We've talked about the problem with boys lagging behind the girls in school several times on this blog already.
Just sharing two new links. Kristoff adds new data and a reference to a new book on the topic. Replying to Kristoff, Lindsay Beyerstein writes the meanest, boy-hating column. It doesn't hurt women, to help boys read more. Head slap.
Kristoff says that boys have to given books that appeal to them. Explosions and swords and violence.
Jonah's home from school this week. We had the best day. I took him to the gym with me. We treated ourselves to brunch at the local diner. We sat at the counter, ordered eggs, took goofy pictures on my iPhone, and sent them to Steve to make him jealous. When the library didn't have the books he was looking for, we went to Barnes and Noble to find them. Then we came home, put our feet up on the coffee table, and read the Percy Jackson books together.
Boys lag behind girls with reading skills, but they catch up pretty quickly, if you foster a love of reading. They need the right books. They need official reading times. You need to read to them for a very long time. Schools aren't doing this, but we are at home.
Apt. 11d 
I didn’t see Beyerstein as boy-hating or mean, just suggesting that, as she says, “our basic pedagogical models were developed by men, for boys–long before girls were allowed to go to to school.” I’m all for including books that appeal more to boys, and to factoring in psychological differences in developing when designing curriculum (as some have done with girls and math). But the idea that boys have naturally poor attention spans and therefore can’t succeed in a traditional classroom seems wrong.
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I agree with af–I don’t see anything mean with Beyerstein’s column; you’re going to have to marshall some serious close-reading of her work to convince me she’s boy-hating. She’s not arguing that boys shouldn’t be given remedial help–just that we shouldn’t retool the whole educational system (which was invented by men for boys, by the way) to respond to current events.
For a long time (hundreds of years even!) no one set a curriculum or reading list with girls in mind. Girls read plenty of stories with male protagonists (see the canon of American fiction–Huck, Nick Carraway, Portnoy, Rabbit, etc.) and still love reading. Why the low expectations for boys? Why do we assume they can’t identify with anyone but themselves, and they only love explosions and bugs? I am pretty sure it would be a better world if boys could identify with female protagonists.
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I agree that you need to have official reading times. I was skeptical when you wrote about it but then one of my friends was doing it with her sons and it made a huge difference. I also agree that you need to read to them a lot. I volunteer with children in very poor schools and very few of them have had anyone read to them. Many don’t like having stories read to them, or even told to them, when they start kindergarten. I’m certainly not any kind of expert or scientist but from what I see they can’t seem to take the words and make them into a story in their mind. So they are bored. Those who eventually develop this ability seem to be able enjoy reading, and to absorb information easily by reading.
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Well, she’s rolling her eyes that there’s really a problem here. And she’s wrong about the school system being set up for boys. Sigh. The modern school system was set up to keep immigrants off the streets of the city until they were old enough to work in sweat shops. Boys and girls went to those schools. She says the only ones that are worried about the education of boys are right wing organizations and the parents of boys. Well, there are a lot of parents of boys out there.
She could have argued that the boys scores haven’t declined, rather that girls scores have risen. Although the new book that Kristoff cites may have a rebuttal to that. Not sure.
Sure, it would be better if boys would read Laura Ingalls Wilder and Caddy Woodlawn, but they don’t. I tried to get Jonah to read Farmer Boy. Not interested. The assignments that he’s had in reading class are art projects that he finds boring. He had to make paper dolls for one class and a scrapbook in another. Poor kid didn’t even know what a scrapbook was. Why couldn’t they have him make a comic book with a superhero character?
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Would a girl in his grade even know what a scrapbook was? I would imagine she would know only if her parents were into scrapbooking. The school where I volunteer has the students make something like paper dolls but they call them story action figures.
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I wasn’t crazy about the article, (I felt like she made several claims that are at least not obvious to me, without much support, among other things) but you’re being unfair when you say She says the only ones that are worried about the education of boys are right wing organizations and the parents of boys.
She says “many”, which is clearly not the same the as “all”, as you imply. Now, I don’t know how many make “many”, or if She’s right about the percentage, but there are certainly some significant right-wing activists in the “war on boys” movement (Christina Hoff-Summers, professional anti-feminist, is probably the most famous.)
My mother read the the Little House books to us (she used to read books to us on car trips) and I liked them a lot. I don’t recall how old I was, though. It’s true that when I was in grade school I mostly read books on WWII and monsters when left to my own devices, but lots of different books are able to appeal to boys, given the chance.
