Thinking and Linking by Joanne Jacobs
Boys are competing — and winning — on girls’ swim teams in Massachusetts, reports the New York Times. Boys do especially well in the 50-yard freestyle “in which strength can trump talent or technique.” That raises the possibility that the state champion in girls’ freestyle could be a boy this year.
State law requires equal access to athletic opportunities and some schools have cut boys’ swim teams.
Equality sucks, writes Rhymes with Right.
Does the College Essay Suck the Life Out of Boys? asks Dr. Helen on PJ Media’s Lifestyle.
She’s reading Andrew Ferguson’s Crazy U: One Dad’s Crash Course in Getting His Kid Into College.
Many of the colleges ask for an essay about the student’s “inner life”–usually a buzz word for some kind of sappy self-absorbed nonsense where the student “took a risk” of some kind and went on to become a better person or some variation of that theme.
The son, who thought his inner life was his own business, finally wrote about passing a swimming test in camp that others could not.
In the essay, the son wrote that he was “tired but proud; he sympathized with his classmates who hadn’t finished and in his victory, accepted modestly, he learned the timeless value of persistence and determination, expressed with grim earnestness…”
But his father knew the truth: “which was the masculine truth. He didn’t remember the race because it proved the timeless value of persistence. He remembered the victory because it was a victory: he had competed against this classmates, friends and rivals alike, and beaten them soundly and undeniably, and earned the right to a sack dance in the end zone. He knew he couldn’t say this, though, and I knew he was right.”
Colleges don’t want critical thinking, concludes Dr. Helen. They don’t want “passion.” They want wimps — or boys pretending to be wimps.
I bet admissions officers are bored out of their skulls by the humble, persistent, lesson-learning, PC applicant. I got a thank you note from Stanford’s admissions director for writing a funny essay. And he let me in. But who wants to risk it?
It’s time to stop teaching one novel to the whole class, argues Pam Allyn on Ed Week.
Sam, a 12-year-old struggling reader, can enjoy Horton Hears a Who! but can’t decode or comprehend the class book, To Kill a Mockingbird.
He faked his way through it. Ashamed, he did whatever he could to distract the teacher and his fellow students from recognizing his struggle, from fooling around while everyone was reading to acting goofy when the teacher asked a question.
Instead of trying to teach the same novel or story from a basal reader to all students, teachers should let students choose reading that fits their interests and abilities, Allyn argues. Boys, in particular, would benefit from a wider choice of readings.
If a student has found 16 blogs about boats, let him read those in school. And maybe that student will follow one of those blogs to a newspaper series about a regatta, or to Dove, Robin Lee Graham’s personal account of sailing around the world as a teenager. In these ways, our students will be exposed to a wider variety of genres than the whole-class novel ever allowed, and they will be more compelled to think critically across genres, as the common-core standards will require of them.
. . . By reading a lot and reading every day, our students ingest. And the more they ingest, the faster and smoother they read. Stamina is vastly underrated. Reading DK Readers or Harry Potter or game manuals or a thousand mobile texts all help children learn to read longer, stronger, and faster.
If a teacher thinks it’s important for every student to read a certain book, such as To Kill a Mockingbird, read it aloud in class, Allyn suggests.
She seems to be designing the whole reading program for the kids who can’t read very well. Some won’t be passionate readers of anything. Is there a middle ground?
Teachers at a school in England reprimanded two seven-year-old boys for making gun shapes with their fingers, reports the Telegraph. A teacher accused the boys of threatening behavior. Parents said they were pretending to be soldiers.
Government inspectors rated the primary school as “good” last year, but said children should have greater freedom to play.
As in the U.S., British schools are limiting children’s play in the name of safety.
Earlier this year, a Liverpool school banned youngsters from playing football with anything other than sponge balls amid fears youngsters might get hurt.
Research last month also found that one in six British schools had banned conkers over concerns of pupils being hit in the face.
