With blond hair standing on end, mud on his knees, and a stick in hand, Jonah is a boy. Lately, he has taken to ripping his shirt off and posing with a helmet and sword. Sometimes he’ll draw a tattoo on his bare chest like Iggy Pop. My dad will watch him involved in an imaginary dual with an adversary and laugh. He calls him “Little Tom Sawyer.”
Part of that boyishness is boundless energy. It is physically impossible for him to walk in a straight line down the street. He must leap off mailboxes, sidekick, sidekick, twist, jump, run in a circle, and prance along the curb. We never worried about ADHD, because when he’s interested in something, he’ll devote every fiber of his being to that something, be it trains or Romans, for hours and hours.
Since his teachers rarely share his enthusiasm for trains and Romans, he has had difficulty remaining still in school. It’s pretty much in check now that he’s 6, but nursery school was a tough place for him. He would poke the girls in circle group or bellyflop on the floor to get a laugh.
Because Jonah’s academic work has never been a concern, I didn’t really loose any sleep about his inability to pay attention and to sit still. Maybe I should be worried. Everyone else is up in arms about boys in schools this week. How many articles can we count on this issue this week? Newsweek, the New Republic, Katha Pollitt. The topic du jour.
Baa. Let’s follow along and talk about boys.
Starting in the mid-80s, boys began trailing behind the girls in school. In many colleges, girls now out number the boys. No one is disputing those numbers. The debate revolves around the reason behind the recent dropoff, possible remedies, and whether or not this represents a national crisis.
Katha Pollitt says that women are more driven to go to college, because they know that they can’t rely upon a man for support anymore. She rejects arguments by others that the curriculum is more verbally based and school structure more rigid than before. Christina Hoff Summers has been making the school is anti-boy argument for a long time.
In Newsweek, they give a lot of weight to the idea that the real problems happen in middle school when the girls and their brains mature faster. The boys don’t really catch up until 18. Of course, the slow brain theory doesn’t explain the recent drop off in boy’s graduation rates.
Some have thrown around the video game and rap music theory (boys are rotting their minds on trash), but that theory isn’t getting too much play.
I agree with Katha’s point that the girls are more driven to get an education than in the past. Boys haven’t changed; girls have.
But there’s more to it than that. Other things have changed in the past 20 years.
There are increasing demands on kids in school, and boys are less able to go with the flow. Jonah had a full day of Kindergarten; while I had a half day. In first grade, he’s adding fractions. He has three tests per week.
Less parents are home to read to their kids nightly and assist with homework. Boys need more handholding in this department.
There are also less opportunities for boys to get their ya-yas out. And boys do need to romp about. It calms them and helps them think better. Playgrounds and recess time are being eliminated at schools across the country, because of lawsuits. Also, kids don’t play outside anymore because they are in daycare or after school activities. Less walks and backyard mucking about leads to jittery, jumpy boys.
Two weeks after becoming a parent, everybody learns that boys are slower than girls. They are slower to talk, to potty train, to be civilized in a restaurant. They have to be taught to aim for the hole in the toilet, to stop eating their boogers, to not dump salt on the table, to stop flinging their toys out the window. They are more work. Every parent knows this.
Many social changes have converged to make school a rough place for boys. To achieve, boys need more exercise and more homework handholding to get them through school. Someone has to do this, either the parents or the schools.
Without intervention, without someone stepping in to make sure the boys go off to college, our two kids will end up living in the basement listening to Bob Marley and doing bong hits. Help the boys. Help me. Thank you very much.
Apt. 11d 
Here’s an education hint that I’ve seen twice for homeschoolers of active kids: have them do their times tables or other similar rote recitation while hopping up and down on a trampoline. I suppose the idea isn’t workable in a formal school setting.
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Not that I know much about ADHD, but it is probably too soon to stop thinking about it. Being able to do something that interests you for hours is, I believe, a typical ADHD behavior. Also, it is possible for an ADHDer to skate through school using just pure intelligence, and then to be really out to sea once they get to the more demanding but unstructured college environment.
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I agree 100% that the current school environment is uniquely unsuited to young boys’ brain development. On the other hand, the dearth of boys in education has been a concern of educators since the dawn of mass public schools: college sports became an essential element in public high school and university education during the Gilded Age in part to encourage boys to stay in school. Girls over the age of 13 were dramatically over-represented in high schools and teachers’ colleges by the turn of the last century, at least in part because boys could begin making full-time wages by their teens, while girls (the ones not heading to the factories) were not yet ready for marriage.
In other words, the crisis of boys’ education has persisted for more than a century. It’s always being rediscovered. Which is all to the good, except that it suggests we have a hard time finding workable solutions.