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I brought home Little House on the Prairie and couldn’t get my 2nd grade daughter to read it. I haven’t totally given up on it. I Netflixed a disk of the TV series and we may read her a chapter, but I haven’t had any luck yet. But honestly, although I read the LIW books as a kid, I didn’t really ever get that into them myself–not enough dragons.
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so are you willing to say that Beyerstein’s work is not the “meanest” column? or “boy-hating”? I mean do you think she actually _hates_ boys? I hate to be a nudge, but I do think that people have to be responsible in their rhetoric, especially if they want to be taken seriously(even on the internet). If this is truly your standard for meanness and hatred, then I guess that’s ok (and I think you have a pretty low standard), but if not, then this kind of sloppy off-hand response doesn’t do a lot to encourage debate or discourse (or convince others that you are right).
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She wrote, “Now that girls are thriving in the system, disgruntled parents of sons and conservative activists like Christina Hoff Sommers of the American Enterprise Institute are crying foul.”
She lumped me in with AEI. That annoyed me.
Parents of boys aren’t upset that girls are doing well. Please. We’re concerned that boys are struggling with reading and verbal skills. We’re concerned that the cutbacks on recess and PE means that boys (and girls) are antsy in the classroom. That’s not a plot against girls. Nobody is arguing that “the system should adapt to the boys, at the expense of girls.” That’s just weird and paranoid.
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Miranda – Her last line of the column was “Maybe boys are acting out and underperforming because they’ve been taught from an early age that the world should change to suit them.” You don’t think that’s mean? I do.
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There are some areas where current school practice is unfortunate for anybody who has issues with distraction. 1. Having student desks facing each other makes it harder for a distractable child to follow teacher directions. 2. Problems with what the Kitchen Table Math crew call “page splatter”–visually “busy” textbooks full of colorful but irrelevant photographs.
I can’t think of anything more right now (aside from maybe the 1970s experiment with the “open classroom”), but there must be other examples of classroom practices which are disproportionately hard on children with attention problems.
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Nobody is arguing that “the system should adapt to the boys, at the expense of girls.” That’s just weird and paranoid.
this may be true for k-12, but the college system sure has changed to suit men, at the expense of women, as we admit less qualified men in order to achieve gender balance. Perhaps because that is what I see on a daily basis, I don’t find it weird or paranoid. Of course, no one ever had to argue for this situation–once it appeared that colleges would have serious gender imbalances, they immediately adapted to admit more men. The system changes to help priviliged (white, upper-class) men and women all the time.
I guess I interpret her last line a little more charitably. I thought she was arguing that the “let boys be boys” line of thinking hasn’t resulted in very positive outcomes for boys or girls. In my mind, she has the emphasis wrong–boys haven’t been taught to underperform because they have been raised in a patriarchal society; it’s that historically their underperformance hasn’t had serious costs for them because patriarchy established an uneven playing field. I saw the last line essentially talking about male privilege, which most children are not aware of, true, and should not be blamed for, but it still exists. I guess you could interpret the suggestion that parents have taught their boys that the world would change to suit them as being mean to parents, but this seems stretching it. I always try to give people more of the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps her phrasing could have been better.
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…it’s that historically their underperformance hasn’t had serious costs for them because patriarchy established an uneven playing field.
Unless the boys weren’t white and middle class.
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Here are some recent boy-unfriendly innovations in school practice (that may not be that great for a lot of girls, either):
1. The introduction of arts-and-crafts into every conceivable school subject (as Laura has documented), often with little relevance to the skills and knowledge that the subject is supposed to impart. My favorite example is the “mole” chemistry project from Out in Left Field:
http://oilf.blogspot.com/2010/02/artsy-science-what-about-sciency-art-ii.html
2. The desire to elicit short compositions for math problems, in the belief that it somehow shows better comprehension, when really math-y kids might not be thinking verbally at all, and asking them to write it out in sentences is just as irrelevant an obstacle as asking them to translate it into Attic Greek.
3. Interdisciplinarity (which tends to mean #1).
On the subject of boys in college, I was reading somewhere (I forget where), that the disparity in numbers is what you would expect, given the over-representation of boys at the top and the bottom. I believe I’ve heard it mentioned that elite institutions have more even gender balance. It is only to be expected that once you get below the elite level, there just aren’t as many boys who can keep up with mid-range girls.
