<p>I agree with you northeastmom. I know that my D would not want to go to a school that was 70% female. A diverse campus is certainly more appealing. It is a shame for all those bright, hard-working girls (including my D) though.</p>
<p>I agree with you about it being a shame for the hard working girls, but there are boys who try the best that they can but have been frustrated for years by projects, and teaching style that is geared more toward girls (talking as a mom of two boys). My son had two huge crafty projects last year and he was in 9th grade already. It really never ends. My boys always hated those type of projects. My son was not given any options. Those were the assignments. For him, this is laborious busy work for which he gains/learns nothing but frustration. I do feel that my older son got into a couple of schools that he would have been rejected from if he were female, but I will never know for sure. Editing to add that if he were female, his stats probably would have been higher too (part of the reason that boys can get away with slightly lower stats at some schools), LOL.</p>
<p>My S is the least competitive person I know; D more so. Neither as competitive as I.</p>
<p>I understand the argument that the structure of school rewards girls and penalizes boys, but I haven’t seen this to be the case.</p>
<p>D always got the grades she had earned; S often had his rounded up, particularly by male teachers in HS who thought he knew the material bette than his average showed. (93 Earth Science rounded up to 95 for yearly grade, for example.) </p>
<p>Boys are also allowed to get away with more pranks without being disciplined. Girls are forced to conform. At least that was my own personal experience. D always said the best guy friend loved getting her in trouble because he would do annoying things, pull her braid, whatever, and she would respond and get yelled at. FWIW he’s at Brown.</p>
<p>D solved the problem of gender inequity by applying to a group of women’s colleges along with coed colleges. She attends Barnard and is thrilled with the education there.</p>
<p>And before we weep for boys too much, girls need more education to earn what boys do without it. The rule of them used to be that a college educated woman earned the salary of a male high school drop out. Now let’s say high school graduate. So there are other routes available to men, such as construction trades, that yield good salaries.</p>
<p>D had increased ire against Vassar for this practice because she believes that as a former women’s college, and a leader as a women’s college, Vassar owes women more.</p>
<p>S applied and was accepted anyway; he chose to go elsewhere, but I know that gender biased acceptances do happen.</p>
<p>mythmom, I am not weeping for boys in admissions. This is the great equalizer, the way I look it. Boys have had some hoops that they have had to jump through. I am sure girls have too, but I am talking in general about the craft assignments and teaching styles. I agree with you about women vs. men and salaries and jobs, and I will add promotions (talking in generalities of course).</p>
<p>Slight tangent - “Boys are also allowed to get away with more pranks without being disciplined.” I definitely found that to be true in the younger grades. I actually had a dad in my neighborhood tell me, “Boys will be boys,” when his 2 sons were the only ones running in circles and crawling under the table while the rest of the (co-ed) party-goers were eating cake at my daughter’s birthday party (I’m thinking she was 7 or 8 at the time). It drove me nuts - why were the behavior standards different for boys than girls? I have one child of each gender. Each child is their own person, but they were held to the same behavior standards. I think it belittles boys to assume they aren’t capable of the same level of self-control as girls.</p>
<p>On the other hand, I agree with the complaints about the arts-and-crafts projects that continued thru middle school. DS’s proects tended to have more content than DD’s, but his didn’t look nearly as good… yet I think they got about the same grades. (Caveat - DD has become an honors student in Art and may make art a career, so she might not be typical). On a gender-equal basis, what’s the deal with the 4th grade architechture project that required my kids to use an exact-o knife and a hot glue gun? Obviously the parent is the one doing the project, no 9 year old should be using an exact-o knife, and it’s the only way to cut foamcore neatly!)</p>
<p>Back to the thread - I had read that the “worst” thing you can be when applying to college is a white suburban girl from the Northeast. Describes my daughter exactly.</p>
<p>My sons are really good at math - they understood times tables immediately, and LOVED math concepts but had to suffer through months of drawing four vases of three flowers and six baskets of seven kittens, all of which were completely unrecognizable. My daughters drew beautifully but hated math. Until they got to middle school and did real math the girls were praised for their math skills and the boys “need to show more effort”</p>
<p>northeastmom: didn’t mean to be contradictory. I know what you mean.</p>
<p>I guess my family is a stereotype blaster: S can draw better than D. Both good, not inspired, at math. (D did like Calc. better than S. Performance equal.)</p>