We used to play Pony Express and Indians with real bows and arrows (made of garden stakes) and water pistols. It was one of the few times in history when it was better to be an Indian. We could have put someone’s eye out, but didn’t.
Boys aren’t learning to read — and it’s a global problem, write William Brozo and Richard Whitmire in a New York Daily News op-ed.
According to a Center for Education Policy report that looked at 40 states, boys “lag well behind girls in literacy skills – while only tying them in math.” And it’s not just an issue in the U.S.
Earlier this month, results of 65-country comparison called the Program for International Student Assessment revealed that girls tie boys in math while soaring ahead of them by an astounding 39 points on reading skills. SportsCenter, last time we checked, has a limited audience in Albania, the country with the largest gender gap in reading.
And that’s not even the worst news. In 2000, the last time we had comparable international reading scores, boys were only 32 points behind. In only nine years, boys – around the world – have slipped another seven points further behind girls.
Boys are somewhat better than girls at reading text printed on computer screens, according to PISA.
But does screen-reading prowess balance out the inability (disinterest would be a better word) to read words printed on pulverized trees? Based on college enrollment and graduation rates, the answer has to be “no.” Truth is, college has become the new high school. Jobs ranging from bank tellers to policing to sophisticated machine shop work require post-high school studies that were not needed two decades ago.
The global economic race to produce the most educated workforce will be won by the nation that figures out how to teach boys to read, Brozo and Whitmire argue.
Black male students are doing very poorly in school, concludes a report by the Council of the Great City Schools, an advocacy group for urban public schools. From the New York Times:
Only 12 percent of black fourth-grade boys are proficient in reading, compared with 38 percent of white boys, and only 12 percent of black eighth-grade boys are proficient in math, compared with 44 percent of white boys.
Poverty alone does not seem to explain the differences: poor white boys do just as well as African-American boys who do not live in poverty, measured by whether they qualify for subsidized school lunches.
In addition to low test scores, black male students drop out of high school at nearly twice the rate of white males. SAT scores for black males who remain in school average 104 points lower than white males.
Ronald Ferguson, director of the Achievement Gap Initiative at Harvard, calls for “conversations about early childhood parenting practices,” such as “how much we talk to them, the ways we talk to them, the ways we enforce discipline, the ways we encourage them to think and develop a sense of autonomy.”
Black girls are much more likely to complete high school and go on to college than their brothers. The culture for girls is less toxic than the culture for boys, most of whom are growing up without their fathers.
The report urges convening a White House conference, encouraging Congress to appropriate more money for schools and establishing networks of black mentors.
What it does not discuss are policy responses identified with a robust school reform movement that emphasizes closing failing schools, offering charter schools as alternatives and raising the quality of teachers.
The report did not go down this road because “there’s not a lot of research to indicate that many of those strategies produce better results,” (Michael) Casserly said.
And what’s the evidence that spending money improves results? Or holding a White House conference for that matter.
In Baltimore, the dropout rate for African-American boys declined to 4.9 percent during the last academic year, down from 11.9 percent three years earlier, the Times reports.
Andres A. Alonso, the chief executive of the Baltimore City Public Schools, said the improvement had little to do with changes at the margins, like lengthening the school day or adding mentors. Rather, Mr. Alonso cited aggressively closing failing schools, knocking on the doors of dropouts’ homes to lure them back and creating real-time alerts — “almost like an electrical charge” — when a student misses several days of school.
Baltimore also opened alternative schools to help students complete a diploma.
President Obama will miss his college goal — he wants the U.S. to lead the world in college completion by 2020 — because he’s ignoring boys, predicts Richard Whitmire. Nobody’s talking about the widening gender gap that leaves males undereducated and unemployed.
If schools discipline more blacks or Hispanics than white students, federal officials warn they’ll use “disparate impact analysis” to charge civil rights violations, reports Education Week.
