well as the administrators, secretaries, etc., got to know the students very well. There was plenty of time for individualized instruction, and teachers were able to help students develop their strengths as well as work on weaknesses. Most of our publich high school teachers are racing through the halls with beads of sweat flying off their brows, trying to keep up with all the demands. On the whole, they do a very good job. But their focus is on the success of the student body as a whole, not on individual students. The school's API and test scores depend on that.</p>
<p>There are different senses in which people are using "seeing students as individuals" here. I think the main one is that they shouldn't be stereotyped, whether by sex or race or ethnicity. A second one is that in trying to explain the sex differences (on average, overall) between the school achievements of girls and boys, we shouldn't assume that each group is homogeneous: there's tremendous individual variation within each group. A third one is the one you're apparently focusing on, understanding students' individual needs and capacities and problems, which has to do in part with getting beyond assessing them just by their quantifiable "products." This is partly, as you suggest, a function of class size and teacher work loads.</p>
<p>
[quote]
In my son's 5th grade class with a young female teacher the punishment for misbehaving in class was to sit in at recess and copy definitions out of the dictionary. My son spent many a recess at the dictionary.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>In my all-girls school, we had three types of punishment.
1. copy (in a neat hand) "I will not xxxx again" 100 times.
2. beginning 6th grade, do 100 Latin declensions (for those in the Classics track; I don't know what those who were not taking Latin had to do).
3. run 10 times around the enormous courtyard (usually for those who were late to school).
Teachers came to our classes rather than our going to theirs homeroom. We had 5 minutes recess between hour-long classes. We were supposed to walk one by one without talking into class, stand until invited to sit down by the teacher, sit with our knees together (no crossing of legs), both hands on desk, etc...
I think the same regime applied in the boys' school.</p>
<p>While of course we are all individuals, when a whole GROUP is falling behind, then it is worth it to see why and try and help that group. I think that all the attention paid to girls' education, as a group, really paid off. If boys as a GROUP are falling behind, then we need to see what can be done.</p>
<p>A very interesting set of data on APs that looks at both ethnicity and gender.
Note the gender gap in AP-Art History, AP-English on the one hand, and AP-Calculus BC and especially in Computer Science on the other. There is closer parity in biology and chemistry (both being less math-intensive), which means that girls are prepared for pre-med majors in college to the same degree as males.</p>
<p>
And,
These comments really reflect the way I view the situation. And, by the way, I happen to have two sons that fit the description offered by TheDad --
-- as do many of the parents on this board. These aren't the boys I'm concerned about. It's all the other boys, whose parents and teachers have no idea about why they are turned off about school and have no hopes of higher education. If you took some of the posts that present a view that there's nothing wrong with the way boys are treated, and plugged in "girls" or "Hispanic" or some other group that's been maligned in the past, I believe there would be a very different response.</p>
<p>
I thought that this was worth highlighting.</p>
<p><<< -- as do many of the parents on this board. These aren't the boys I'm concerned about. It's all the other boys, whose parents and teachers have no idea about why they are turned off about school and have no hopes of higher education. >>></p>
<p>yes! many parents are bewildered as to what to do to motivate their sons to be more "school oriented." </p>
<p>I wonder if fathers made as big a deal out of their sons good grades as they do when their sons make a homerun or a touchdown, would boys value education more......? </p>
<p>I wonder if dads spent as much attention on their sons' education as they do coaching and watching their sons' sports, would boys value education more.....?</p>
<p>Just wondering how "priorities" factor into all of this......</p>
<p><<< In my son's 5th grade class with a young female teacher the punishment for misbehaving in class was to sit in at recess and copy definitions out of the dictionary. My son spent many a recess at the dictionary. >>></p>
<p>With your permission she should have given your son something to do <em>during recess</em> (such as walk around the playground 20 times or jump rope for 5 minutes or whatever!) that would have allowed him to "burn off energy" but not let him play at what he wanted to play during recess. Boys need to burn off energy during recess. An occasional "loss of recess" is one thing, but if a child is "acting up" then he needs to "burn it off". </p>
<p>Teachers need to work with parents to find discipline solutions that will work for a particular child. As Dr. Phil would say, you need to find the child's currency. In my son's case, his 2nd grade teacher kept deducting 10 points every time he forgot to put his name on his paper. The loss of 10 points didn't "mean" anything to him -- to him, at the time (not now!), a "B" was "good enough". This continual loss of 10 pts annoyed the heck out of me because I knew that his report card was not going to reflect his real academic standing. I told the teacher to stop deducting the 10 points and instead, make him write his name over and over again on a paper during the next recess. I knew that my son loved recess and would not want to lose it again. It worked!! My son never forgot to write his name on his papers again. Losing recess for my kid was ok by me because it was a "one time thing" and I knew he'd learn his lesson. He wasn't going to need that recess to burn off energy. He's quiet and always has been able to "sit still" in class. Teachers have to realize that punishments can't be "one size fits all." If "time outs" don't work for one type of child, find something that will (or ask the parents for suggestions) - everyone has a currency. </p>
<p>BTW: I remember when I was in grade school, if the boys (& anyone else) started getting antsy, the teachers would say, "everybody up and do jumping jacks" or "everyone get up and run in place". A minute or two of this and everyone would be ready to 'get back to work".</p>
<p>The anti-bias suit by a Lexington High (MA) student has attracted an interesting set of letters to the editor from both men and women, teachers and parents:</p>
<p>marite:</p>
<p>GREAT find, thanks.</p>
<p>One thing that jumped out to me was the sheer number of calc tests -- Calc was the #3 most-taken test (counting Eng as one). Thus, it seems that families ought think long and hard about taking Stats instead (since the competition is taking calc). The other number that was really striking was AP Physics -- 65% male. (I guess our HS is just asexual, since son's eng lit and physics classes were ~50%/50%, and his Art History class had more guys than girls. But, if I recall, not many senior guys took the Art history exam, since they only took the class to fulfill a UC requirement.)</p>
<p>This is the first part of a series. Birmingham High was the next-door neighbor to my own high school in L.A. back in the day.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.latimes.com/news/education/la-me-dropout29jan29,0,6750397.story?coll=la-home-headlines%5B/url%5D">http://www.latimes.com/news/education/la-me-dropout29jan29,0,6750397.story?coll=la-home-headlines</a>
THE VANISHING CLASS
Back to Basics: Why Does High School Fail So Many?
