NYT: Teaching Boys and Girls Separately

[RedEarth]

March 2, 2008
Magazine Preview
Teaching Boys and Girls Separately
By ELIZABETH WEIL
This article will appear in this Sunday's Times Magazine.



On an unseasonably cold day last November in Foley, Ala., Colby Royster and Michael Peterson, two students in William Bender’s fourth-grade public-school class, informed me that the class corn snake could eat a rat faster than the class boa constrictor. Bender teaches 26 fourth graders, all boys. Down the hall and around the corner, Michelle Gay teaches 26 fourth-grade girls. The boys like being on their own, they say, because girls don’t appreciate their jokes and think boys are too messy, and are also scared of snakes. The walls of the boys’ classroom are painted blue, the light bulbs emit a cool white light and the thermostat is set to 69 degrees. In the girls’ room, by contrast, the walls are yellow, the light bulbs emit a warm yellow light and the temperature is kept six degrees warmer, as per the instructions of Leonard Sax, a family physician turned author and advocate who this May will quit his medical practice to devote himself full time to promoting single-sex public education.

Foley Intermediate School began offering separate classes for boys and girls a few years ago, after the school’s principal, Lee Mansell, read a book by Michael Gurian called “Boys and Girls Learn Differently!” After that, she read a magazine article by Sax and thought that his insights would help improve the test scores of Foley’s lowest-achieving cohort, minority boys. Sax went on to publish those ideas in “Why Gender Matters: What Parents and Teachers Need to Know About the Emerging Science of Sex Differences.” Both books feature conversion stories of children, particularly boys, failing and on Ritalin in coeducational settings and then pulling themselves together in single-sex schools. Sax’s book and lectures also include neurological diagrams and scores of citations of obscure scientific studies, like one by a Swedish researcher who found, in a study of 96 adults, that males and females have different emotional and cognitive responses to different kinds of light. Sax refers to a few other studies that he says show that girls and boys draw differently, including one from a group of Japanese researchers who found girls’ drawings typically depict still lifes of people, pets or flowers, using 10 or more crayons, favoring warm colors like red, green, beige and brown; boys, on the other hand, draw action, using 6 or fewer colors, mostly cool hues like gray, blue, silver and black. This apparent difference, which Sax argues is hard-wired, causes teachers to praise girls’ artwork and make boys feel that they’re drawing incorrectly. Under Sax’s leadership, teachers learn to say things like, “Damien, take your green crayon and draw some sparks and take your black crayon and draw some black lines coming out from the back of the vehicle, to make it look like it’s going faster.” “Now Damien feels encouraged,” Sax explained to me when I first met him last spring in San Francisco. “To say: ‘Why don’t you use more colors? Why don’t you put someone in the vehicle?’ is as discouraging as if you say to Emily, ‘Well, this is nice, but why don’t you have one of them kick the other one — give us some action.’ ”

During the fall of 2003, Principal Mansell asked her entire faculty to read “Boys and Girls Learn Differently!” and, in the spring of 2004, to attend a one-day seminar led by Sax at the school, explaining boys’ and girls’ innate differences and how to teach to them. She also invited all Foley Intermediate School parents to a meeting extolling the virtues of single-sex public education. Enough parents were impressed that when Foley Intermediate, a school of 322 fourth and fifth graders, reopened after summer recess, the school had four single-sex classrooms: a girls’ and a boys’ class in both the fourth and fifth grades. Four classrooms in each grade remained coed.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/02/magazine/02sex3-t.html?ex=1204952400&en=9d4cbac59a9b5ea4&ei=5065&partner=MYWAY

[proud2BlibKansan]

1. Proud grad of all girls school here

I got a terrific education. I think it's a model we should provide to more kids.

[Warren Stupidity]

2. I'm against segregation.

But that's just me.

[Speck Tater]

5. Dogma always trumps reality. NT

[Warren Stupidity]

9. I guess as long as it is equal, segregation is ok.

My karma ate your dogma.

[HockeyMom]

3. Choice

It should be a choice. My parents went to same gender public schools in NYC back in the 1920s and 1930s. I, myself, chose to go to an all girls Catholic HS after going to a mixed gender elementary school. I liked the all girls school due to the fact that I was a very shy preteen and what you might call a "bookworm".

It should be up to the parents and/or individual boy or girl.

[Beregond2]

4. Gender

This kind of generalizing about gender makes me uneasy, but I must admit the best year I had in public school was sixth grade, when, as an experiment, they had an all-boys class, an all-girls class, and a mixed class. I was in the all-boys class. The experiment was abandoned the next year when the teacher of the all-girls class said: "Never again!"

[Speck Tater]

7. Anything other than Abstinence-Only makes conservatives uneasy.

Dogma always seems to trump reality. Regardless of which wing that dogma comes from.

