<p>Interesting article on efforts to change classroom teaching styles in response to research showing that boys do learn differently than girls. A 2006 Vanderbilt University study found girls had an advantage over boys when tests and tasks were timed while boys fared better when studying interesting or challenging material in smaller chunks, without hard and fast time limits.</p>
<p>If ever there was an example of this, it was with my son’s hs chemistry teacher. His teacher did not use the book. Yes, he would tell the students ahead of time what unit they were doing, and if they WANTED, they could read it. But all of his teaching was done using hands on methods, real time give and take, question and answer (is there a term for that?). He also used a sort of competition, if you want to call it that, where the kids learned a long list of chemical formulas/names (can you tell I’m chemistry-challenged here?). My son loved the class; he is now majoring in chemical engineering. Most of the girls he knew hated it. They needed or wanted the structure of assigned readings, outlines, questions at the end of the chapter. They needed to opportunity to learn it, I guess, in their own way.</p>
<p>This speaks for the need to take different approaches when teaching boys and girls.</p>
<p>Doubleplay, that class structure sounds just up my son’s alley. Perhaps the biggest reason it worked is that the TEACHER didn’t need the book. Only a teacher truly well versed in chemistry could move through a course without the security of the book, prepackaged lessson plans, and prepared questions.</p>
<p>This research is really important. I think also that some boys really aren’t ready for what happens in first grade, or even Kindergarten at the ages we start them. Way too much sitting still for a lot of guys (and some girls). Interesting about Grammar Bowl in the linked article. My son’s Scholars Bowl team is almost all guys and this is common. The one girl on the A team says she thinks girls are more afraid of tossing out a quick answer that might be wrong. The boys seem willing to risk being wrong in order to be first.</p>
<p>“The boys seem willing to risk being wrong in order to be first.”</p>
<p>I’d go a little farther. My 8-year-old son prefers to be wrong and first to being right and not-first. He also likes to get up and pace around while he listens or talks. Not appreciated by his teacher.</p>
<p>What’s so frustrating about this is that many of the ideas about different learning styles is not new at all; Howard Gardner came out with his theories about “multiple intelligences” back in the 1980s and if his concerns that all students reach their potential by matching teaching methods to different learning styles (regardless of gender) had truly been embraced by our educational system since then, the gender gaps that currently exist should never have even occurred. But during the past two decades especially, budgetary concerns have always come first, and now we are paying the price.</p>
<p>Not to mention NCLB–I’ve heard some schools are now doing math half the day and reading the other half in a desperate attempt to make Average Yearly Progress numbers. No more art, music, pe, not to mention recess. It’s getting worse instead of better.</p>
<p>weenie, I agree with you. And my DD is going to a women’s college this fall.</p>
<p>I think it’s become un-PC (for anyone who really cares about those things) to suggest that boys and girls might have different learning styles. After all, someone might get offended by it.</p>
<p>Maybe I really could have learned Trig all those years ago.</p>
<p>Again, it depends on the kid. D does not fit the female learner profile established here. She was the caption of her Academic Challenge Team and was the high scorer, never afraid to jump in there with her gut response. She is the all-time high scorer for our school. Still doing this in college. and is one of the top scorers for college team. Also, she is top state academic winner in 2 competitions for school, and those were timed. She was the first girl to win one of the competitions, and the first kid ever to win 2 years in a row. But do I agree with this as a whole? Yes. The problem arises, as it does, today, that not all kids can be streotyped in this manner. Ame-sex schools would work fine for the majority, but for those that learn differently, we are back to square one.</p>
<p>NYMOMof2- totally can relate, my first graded decided " I should be able to get up and go do something else, since I already know what they are doing" not an endearing quality to his teacher.</p>
<p>But he also believes they have it all wrong, the week and weekend really should be reversed!</p>
<p>Starting to look at schools with DD, I mentioned womens college, you would have thought I suggested
siberia!!</p>
<p>Scansmom is right - this has been known for a long time. In fact, if you asked any teacher they would tell you that OVERALL boys and girls have some different trends.</p>
