Girl Power!

WashDad
Sun, 11 Mar 2007 13:41:54 +0000

The problem is that there are too many women in our elementary, middle, and high schools.

Maybe the “solution” in college is that there are finally some male teachers.

Hmmm…I wonder if anyone has ever studied that. Do boys perform better in schools that have male teachers?



With my wealth of experience derived from two sons and a mother who was a renegade public school teacher, I can say without much doubt that school through junior high is practically designed for girls. I’m not so sure about high school.

I wish I would just take the time to fully develop this thought, but here are some fragments of ideas on this issue.


Despite wide individual variation, boys are less likely than girls to want to sit in chairs and listen attentively to teachers. I have little experience working with adolescent girls, and lots with adolescent boys, so a comparison is hard for me to do, but I CAN say that even 16-year-old boys have the ability to sit still and pay attention for about 15 minutes. Tops. Younger boys won’t even last that long. If you don’t give them something to DO they will invent one for themselves.
All bright kids have trouble with the fundamentally stupid nature of most high school work. Kids that don’t care about pleasing adults (more boys than girls, in my experience) simply blow off the dumb stuff. As Jr told me one time in explaining why he resists doing homework (paraphrased, but pretty close to verbatim): “I heard it in class. I understood it. No matter how many times I do homework exercises, I won’t get it any better than I do right now. I’ve never earned less than a 95% on any test or quiz, so who cares if I do the stupid homework?” I think he has a point. More to the point – this is NOT how college works. Unless things have changed since the last Ice Age, college is about papers, exams, and labs. College homework has nothing in common with about 80% of high school homework, so in what way is high school preparing kids for college?
Great teachers get results. Funny, isn’t it, that my sons’ favorite teachers are the most demanding – in terms of understanding and meaningful performance – and their least favorite are the ones that assign the stupidest homework. (I’ve looked at it. A lot of it is stupid. This is an objective analysis…) Here’s the funny thing – their grades don’t necessarily match how they felt about the teacher. My son’s APUSH teacher was very demanding about writing quality. I think Jr earned Bs from this teacher, but credits him for turning him into a good writer. Funny, it wasn’t an English teacher, but a history teacher who wouldn’t accept poor work. For the record, all of the APUSH homework was in to form of short papers (I want to say 2-3 pages) which had to be thoroughly researched, well organized, and clearly written. How does this reflect on boys vs girls? I don’t know, except that it leads to point …
What do homework grades mean? When Jr was learning to write in the process of APUSH his papers at the beginning of the year were pretty bad. By the end of the year, I think they were college-quality. His grades improved throughout the year. Since he was being judged on his ability to exercise a skill (writing) that he needed to develop, what did the early-year grades really mean? When I’m learning a new skill, I am definitely not as good at it as I will be later. Why put the learning curve scores in the student’s “permanent record?” Students who were fortunate enough to have learned to write well earlier got higher grades at the beginning of the year. Are grades about lifetime achievement? There’s a whole thread here in the question, “what do grades actually mean in primary and secondary education?” I tell you, I don’t know the answer.


I do know that girls, who start high school with at least two more years of maturity than boys, have a clear advantage in the beginning. If anything, this might be the single biggest difference between boys and girls, and why the academic achievements of men and women in college do not repeat the high school distribution.


Back to the original question, the skills that make a person successful in high school are not necessarily the same as the ones that make you successful in college. This might be why no individual numeric factor (SAT, GPA, ACT) does a particularly good job of predicting success in college. There are too many other factors that are hard or impossible to measure.
It’s not popular to believe that IQ scores mean anything, but they do. The IQ distribution for men is wider than for women. There are more men than women who score three SDs above the mean, and there are more men than women who score two SDs below the mean. You would expect more men than women at the extremes. You don’t even have to posit negative social forces to explain why there are more men than women Nobel prize winners in the academic areas if you think that research ability and intelligence is correlated. (If you believe that social forces are still working against women, it would tend to amplify this, of course. If academic Nobel winners have IQs over 150 – and I am clearly just making this up – and some women who might have become field-leading researchers are forced aside or decide to mommy-track, you would find men over-represented in the Nobel winners. Fun questions, but pretty fact-free.)
And finally, it’s my sense that grade earning is largely achieved by teacher-pleasing behaviors. On the whole, overall, in my experience, more girls than boys are willing to play the teacher game. WashDadJr, for one, really, truly, honestly just doesn’t care if his teachers like him or not. I’ve told him several times that independence and the willingness to stand up for himself are great traits, but that they can lead to being either Ted Kaczynski or Richard Feynmann.