<p>Momneedsadvice: Well, if you add Humanities student to that you have it right. If you D wants math, science, engineering, that helps. If not, yeah, it’s a horrible demographic. One adofficer even said: I pity the girls from the northeast who want to major in English." D wrote Classics (was true at the time until she couldn’t handle Ancient Greek) instead of Lit because schools are short of Classics majors and she had a real interest in the field. Since she ended up at Barnard, it wasn’t an issue. And many schools do discriminate against kids from their own state, wanting to get up the OOS attendance stats. I don’t think Barnard does that. Lots of women from the tri-state area.</p>
<p>mythmom, I knew what you meant. Boys do have more options without a college education.</p>
<p>My son had trouble in Spanish when he was given worksheets with drawings and asked to label items such as the “blouse” with the correct Spanish words. He had no idea what a “blouse” was :eek:</p>
<p>That’s hilarious.</p>
<p>Along the same lines - female students in Asia are also outperforming their male counterparts academically.</p>
<p>I attended a women’s college and now help with recruiting for them. When people wonder if the time for single-sex education has passed, the boost men get in college applications (especially at LACs) is a big reason my answer is no.</p>
<p>Well if you check out SAT national score, more boys got higher scores on Math and Reading. Girls only out score boys at Writing section…I would say in general boys just mature later than girls.</p>
<p>Re post #33 - I don’t know any men with nice handwriting - in fact it is customary in our culture to question the manliness of a guy when he has nice handwriting!</p>
<p>I tend to agree with starbright, that the problem is being hyped by the media. I checked the stats on the US News website for the list of schools to which my S applied. Most of them accept a slightly higher percentage of the female applicants than male applicants. (Typically about 67% of male, 70% of female.) I noticed UNC Chapel Hill accepted the same percentage of applicants of both sexes. Of course, this says nothing about the relative quality of the male versus female applicants, but at first blush there doesn’t seem to be much of a story here.</p>
<p>Re boys and ‘craft’ projects…apparantly it doesn’t end in middle sch. My S2, a h.s senior has his Honors English exam today. They just completed reading and study of “Frankenstein”. Part of the exam assignment was to “create your own monster and write a one page paper describing him and how he came to be a monster”. We were fairly amazed that part of a senior Eng. exam involved crafting a monster. S accomplished this by going to the local Goodwill, picking up a Cabbage Patch doll for .99 and proceeded with monsterizing it. I had to show him how to use a hot glue gun,LOL.<br>
The girls in the class will probably have better looking monsters. His looks kind of grade schoolish to me but then the whole project seems grade schoolish. Can’t see how this will benefit him in college next year.</p>
<p>Packmom, it does not surprise me. Some of the teachers think that assignments like this would be enjoyed by many of their male students because they are creating a “Frankenstein”, rather than a Barbie Doll, LOL. My sons would not enjoy creating a monster much more than creating a paper doll. Okay, I am definitely exaggerating, but my sons would not like the craft much more, just because it is a “Frankenstein”. They would wonder why they needed to make it, and what they are to learn from the process. They would prefer to just the creative paper about becoming a monster.</p>
<p>If creating the monster involved power tools, combustible ingredients, flames, noise, and bad smells, the boys would enjoy the project.</p>
<p>
This is a very telling statement. I would bet $$ that the teachers involved in praising the fancy drawings were women. I remember S struggling with the silly drawings of eight flowers, or seven horses to demonstrate math problems. He was cross dominant, so his fine motor skills were miles behind everyone else. It was torture. I quickly told him that he would only have to draw balls, ball bearings, wheels, tires, smiley faces, peaches, doughnuts, marbles, cranberries, grapes, or washers (all circles, in case you haven’t noticed.) Frustration ended.</p>
<p>Well, just a reality check here on college. S attends Williams, definitely boy slanted IMO. Not a LAC that suffers from “too many girls.” (I put this is quotes because, of course, as a mother of a D, I know there can never be too many girls.)</p>
<p>For winter study he is in a class (10 kids) that is studying the Tempest and enacting parts of it. His group (5 kids, at least 3 boys) got Act I and chose to enact with …self made puppets! Have you seen the puppets on YouTube? Mostly made by boys.</p>
<p>Crafts don’t seem to ever go away.</p>
<p>Now at Barnard where D is, this would never fly. They are way too traditionally academic there.</p>
<p>BTW: The theater person from the team really liked their puppets.</p>
<p>My only consolation is that S has a part in a full scale production of the Tempest that will not be invaded by arts and crafts (except costume and scenery departments.)</p>
<p>Yeah, but the puppets in those instances are created with humor as the goal. I doubt those guys are shopping at fabric stores to find the perfect tapestry pattern for a puppet’s robe, or at a craft store for more realistic looking doll hair.</p>