Shockingly high dropout rates portend a bleak future for youths who fall by the wayside and for society. For many, the traditional U.S. education system is a dead end.
By Mitchell Landsberg
January 29, 2006</p>
<p>First of four parts</p>
<p>"On a September day 4 1/2 years ago, nearly 1,100 ninth-graders a little giddy, a little scared arrived at Birmingham High School in Van Nuys. They were fifth-generation Americans and new arrivals, straight arrows and gangbangers, scholars and class clowns.</p>
<p>On a radiant evening last June, 521 billowing figures in royal blue robes and yellow-tasseled mortarboards walked proudly across Birmingham's football field, practically floating on a carpet of whoops and shouts and blaring air horns, to accept their diplomas.</p>
<p>It doesn't take a valedictorian to do the math: Somewhere along the way, Birmingham High lost more than half of the students who should have graduated.</p>
<p>What happened to the Class of 2005?"</p>
<p>The fact is that colleges are more female because so many more women apply to college than men, since fewer men complete high school with the grades to go on. There are probably a few other factors such as the fact that some men will choose a job not requiring college that not as many women want (construction, plumbing,etc). But basically fewer men apply to college.
For whatever reason, more men take advanced math and AP physics. I don't see this as a big problem - we are not here discussing that more women become dancers, but they do. Is that a problem?
It is not good for anyone if one sex dominates Universities. Once they get there, the students can major in whatever they choose. But we didn't like it when women were doing less well in school and we shouldn't accept it when it affects our sons, either.</p>
<p>Picking up on Alum post...</p>
<ol>
<li><p>It's not that girls SHOULD sit still and be taught to behave to please authority, it's that we are still teaching many girls to do that. Subtly. I can tell you it backfires completely when they get to architecture school or, miracle of miracles, onto a big construction site. </p></li>
<li><p>Boys in an all-boys school read books geared to teenage boys, emphasis on the word teenage. Engaging books for teenage boys are few, probably because so many teenage boys give up reading. The majority of the teen publishing market is geared to girls. In a boy's school, Austen gets a pass but military history is well and truly covered. At every opportunity. The boys love it and the parents don't complain.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>Actually, continued reading may be the key to keeping boys on the rails until they are mature enough to push their intellectual development independently. Anyone else buy a ton of books hoping to catch their interest? I did. I've donated them all to schools now.</p>
<ol>
<li> At the university level, there is a ton of admin attention going into male affirmative action because guess what? Girls want to date neat guys when they go to college. A 60/40 ratio is a drag. That brings the 'neat' guy percentage down to, what, 30%?</li>
</ol>
<p>While travelling laast summer, my son met junior girls from a top univeristy with a 60/40 ratio--and the girls had never dated! Son was gobsmacked that such clever cuties had never had a date.</p>
<ol>
<li> Though no prize in the housekeeping department (as yet) my sons are both dyed-in-the-wool egalitarians and as a result, our lives have been full of the cutest, funniest, smartest, most amazing girls. Lucky us.</li>
</ol>
<p>Personally, I think the answer lies in single sex education for the few years of extreme awkwardness and immaturity (when boys are 14-16).</p>
<p>There were decades after decades where a 40 percent female enrollment in college, particularly in the upper echelons, would have been considered heaven. It was thought to be mete and proper.
I'm <em>not</em> saying that the imbalance isn't a problem. Consider it an observation about how much grease the squeaky wheel gets when females are at the short end versus males.</p>
<p>As a datum from UCLA, the problem isn't just that more girls than boys are applying to college by any significant number. From the Common Data Set, 2004-2005: </p>
<p>Applications: 19,568 male 23,631 female
Admitted: 1,565 male 2,135 female</p>
<p>Thus while 21 percent more females applied to UCLA, 36 percent more were accepted. I am informed with an extremely high degree of reliability that this imbalance has been accelerating as an artifact of the push for "more objective, stats based" admissions as a push-back against affirmative action. Unintended consequences. If admissions were in the same proportion as applications, the ratio would be 55-45...not great, but better. As it is, the severity of the problem is masked at UCLA by the engineering school, which is still predominantly male. In the College of Letters & Science, the female/male ratio is something like 67-33.</p>
<p>TD:</p>
<p>The state flagships are moving away from stats-based admissions. The imbalance at UCLA has increased since Comprehensvie Review has been used by the UCs. The last UCLA matriculating class prior to Comp Review (where 50% of the acceptees were on stats alone) was 43%/57%, which was much closer to the applicant pool of 46%/54%.</p>
<p>BB, the "Comprehensive Review" overall results in more stats-intensive decisions than the old 50-50 did as a whole.</p>
<p>Well my son just figures he will have LOTS of dates in college and probably also have an easier time getting in than his older sister (who got accepted ED to NYU with a bad male/female ratio but she figures at least she's in NY and there's got to be some guys around) No way was she going to go to an LAC with a bad ratio in the middle of nowhere. This was a major topic of discussion with her friends when they were looking at colleges.</p>