<p>…becasue it was one of the few professional jobs women could hold, the quaility of teachers (elementary) was much higher. You may have remembered them as “not suited to work with children”, I rememeber them as tough, no nonsense people, just what is needed today!!!</p>
<p>Or lazy, unfocused women who had no classroom management skills, let the inmates run the asylum (literally and figuratively), could not set limits and were more concerned with being friends with certain students than being a teacher to all the students.
ETA: I skipped the sixth grade because of one of these. I showed up at school and sat in a classroom that year, but I skipped the sixth grade.</p>
<p>I had a teacher in third grade who was so evil that I still have nightmares about her 40 years later. I recently learned that she had moved a block away from me in the last year. I have such a visceral reaction to her that I hope we don’t cross paths.</p>
<p>Not everyone can or should be a teacher, but the good ones should be respected and valued.</p>
Hahaha! I hear she’s been sainted in her old age, but I would not be able to restrain myself. I hope she lilves a long time and then rots in hell for eternity.</p>
<p>Oh, for the love of God. I hate gender essentialism. Christina Hoff Sommers is one of the big ones. Yes, boys and girls act differently, but that’s partially because we socialize them differently. Boys are more likely to make weapons out of toys because those are the toys we give them and the behavior we encourage in them from a young age. We sit girls in front of princess movies and buy them dress up clothes and toy kitchens; we sit boys in front of action movies and buy them action figures and Nerf guns. But studies in children have found that boys are no more aggressive than girls - in fact, the girls are just better at HIDING their aggression. They don’t deploy it physically; they deploy it emotionally.</p>
<p>In any case, I agree that this is stupid, but it’s not because “education is hostile to boys”. It’s because of zero tolerance policies and new standards that encourage tightly controlled children who sit down and quietly fill in bubbles on sheets. Boys happen to be more likely to run afoul of these policies, but it’s not because teachers are targeting them or trying to feminize them; it’s because boys’ socialization typically goes contrary to what teachers want them to do. At home they’re taught to be rough and tumble and active, and at school they’re taught to sit still and be silent, and those conflicting messages are confusing to them.</p>
<p>In other words, girls color inside the lines and eat their vegetables, boys eat their crayons and try to color with green beans, and that’s not what the teacher wants from them.</p>
<p>I read this really interesting book about gender imbalance in some countries. One of the take-aways that very much surprised me was that here in America, when parents have a specific preference, it is overwhelmingly toward having a girl.</p>
<p>The book is called “Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys over Girls” by Mara Hvistendahl and mostly deals with China and India, but her section on the US talks about how in families that want to determine the sex of their unborn child, they want girls. Personally, I always wanted girls. I find girls 1000 times easier to deal with than boys and I know many women who wanted girls. There is a whole movement to support women grieving over never having had a daughter. Of which I would have been one.</p>
<p>My father had sixty boys in his class and there was no get up and move around the classroom because you are boys and can’t possibly sit still through a lesson. They kept their feet on the floor and their hands visible. Why have we lowered the expectations on boys so much?
