Hey girls... (no, I'm not comin' on to ya')

[Cicero]

I think we are losing sight of the actual point of this thread.

The real topic is to figure out why Drax is celebrating Women's day. I mean...who expected that?


Hey HLJ, there aren't any computers in my kitchen for me to fix for my husband after he breaks it, being completely careless.....(my new one)

[Clodfobble]

Griff, do you think the Montessori model accounts for this difference between individual students, or is it just a different way of doing things? (I don't know a whole lot about it other than a lot of my smart/successful friends went through the program, but it also tends to be self-selecting that way.)

[Shawnee123]

Good points all. We do, when making societal changes, tend to swing too far in the other direction before finding something reasonably close to a happy medium. We are different, and not just between genders, and as we learn more about learning styles we will get closer to realizing what's good for the goose isn't always good for the gander (pardon the overused expression.)

[DanaC]

We do, when making societal changes, tend to swing too far in the other direction before finding something reasonably close to a happy medium.

So true. Funnily enoug, whilst reading seems to favour girls (in teaching styles) at the moment, science teaching still seems to favour boys. At age seven and eight they are very similar n their levels of interest and achievement in science, by the time they get to keystage 2 (age 9 and 10) they have started to diverge overall, with boys achieving better in science than girls. The numbers of girls who take up and achieve in sciences after that are significantly lower than the boys. Something happens between them being in the infants where it's all exciting hands-on experiments and them getting into the academic side of science, to turn girls off.

The situation with regards reading and writing is an even more complex one I fear. One of the problems is the way children are taught in schools overall. We traditionally only recognise a limited number of intelligence types and clamp down on behaviours which do not conform to our expected norms. This affects boys and girls: so, boys get into trouble for being too active and fidgety and not sitting still. Girls meanwhile get into trouble for talking in class. Both these behaviours in children are signs of intelligence: physical intelligence and social/emotional intelligence. But they do not conform so they are inhibited. Lots of children leave school unable to read properly, boys and girls. The school system is a one size fits all environment for a large number of little individuals.

Not sure where this is ggoing....that was a little rambling :P Shawnee makes a good point though. Schooling used to be taught in ways that suited boys: not deliberately I don't think, it just evolved that way. When it was discovered that the way children were being taught was severely disadvantaging girls moves were made to discover why and how.....and then rectify the problem. Now we need to figure out why and how our early education is letting boys down and rectify that.

Note though: early education. Further and Higher education still favours male education styles and male achievement.

[Griff]

Originally Posted by DanaC

Further and Higher education still favours male education styles and male achievement.

Not if you measure it by graduation rates, at least in the US. That could be an artifact of early education difficulties leaving us with your assertion that the preponderance of higher ed students (females) are not being served, which really would be awful, driving out a high percentage of one group early then failing to serve the rest.

I also wasn't saying that dissatisfaction among young boys was the result of a swing toward teaching better for girls. The adjustment of teaching styles in the US is mostly a middle school phenomena and hasn't had any impact at the pre-k/K levels. The early push for academics is coming from parents and the testing mania of the standards movement.

[monster]

We need more Open Schools. http://aaopen.a2schools.org/aaopen.h...ann_arbor_open