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I think all the details stem from the loss of the uneven playing field (i.e. the diminishing, to some degree, of the “patriarchy”, at least in K-12 education) and the high degree of feminization of the K-12 workforce, including now, in the supervisory roles of principal (though to a lesser degree than in frontline teaching).
I think environments will be influenced by the people who run things. In most of the world, that’s men, and men get to set the rules and they create boy/man-friendly environments. K-12 education has enough people in positions of power that they might be creating a girl-friendly environment (i.e. one that the people in charge find friendly).
I find it difficult to get worked up about this being a bad thing. Having seen the wildness of kindergarten boys, including my own, I kind of like him being schooled in a girl-friendly environment, i.e. one in which his wild, wiggly, type A, competitive, dominance-seeking personality is tempered with training in valuing cooperation, discipline, precision (“feminine” traits). Now, mind you, my son is doing well in school, because he is able to temper his “boy” tendencies sufficiently so that they don’t impede his learning. I might feel differently if I thought he wasn’t learning to read or write because of the techniques being used.
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Wow I’m surprised at the comments here at the NYT Motherlode blog.
Anecdatum: I spent 3 years as a ed assistant in a learning centre which is like the mild form of special ed for kids up here. There was no question within the closed doors of the school that there were some teachers that “got” boys and some that didn’t, and we saw disproportionate numbers of boys in the centre from the classes with the teachers that didn’t do well with boys.
I never really did pin down all the critical differences but some of it seemed to have to do with neatness in the earlier grades and sitting in one’s seat without wriggling too much. Once the boys got the message that they were “bad” they tended to take that identity on and build on it (not necessarily as an obvious rebel, but giving up on learning), which is when we got them.
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“…sitting in one’s seat without wriggling too much.”
The ironic thing is that wriggling or fidgeting is actually productive for some kids who have attention issues. In their case, the body somehow needs some input in order for the mind to be able to pay attention. I know a psychologist who sometimes recommends that kids need an item to fidget with (like a squishy ball) and there’s a study that says that gum-chewing actually improves concentration.
Another counter-intuitive classroom fact is that some children (and big people) process oral speech better when they are not looking in the eyes of the person who is speaking. In some cases, it’s actually distracting to make eye contact.
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Jonah’s got a playdate over. I just asked them, “do teachers favor girls, boys, or neither?” Response? “Girls, duh!” So, it’s scientifically proven.
The wiggle stuff and body control gender differences seemed bigger in Kindergarten and 1st grade. That’s why nearly all the parents of the boys in Jonah’s grade held their boys back a year from school. Jonah’s a June baby and is the youngest in his class.
I would be hesitant to say that the school system favors girls. I just don’t know enough. I would say that certain teachers favor certain personality types. They like rule followers and discourage real creativity (but liked canned creativity). Jonah has one of those teachers this year. He managed to get a C on a math test this year, even though he got all of the answers right on the test. She took off points because he did all the work in his head rather than writing out the work. She took off points because he forgot to write the label after a word problem. She took off points because he circled the right answer, rather than underlined it.
I’m not sure if girls do better with these nit-picker teachers than boys do. Steve and I don’t do well with these types of people at all and openly mock them. It’s probably not serving our children well and we should develop a hand gesture to more subtly mock them.
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“They like rule followers and discourage real creativity (but liked canned creativity). Jonah has one of those teachers this year. He managed to get a C on a math test this year, even though he got all of the answers right on the test. She took off points because he did all the work in his head rather than writing out the work. She took off points because he forgot to write the label after a word problem. She took off points because he circled the right answer, rather than underlined it.”
I think I want to cross-stitch this on a pillow.
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I’m not sure if girls do better with these nit-picker teachers than boys do.
I had a teacher who made me re-write assignments because she didn’t like my handwriting. This was in 8th grade or so. I wouldn’t have been that put-out about it (even in 8th grade I recognized that my handwriting was horrible) except for the fact that she made me write cursive and she told me that “Mongol” and “Muslim” were synonyms. The publisher-provided answer key agreed with her and I was being an asshole over the difference between a 99% and 100% on a test, but still.
Of course, she didn’t like the girls any more than she liked me. And, on reflection as I get older, she may have made me re-write it only to stop me from causing trouble with the time I had because I finished a day early. But, it was a lucky break for me that computers came and made a liar of everybody who said that I would be hurt later in life if I didn’t learn to write clearly enough that other people could read it.
Also, though I don’t have a hand gesture, I do deliberately make errors in forms and the like when the person giving me the form has no real power over me and seems much too picky.
