Boys (mostly) Won't Be Girls

Everybody's different. Sometimes one group of individuals seems substantially different from another. Stop Penalizing Boys for Not Being Able to Sit Still at School - Jessica Lahey - The Atlantic

According to the book Reaching Boys, Teaching Boys: Strategies That Work and Why, boys are kept back in schools at twice the rate of girls. Boys get expelled from preschool nearly five times more often than girls. Boys are diagnosed with learning disorders and attention problems at nearly four times the rate of girls. They do less homework and get a greater proportion of the low grades. Boys are more likely to drop out of school, and make up only 43 percent of college students. Furthermore, boys are nearly three times as likely as girls to be diagnosed with Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). Considering 11 percent of U.S. children--6.4 million in all--have been diagnosed with a ADHD, that's a lot of boys bouncing around U.S. classrooms....

Hmm....sounds like 4.8 million boys and 1.6 million girls. You wouldn't want to forget the 1.6 million by creating a boys v. girls division, but on the other hand even that might be better than what we have now. The book being described apparently sorts out results from a survey describing

eight categories of instruction that succeeded in teaching boys. The most effective lessons included more than one of these elements:

• Lessons that result in an end product--a booklet, a catapult, a poem, or a comic strip, for example.
• Lessons that are structured as competitive games.
• Lessons requiring motor activity.
• Lessons requiring boys to assume responsibility for the learning of others.
• Lessons that require boys to address open questions or unsolved problems.
• Lessons that require a combination of competition and teamwork.
• Lessons that focus on independent, personal discovery and realization.
• Lessons that introduce drama in the form of novelty or surprise.

I suspect that, in the end, we want all of those to be available -- not compulsory -- for kids and groups, some in formed in person and some by telepresence.

Or then again, maybe not.