Also, it’s true that boys would benefit from more recess time — but so would girls. That girls can endure and even thrive under suboptimal conditions (in terms of art, music, phys ed, and recess all being cut, and rote learning being emphasized) doesn’t mean that they couldn’t do even _better_, and be more satisfied, with a curriculum that acknowledges _every_ child’s need for a variety of physical and mental stimulations.
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In my experience with my twins of opposite genders, girls are WAY harder to raise than boys. But in school, my daughter is willing to take more responsibility for her work, is much more willing to charm the teachers, and seems to get the whole social system better than her brother. My son is 13 and in 10th grade in a public highschool. He is in a ‘small community’ program within the school, a program that supports 23 boys (and two girls) who are bright, but need more support for doing homework, organizing themselves, and in general remembering where they’re supposed to be at any given time. If not for this community, my kid would be wandering the halls wondering where he’s supposed to be going next, not because he’s dumb, but because he’s an absent-minded professor type.
I think that the lack of recess and physical outlets for boys is horribly detrimental to them. I also think that boys need much more sleep than girls do when they’re teens, and this tends to make them sleepwalk through school.
Socially, boys are almost required to take on the outlaw gangsta persona and to fight and get into trouble. It’s a right of passage. Boys tend to do much more dangerous stuff than girls, hence they get into more serious accidents and are injured more. Boys tend to lack the ability to control their impulses when they are teens, but girls get that much sooner.
My dd went through puberty 2 years ago, her twin brother has not yet started. He’s still a little boy in some things, and in others he’s an adult. Right now, boys at 18 still aren’t considered mature, where girls are. Boys go through what’s being called the second decade of adolescence, and now it’s thought that they aren’t really adults until they get out of their twenties. Untrue for girls. Boys brains don’t develop as fast as girls. They have much more severe hormonal surges (hard to believe, but think of all those nocturnal emmissions) once puberty hits, and they seem unable to think with their brains for a few years.
All of things things combined make school a lot less of a caring environment for teenage boys. I think schools need to rethink the huge regional schools, and break down the schools so that small schools are the norm for boys. I think that single sex schools are a good thing for both boys and girls, and wish public schools would offer such a possibility. I think that teachers have to learn how to deal with the new boy, the kid that looks like a gangsta but is really just a nice kid in awful clothing with an inability to speak english correctly. And I think parents of boys need to advocate strongly for them and not let them languish in schools where their needs are not being met.
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Oh, and ADHD doesn’t mean that a child can’t hyperfocus. In fact, that is one of the telltale signs of ADHD, the ability to focus on something for a long time and block everything else out.
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I student taught at a private school for gifted kids in the city called De La Salle Academy. The brother who started that school has founded a school for boys on the LES. It’s aimed at bridging that disparity that is increasing between the performance of boys and girls in school by acknowledging the different physical needs of the boys, as well as their different academic and social needs. The boys have recess and more time to run around and get “their ya-yas” out. They also have more male teachers and allow the boys to re-enact important battles in history to help engage the boys.
Before this year, I taught at an all-girls’ school and now that I am back at a coed institution, the different needs of middle school boys are quite aparent. When I have my class after recess, the boys are more focused. They can listen to me and process what I’m saying. I teach a resource class and all my kids either have ADHD and are unmedicated or have a processing issue. I think that schools need to think about axing recess because they need to fit in an extra academic class. It connects to the overscheduling of kids afterschool. Kids need time both in and out of school to hang or run about or do whatever they please. Placing more demands on them at an earlier age, in my opinion, just means that more kids will burn out earlier.
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“Playgrounds and recess time are being eliminated at schools across the country, because of lawsuits.”
Ya know, I see this statement, or a variation of it ( . . . because of testing demands/NCLB) frequently on the internet, but have trouble believing it. Gym classes less frequently, yes, but elimination of recess for elementary students? I would really like some documentation.
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Um…. other poster’s comments aside, based only on my experience with the standard tests for ADHD (and on our ADHD therapist’s comments) believe that you are right. The ability to focus intently on something (and to block out outside distractions) would not be considered to be typical ADHD behavior.
And if your child is doing well academically and socially, think your instincts are good.
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Maybe I’m just showing my age here, but I didn’t think Marley-basement-bong and college were an either-or proposition.
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Maybe I’m just showing my age here, but I didn’t think Marley-basement-bong and college was an either-or proposition.
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Around the Dial: Boys, education and the media
A sampling of what’s happening “around the dial”. The binding themes are boys and education, and the mainstream media’s handling of this problematic issue.
11D notes the recent hand-wringing in the mainstream media about boys’ education in “The Boys Lag B
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Some girls’s brains develop the same as described for boys. They don’t get cut any slack, which boys sometimes get (emphasize sometimes). As a society we do need to do a better job accounting for the need for activity and a slower learning pace for both girls and boys- and not have it be related to intelligence but a different learning style.
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