Under “disparate impact,” schools can be in violation if discipline policies affect one racial group more than others, even if there’s no evidence of unequal treatment for the same offense or an intent to discriminate. An education agency would be found out of compliance if an equally sound policy would have less of a disparate impact, Russlyn Ali,an Education Department official, told Ed Week.
U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said at a conference he was “deeply troubled by rising discipline rates and disparities in discipline” in the nation’s schools. The department has launched compliance reviews in the Christina School District in Wilmington, Del.; the Salamanca City (N.Y.) Central School District; Winston-Salem/Forsyth (N.C.) County Schools; San Juan (Utah) School District; and Rochester (Minn.) Public Schools. All involve both different-treatment and disparate-impact analyses.
Roger Clegg, president of Center for Equal Opportunity, warned the policy could push schools to manipulate the data rather than enforce rules fairly.
“In education, with respect to discipline, my concern would be that school districts are afraid they will be hauled before a court or some administration agency and threatened with a loss of federal funding whenever they have a racial imbalance of one kind or another,” he said. He explained that educators might become hypersensitive to students’ race or ethnicity in discipline decisions, resulting in disciplining some students who shouldn’t be and not disciplining others who deserve it.
In most districts, suspension rates are much higher for black and Hispanic students. Denver Public Schools changed its policies in response to complaints from a local community group, says Allegra “Happy” Haynes, the chief community-engagement officer.
The district implemented a “discipline ladder,” for example, that spelled out the level of the disciplinary action students would receive for specific kinds of infractions, such as chewing gum in class or talking back to teachers. The policy emphasized that students should receive out-of-school suspensions or be referred to police only for serious misconduct, such as causing harm to someone in a fight.
The result was that referrals to law-enforcement officers dropped by 63 percent and out-of-school suspensions declined by 43 percent in the district from the 2008-09 school year to the 2009-10 school year, she said.
Denver’s policy seems to make sense: Why kick kids out of school or call in the police, unless it’s necessary to maintain safety? But it doesn’t make Hispanics as likely to be suspended as Asian-Americans or whites. For that matter, boys are far more likely to get in trouble than girls. Should the rules be changed to tolerate boy-typical misbehavior?
The “different treatment” rule, used in the Bush administration, is simple: The black kid who curses the teacher shouldn’t get a harsher punishment than the white kid who curses the teacher. It doesn’t matter if blacks are more likely to curse and therefore to get in trouble.
When student misbehavior is tolerated, it’s harder for teachers to teach and for students to learn. The wild kid who gets away with it pays in the long run because he doesn’t learn self-control, a critical life skill. All the high-achieving, high-poverty schools teach students to follow the rules so they can learn in a safe, orderly atmosphere.
If Tom Sawyer were a schoolboy today, he’d be diagnosed with ODD (Oppositional Defiant Disorder) and ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder), writes Anne Applebaum in the Washington Post. And maybe CD (Conduct Disorder) too.
“The harder Tom tried to fasten his mind on his book, the more his mind wandered,” Twain writes at one point. Unable to focus (“Tom’s heart ached to be free”) he starts playing with a tick. This behavior is part of a regular pattern: A few days earlier in church (where he had to sit “as far away from the open window and the seductive outside summer scenes as possible”), Tom had been unable to pay attention to the sermon and played with a pinch bug instead.
Tom “blames his half-brother for his poor decisions, demonstrating an inability to take responsibility for his actions. He provokes his peers, often using aggression. He deliberately ignores rules and demonstrates defiance toward adults. He is frequently dishonest, at one point even pretending to be dead.” Of course, he skips school.
Although ADHD and ODD are often dismissed as recently “invented” disorders, they describe personality types and traits that have always existed. A certain kind of boy has always had trouble paying attention in school. A certain kind of boy has always picked fights with friends, gone smoking in the woods and floated down the river on rafts.
Tom turns out OK, Applebaum points out. Huck Finn, who runs away from his foster home, plans to head out to “Indian territory” when “sivilization” gets to be too much for him.