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“we should develop a hand gesture”
Thumb forming a circle with forefinger and middle finger, then vigorously wiggling the hand up and down (vertically or at a slight angle), either from the wrist or the elbow.
I’m not so sure about the subtlety.
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If Ricky Martin can make the news by coming out, I think you don’t need to worry. Anything is now subtle.
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“She took off points because he did all the work in his head rather than writing out the work. She took off points because he forgot to write the label after a word problem. She took off points because he circled the right answer, rather than underlined it.”
Call me the outlier, but I think this is OK, as long as she told him those were the rules. Now, I’d feel differently if he *hadn’t* gotten all the questions right. Then, I’d be worried that the nit-picking was impeding his learning, but if he’s getting the learning anyway, then that’s the time to spend on learning the rules (at least if you want to get the grades).
I was a girl who wouldn’t follow rules. One time, in high school, I lost half the points on my chemistry exam ’cause I didn’t write one answer on the front and one on the back. It was annoying, but it did make me more likely to follow the instructions next time. And, my handwriting has always been sloppy enough that it can actually impede the math — my spouse jokes that equations are a lot easier (or alternatively impossible) to solve when your z’s turn into 2’s, and you make your system of 4 equations into a system of 3.
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I agree with Laura – and our boys go to a German school. It’s very heavily skewed towards “girl-y” skills — every single worksheet needs to be colored, even math and science ones. If you don’t color your homework sheets, you don’t get a stamp (which is a huge deal).
My boys hate coloring. My 19-month-old daughter loves coloring more than they do. I’m already sure she’ll ace all those coloring sheets. My boys, not so much. Is this important for their problem solving skills? I have my doubts. My ADHD oldest child who is bright and loves math and is just learning about chemistry because he wants to (he’s 8) seems at an unfair disadvantage.
We’ve had similar experiences with a teacher not giving points for correct answers because the numbers weren’t pretty enough. For me, this teaches all the wrong things. Sigh.
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Vee haff vays of making you use der proper shading.
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Aggh, well, I agree with both sides to some degree. I do think with Lindsay that school used to be as repressive if not more so than it is now–I think there’s a good argument that the rest of society has changed, so most kids get little practice with executive function tasks and sitting still, not to mention not enough ways to blow off steam when they’re NOT being repressed. Schools are also worse at enforcing their own behavior standards than they used to be. On the other hand, I also think school is currently grossly over-obsessed with collaboration and faux-creativity. Does this disadvantage left-brain thinkers and kids with attention problems and, no doubt, the socially inept, as well as boys? Almost certainly.
Is there any evidence yet that poor school performance is really hurting boys, though, rather than just pissing their mothers off? Last I heard, lots of the worst-performing male college students still had better career outcomes than girls who did all their work and got good grades.
And Lindsay’s also quite right that some of the yuckiest right-wing people seize on this stuff because of their girl-hating.
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(I’m joking about the mother-pissing-off, by the way. I think I have mentioned before that my older daughter has every one of the behaviors issues that annoy teachers in small boys, other than physical aggressiveness, and it’s definitely worrisome to me that there’s an expectation that classrooms need to be constantly collaborative as well as noise- and wiggle-free.)
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Popular reading instruction methods are another problem area. Here’s a UK story from several years ago:
http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/article-23389856-boys-do-better-than-girls-when-taught-under-traditional-reading-methods.do
According to the study, synthetic phonetics (as opposed to conventional analytic phonics) yields
1. a 20 month improvement in boys
2. a 14 month improvement in girls
3. “Children from disadvantaged areas who received synthetic phonics training kept up with children from well off areas until the seventh year at school, whereas those taught with usual methods fell behind five years earlier.”
I found the link over at Kitchen Table Math.
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The kid has a say, too.
Hubby and I are bookworms. We have 3 kids. 1 and 3 are bookworms. Number 2 had other priorities. We had reading time, we had all that stuff. I scrounged the library for the lost in the wilderness stuff he was willing to tolerate. We appealed to his competitiveness — “You wanna play scholastic bowl, you’re going to need to know stuff. TV just isn’t as dense as books are. If you wanna do well, you’re going to need to read.
Kid read what he had to. Did what he had to do to get the lowest A. Played sports, made friends, met his obligations. Would not read recreationally. Watched a lot of Discovery Channel. Made first team all-state in Scholastic Bowl. To spite us, we suspect!
Not all kids are readers. Some non-readers do just fine. Filed under humbling lesson of parenthood number 5742 in my portfolio.
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