10.22.06
The more you think about it, the more it makes you think
My personal feeling is that the differences for any one individual are smaller than influences of the cultural forces that are in motion around us. So a culture of glorification of thuggishness and anti-intellectualism is having an influence on male learning in suburbs and cities, among middle class and immigrants. Girls seem to be less influenced by this.
They used to call it “tracking” when students were grouped by ability into different sections and taught different material. Of course, the class at the bottom got less learning, while the one at the top got better resources and learned more.
Since then, there have been big changes in this system. Research has shown that when students of all levels are grouped together, everyone learns more. I have no idea under what conditions they reached this conclusion, as my experience (and other teachers I have spoken with about this, too) is that the teacher is now expected to come up with and teach separate lesson plans to perhaps three or four different groups in the same classroom. The preponderance in some classes is group work, where students of different levels work together or delegate to each group member what they are best able to do.
Okay, that’s the theory. The fact is that most of the teacher’s classtime is spent trying to keep bratty kids with no intentions of learning from disrupting work in the classroom. These are students who are willing to work much harder to avoid learning than it would take to complete course requirements. Students at the lowest levels don’t understand, as the coursework is far above them. The work is geared toward the middle level in the class, and although it’s easy enough for these kids, they generally don’t do the work. Kids at the top are no longer getting the high quality education you would expect for college bound students.
Don’t get me started on “groupwork”. The way that plays out is you take a worksheet that any member of the group could quite reasonably be expected to complete on their own, you hand it to a group of kids that shoot the shit for a while. Finally one group member does the assignment, or each does one question, then everybody copies everybody else’s paper, without a single person checking to see if the work was done correctly.
Upper level classes now – with a few exceptions – are generally 10:1 girls to boys. Often the boys are less well prepared for upper level classes by the fact that they were already behind when they showed up as freshmen, after having coasted in middle school for three years. So often I would hear parents say that they fully expected their (now-freshman) son would buckle down and start working after the first disastrous quarter in high school, when it was clear to me that the boy has seriously delayed reading and writing ability.
The fact is that girls start with a slight language ability over boys. This can be compensated for by hard work, but hard work is something that we don’t like to give students anymore, as they don’t do it, and teachers get in trouble for giving bad grades to students who don’t do their work. The only serious academic class I was ever in where the boys greatly outnumbered the girls was a computer programming class.
Solutions? Not sure. Require kids to learn stuff? Stop acting as though the purpose of middle school is to bolster fragile egos? You’ve got me.
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October 18th, 2006 at 1:15 pm eWhile I don’t believe in gender inequality this reminded me of high school.Some of my classes had their membership determined by “ability.” I think it was based more on something we knew only as the California tests but might have been the prior year’s grades.In those there were always more girls than boys. One English class I recall was mostly female – mostly Jewish girls. I never drew a conclusion but did wonder somewhat.