<p>Other things that have changed in the last couple of decades -</p>
<p>– Much more remediation of girls’ traditional weaknesses. :)</p>
<p>asteriskea,
thanks for the thread and posting the article link. </p>
<p>i found an interesting book this year that was very helpful “The Minds of Boys - Saving Our Sons From Falling Behind in School and Life” by Gurian and Stevens. this book is well worth the read for any cc’ers with boys in school.</p>
<p>bethievt - nclb - my experience with my son this year revealed that there is more and more teaching to the “test” and teaching to the “average” students in the class. for boys who happen to also be “high ability” learners, they can be incredibly bored and frustrated at the slow pace. being re-taught and re-taught the material over and over again is causing problems for many of nation’s brightest students. these kids get “it” the first time. imo, having them sit there being bored and not challenging them is a huge mistake that’s being made in many of our schools today.</p>
<p>For those of you who know parents of younger children struggling in school because of different learning styles, might I humbly suggest that you mention the possibility to them of homeschooling?</p>
<p>I understand that it’s not a possibility for everyone, but for those who can do it, it can make all the difference for a child who is being left behind academically or pigeon-holed as a troublemaker.</p>
<p>We homeschooled all 3 of our children and each learned differently. It was challenging for us to figure out how to meet each one’s needs, but we were motivated to do so, because it was important to us.</p>
<p>Homeschooling has gotten so mainstream that concerns about getting into college or being properly socialized are pretty silly. I think it’s funny sometimes when people will say that they know some homeschooled students who are “weird”. What they don’t realize is that their “weirdness” is often what caused their parents to pull them out of school in the first place. </p>
<p>A kid who acts like a normal kid isn’t going to start acting strange all of a sudden because he is being homeschooled.</p>
<p>I just don’t see how it would be possible for public schools to address the different learning styles present in all of those students. Asking them to do that is just not reasonable.</p>
<p>Condor, we haven’t had that issue due to leveled classes at the high school level. What you describe was much more of a serious problem in elementary and middle school.</p>
<p>But the amount of time wasted in “preparing for” and taking these state tests? Beyond ridiculous.</p>
This annoys me, too. As if there are no “weird” kids in a conventional school setting. My hat is off to any family with the patience to home school. Considering the hours of wasted time in a typical elementary school, it’s certainly a very sensible alternative.</p>
<p>I will always love my sons’ second grade teacher (both had her) who believed in movement in the classroom. She incorporated standing up and moving around in her lesson plans. For example, there was a game in which the class stood up in a circle and the teacher would toss a bean bag to a kid, who caught it and then answered the math problem she gave him. It was a fast and fun way to practice arithmetic and she could vary the problems by skill level: multiplication for the advanced second graders and subtraction/addition for others. The kid who answered got to toss the bean bag to another kid, who would get the problem and so on. She also had spelling games and add-a-line to a story at the board that kept the class up and down and moving throughout the day. It was great for all the kids, but particularly for antsy boys like my S, who adored this teacher. Parents would petition the principal to get their sons into this classroom, but there was never any effort to duplicate her methods in other classrooms. I always thought that was a shame. And I can see where the growing emphasis on NCLB testing and CA standards testing and teaching to the test is crowding out time in the day for these types of learning strategies and that is also a shame.</p>
<p>My son just hated Everyday Math because it kept cycling back over the same matereial at imperceptibly higher levels. It was great for some kids but terrible for others. Home schooling would have been better in some regards–in hindsight, I should have pulled him out in 2nd grade. But I did feel he needed to learn to deal with a wide variety of people–kids and adults–and school was better for that.</p>
<p>Consider how bad the choices are in general for people though:</p>
<p>Rich people can pull their kids out and send them to private schools (or move to better school districts).</p>
<p>A few families can homeschool.</p>
<p>And, ummm, everybody else???</p>
<p>Make education reform an issue in every election. (Although, admittedly, I have no idea how one does that – if you demand reform you end up with something dumb like NCLB or “teaching method du jour.”)</p>