There’s a lot less leeway these days for impulsive, fidgety, reckless boys, writes Applebaum, the mother of two boys.
These days Tom and Huck would be on Ritalin. And Aunt Polly would be on Prozac.
More schools are dividing classes by gender, reports the Washington Post, looking at Imagine Southeast Public Charter School, a D.C. elementary school that separates boys and girls starting in first grade.
“I need the cleanup crew here,” shouts (Soheila) Ahmad, a 23-year-old first-time teacher, sweeping her arm around the central area of the class, where a few books lie scattered on the blue rug, and six blue beanbag chairs are arranged in a reading circle. Three boys hop to it, hoisting and heaving the beanbags into a pile against the far wall. A fourth boy collects the books and reshelves them. It is 10:30 a.m. and time for math.
“Let’s practice counting by 10s to 100,” Ahmad says.
The boys, standing behind their chairs, begin to chant, jumping in place as they say each number: “Ten, 20, 30, 40, … ” they sing, as their jumps and hops get bigger.
“Now let’s count by 2s to 100.”
The boys find their rhythm. Some do scissor jumps. Some do jumping jacks. One pounds his thighs. Another dances wildly, huffing out the numbers as a breathy backbeat. Yet another channels Michael Jackson, moonwalking backward, each sliding step punctuated by his counting. The decibels rise — a stampeding herd of elephants racing toward 100 — and the pace quickens. Ahmad doesn’t blink an eye.
She quizzes them for 15 minutes on their addition facts and divides them into their math groups: Persevering Penguins, Ferocious Foxes, Eager Eagles. The Penguins test each other with addition flashcards. The Foxes play math games on three computer terminals in the corner. The Eagles sit on the floor and have a math lesson with Ahmad. When it is time for the groups to trade places, Ahmad asks, “All set?”
“You bet!” the boys shout, swapping places in a raucous bustle.
Ginene Pointer’s first-grade girls sit quietly at their desks till their math group is called.
“Strawberry Shortcake House,” she says, as four girls stand quietly, push their chairs in and walk to the carpet, where they sit in tidy rows at her feet. “Unicorn House. SpongeBob House …”
When all the girls are seated, Pointer, 31, who has taught for nine years, gives three of them plastic baggies with their supplies: small white boards, construction paper and markers. The leaders distribute the materials and return to their spots on the floor, crossing their legs with military precision. The girls carefully arrange scraps of construction paper on one corner of their slates, sock erasers on their laps and markers in their hands. They are ready for the game.
“Six plus unknown partner equals 15?” Pointer asks.
The girls scribble furiously on their boards. A student named MaKayla raises her hand.
“Nine!” she says softly when the teacher calls on her.
“What?” Pointer asks. “Use your big girl voice, please.”
“Six plus nine equals 15,” MaKayla responds firmly.
“Yes,” Pointer says. “Let’s give her a round of applause.”
The girls clap.
“You go, girl! You go, girl!” one chants.
The boys are allowed to move around during lessons and teachers introduce competition through games. The atmosphere for girls is more relaxing, though they like games too.
Like students nationally, Imagine’s girls do better than the boys in reading and about the same in math.
According to the DC Benchmark Assessment System (DC BAS), which measures students’ progress annually in reading and math, 100 percent of Pointer’s girls scored “advanced” in reading, compared with 50 percent of Ahmad’s boys. Almost the same percentage of girls and boys scored “advanced” in math (40 percent and 38 percent, respectively), but 60 percent of the girls were “proficient” in math (the next step down from “advanced”), compared with 38 percent of the boys.
I’m not persuaded that single-sex classes are more effective. Once the boutique effect wears off, kids seem to do about the same. And the research on boys’ and girls’ brains is sketchy, as the story indicates. But it’s the sort of option that may work well for some students in some schools. If the parents want it, why not try it?
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