[RaleighNCDUer]

8. The girls' teacher said "never again"?

Was it (I hypothesize) because the girls stopped acting in their pre-set roles without the boys around? Girls who would normally be reclusive, shy, unassertive around the boys suddenly became more assertive and confident, and the teacher didn't know how to deal with it?

I don't imagine the boys changed much - boys will be boys, and with the males what you see is pretty much what you get. But the girls, being much more socially attuned, might change dramatically without the boys around - and entirely new dynamic.

[Warren Stupidity]

10. Actually it is mostly boys who are educationally at risk these days.

"boys will be boys" is part of the problem, as by middle school that tends to mean not being a good student. That said, I'm still against gender segregation. There have to be better ways to deal with the problem.

[madeline_con]

19. TRhat's an astute observation. Any one who does the

"girls night out" sees the dynamic in action.

[madeline_con]

17. It's actually research based and on the up and up.

There are distinct differences in the way girls and boys should be educated. It's actually been shown that the typical public school uses the model more suited to girls across the curriculum.

typos

[no_hypocrisy]

6. Graduate of Sweet Briar College, one of the last remaining independent women's colleges.

Didn't like it at first, but changed my life for the better.

[geek_sabre]

16. hey!

Vixen here as well!

[fight4my3sons]

11. my school union is talking about the possibility of separate

classrooms right now. I am kind of on the fence about it. Here is the Superintendent's newsletter:

http://www.u47.k12.me.us/union47/Newsltr0411.pdf

[ChazII]

12. There should be a choice

for parents as to what type of class they can have for their child. It might be that a single-sex class room would benefit some students.

[LWolf]

13. Please, god, no.

Yes, boys and girls learn differently. Girls learn differently from other girls, and boys learn differently from other boys, as well. While the research cited in the article you posted addresses brain research on learning differences, there is quite a bit of research out there to show that there are differences within genders, as well. Girls learn differently from other girls, and boys learn differently from other boys. The answer is not to create increasingly homogeneous classrooms. Research doesn't support it.

<snip>

There has been much discussion in educational literature about the impact of ability groupings on learning. While teachers tend to believe that achievement is improved by creating homogeneously grouped classes, this is not generally supported by the research.In 1987, Robert Slavin coordinated the findings of fourteen studies on this issue and found that “the achievement effects of ability grouped class assignment are essentially zero.” (Educational Leadership, September, 1988) While there is more evidence that ability grouping may have advantages for academically gifted students, it does not raise the achievement level of students on most ability levels. Furthermore, the creation of homogeneous classes carries with it a number of negative consequences including the stigmatization of lower level students, the lowering of teacher expectations, and the creation of academic elites. Lower track classes tend to suffer from a greater level of disruption as students lack the positive role models and the stimulation provided by heterogeneous groupings. Consistent with Slavin’s findings, the Harvard Education Letter (July, 1987) suggested that heterogeneous groupings make sense on the elementary level, and that homogeneous groupings should be reduced on the secondary level as well.

More: http://www.lookstein.org/heterogeneous/hetero_intro.htm

I teach middle school. For the last few years, we have had a disproportionate number of girls; always at least 2-1. It's been a social nightmare. Learning continues regardless of the number of boys or girls in the room. A whole herd of adolescent girls creates other issues around relational aggression that don't seem to resolve themselves until about their sophomore year in high school, which is, of course, too late for us.

<snip>

The term "relational aggression" is used to describe a type of bullying primarily used by pre-adolescent and adolescent girls to victimize other girls—a covert use of relationships as weapons to inflict emotional pain. Researchers have found that, contrary to popular belief, girls are not less aggressive than boys, they are just more subtle or covert in their use of aggression. Mary Pipher, a clinical psychologist, brought popular attention to this form of harassment through her best-selling book, Reviving Ophelia . She notes that relational aggression is not a new social problem, but it is one that is becoming more widely recognized.
.................................................................................

Relational aggression tends to be most intense and apparent among girls in fifth through eighth grade. This type of behavior often continues, although perhaps to a somewhat lesser degree, in high school. Although most common during the school day, relational aggression can occur in other settings such as the neighborhood or community activities.

http://www.teachersandfamilies.com/open/parent/ra1.cfm

In my school setting, we have a minimal amount of bullying by boys. We have a constantly high level of relational aggression among the girls. It's amazing how much of our time and energy is spent on this issue, rather than on teaching and learning.

I believe that same-sex classes would increase this problem, not diminish it. At least now, for the time that they are in class, I can separate the worst offenders by seating them with the boys, so that we can spend our time on learning, rather than social warfare.

[madeline_con]

18. If the boys were not there to "fight" over, it's my contention that

some of this agression would be eased.

[orangefire]

14. I see no reason for this

Why? I ask?

[Scooter24]

15. I think it should be a viable option

when a district is in need of new ideas to revamp it's failing schools.

If it doesn't work, then try something new. But every district is different so we shouldn't discount it's potential to bring results.