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.

Ericsson -- Future of Learning

I've mentioned TED talks by Daphne Koller: What we're learning from online education and Sugata Mitra: The child-driven education; Here's a 20-minute Ericsson-funded documentary, noted by Geekdad at The Future of Learning

Talking with the likes of Sugata Mitra, Daphne Koller, and Jose Ferreira, The Future of Learning examines how the learning process can be adapted to the needs of each child and how the highest quality education is now available for any person who can connect to the internet.

They also have Seth Godin as a speaker -- I've linked in the past to Stop Stealing Dreams -- Seth Godin at Hamilton Central Options. I guess I've heard of Jose Ferreira and of Knewton, his adaptive learning/teaching software platform that will be the basis for Pearson's efforts, but didn't know much about him.
The "highest quality education" claim in the Geekdad summary is not actually what Mitra or Koller or especially Godin are saying; they don't think we can (yet?) provide an online substitute for a good teacher, but they do think that kids with good teachers can do better than they have done with these new resources, and they also think that kids with bad teachers or no teachers can do better than they have done. In the next 30 years, more kids will leave school than have left school in all of human history...
Or then again, maybe not?

ADHD or not, here we come...

Attention Disorder or Not, Children Prescribed Pills to Help in School - NYTimes.com

“I don’t have a whole lot of choice,” said Dr. Anderson, a pediatrician for many poor families in Cherokee County, north of Atlanta. “We’ve decided as a society that it’s too expensive to modify the kid’s environment. So we have to modify the kid.”
Dr. Anderson is one of the more outspoken proponents of an idea that is gaining interest among some physicians. They are prescribing stimulants to struggling students in schools starved of extra money — not to treat A.D.H.D., necessarily, but to boost their academic performance.
... ... Reported side effects of the drugs have included growth suppression, increased blood pressure and, in rare cases, psychotic episodes.
The disorder, which is characterized by severe inattention and impulsivity, is an increasingly common psychiatric diagnosis among American youth: about 9.5 percent of Americans ages 4 to 17 were judged to have it in 2007, or about 5.4 million children, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The wonders of chemistry in our kid's education.
Or then again, maybe not.

Exercise and ADHD

I tend to think of some level of ADHD as "normal", and I've always associated it with the need for kids to run around before sitting. I find this disturbing: Exercise may lead to better school performance for kids with ADHD

drugs have proven largely effective in treating many of the 2.5 million school-aged American children with ADHD,
In the study, Pontifex and colleagues asked 40 children aged 8 to 10, half of whom had ADHD, to spend 20 minutes either walking briskly on a treadmill or reading while seated. The children then took a brief reading comprehension and math exam similar to longer standardized tests. They also played a simple computer game in which they had to ignore visual stimuli to quickly determine which direction a cartoon fish was swimming.
The results showed all of the children performed better on both tests after exercising.
"To date there really isn't a whole lot of evidence that schools can pull from to justify why these physical education programs should be in existence," he said. "So what we're trying to do is target our research to provide that type of evidence."

Now, why would that be disturbing? Very simple: we seem to be putting a couple of million kids on medication without doing that research first. No, surely that's not what it means. This has to be a misrepresentation.
Or then again, maybe not.