Actually, this shouldn’t be so gender stereotyped. I’ve spent enough time in my kids elementary school classrooms to know there are a lot of ants in the pants girls having problems. Is it video games, technology, parenting, something environmental? Is it just a lack of discipline?</p>
<p>Not all boys have trouble sitting still. In my son’s middle school and elementary school, most of the behavior problems were girls. Fighting, precocious sexual behavior, vandalism. Bad behavior is bad behavior.</p>
<p>My perspective from my son is that female teachers (including my daughter) have different aesthetic expectations and different preferences. For example, my son had a teacher in 6th grade who was really unpleasant and made lfe unpleasant for all kids who didn’t conform to her preferences. If a girl was even a little messy, she was dinged out of all proportion, just like boys were. Same with aesthetic choices. It wasn’t so much anti-boy as anti everything that she didn’t like and more girls than boys fell into step with her preferences. I’ve seen this a bit. Also reading material. The whole entire year they read things like Ella Enchanted and other fluffy books with female protagonists. Not a single piece of reading material that featured a male protagonist and not a single piece that was non-fiction. I’ve seen research that boys often prefer biographies more than girls do, and what would the harm have been from that?</p>
<p>…a lot of what we call “son worship” out there. Many females just can not stand seeing boys fail or having anxiety, & will go to great lengths to see that they don’t. My wife was president of the swim boosters for both boys & girls teams, she was shocked to witness the excuses mothers would make for their boys irresponsibilities, but not he girls. Of course the absent fathers just add to the problem, women feel guilty about that & don’t have the heart to be tough with their sons…in my house my mother didn’t have to be tough, that was my father’s job!!</p>
<p>@Zoozermom - I always thought I would die if I didn’t have a daughter. However, God saw fit to send me two sons and I’ve never looked back. Yes, I miss having the “girl” clothes and the “girl” occasions. But I was never close to my own mom as a child (though I am now) and never seem to get what I needed from her. Had I had a daughter, I might be too tempted to re-live my childhood through her, although I think all parents live vicariously through their children to an extent.</p>
<p>My mom raised me with the statement (I’m not kidding) “if you don’t have a daughter when your mother dies then you are completely alone in the world” and my dad believed to his dying day that females were inherently better than males. When I was pregnant with D1 and D2 I wore an item of pink every single day. My son was an unexpected blessing and when he was born I asked the doctor “what am I supposed to do with that?” But God does have a sense of humor. I love my kids with every fiber of my being, but my relationship with my son is completely unfraught (is that a word? It is now) and uncomplicated. We worship each other, revel in each other’s company and lavish unrestrained affection on each other. My son is pushing 15 now and is about 10 inches taller than I am, but he still always gives me a kiss and a hug even in front of friends and is diligent about taking care of his little person. But I can see, at least in some circles, that girls are very much the preferred gender.</p>
<p>Juillet–socialization of the gender doesn’t have anything to do with boy/girl behavior. They are just born that way. Girls in general are just not as rough and tumble as boys when young in my experience. I got both and worked with both. Personally I think it has to do with pain threshold…
As to toy guns…
I grew up with “Combat” and my favorite “Man from UNCLE”. My friend and I each got a “Man from UNCLE” set for Christmas one year. Lots of guns in that set. Guess my parents didn’t care about socialization. We had lots of fun shooting things up. And dart guns/targets. And bows and arrows. And cap guns. “Charlie’s Angels” had nothing on us.
In girl scouts we learned to shoot rifles at tin cans thanks to a great dad.
Go to the Nerf gun and paint ball gun aisles of your local toy store and check out what’s available. Add in the “super squirters” for the pool. Or “water bombs”. Or even water balloons. How about the traditional egg throw at parties? Do you really think we should be suspending kids for PRETEND guns at school made of a poptart?
In HS we did archery and had competitions–is that outlawed nowadays?
Never shot at anything more than the tin can or target in the rest of my life.
One thing about “finger guns”–if someone shoots at you, you can shoot back.
As for “son worship”–there is some truth to that “Momma’s Boy” and “Daddy’s Girl”.</p>
<p>ZM–reading needs to be the kid’s choice like you say. My kid HATED the “read X number of books” competitions they would have in elementary school. Why? Because the books he WANTED to read (and did) were at least 200 pages but it would only count as one book. So yeah, I told him to read several short stupid books to con the system and then return to his real reading material. Why side-step the system? Because they had a “gold star” chart and he wouldn’t have even been on it (it was plastered on a wall in the classroom).</p>
<p>ZM: This has been my experience, too. So many people seem scared to have boys. “Unfraught” is exactly how I would describe my relationship with my son, too. Never an eye roll, always a hug…he is like sunshine. I adore my daughter too, of course…but it is definitely a more complicated relationship on many levels.</p>