RAGE!

[liri]

Boy Brains, Girl Brains from Newsweek - I'm not sure I can articulate the rage with which this article fills me. Let me try.

AKLEAEJ;AEJ'E!!cFFFF@@@!!!11!! EAKAKEaklej@!!!AEJN;AEHNAKL/E,NALN/REWLA/!!!

Nope. Can't.

The principal of an elementary school in Kentucky decided to work on low test scores by sex-segregating classes.

Because males have less serotonin in their brains, which Gray was taught may cause them to fidget more, desks were removed from the boys' classrooms and they got short exercise periods throughout the day. Because females have more oxytocin, a hormone linked to bonding, girls were given a carpeted area where they sit and discuss their feelings.

The girls' classroom sounds like a fucking NIGHTMARE. Sit and discuss their feelings? OMGWTF? Run away! Crap, am I going to have to worry about this too when I have kids? I was just worried about making sure they learn to spell! It goes on to indicate that boys take timed tests because they're competitive, while girls are given more time to finish multiple-choice tests - oh, none of this is going to reinforce the gender stereotypes they've already been socialized with at ALL! And they're adopting this for the fifth and sixth graders. I go into a full-body cringe at the notion of a feelings rug for sixth-grade girls. Small children are cruel and amoral, which is bad enough, but by sixth grade or so the girls are vicious, sociopathic little monsters. The boys may be, too, but most of my dealings with boys of that age involved them making obscene prank calls to me so I tend to assume they operate a bit differently. I don't know what they do to torture other boys.

I may go capslock again. I know I won't be coherent about this. There are a handful of issues that will make me incandescent with rage every single time - threats to abortion rights/ contraceptive rights, threats to gay rights, strangers calling me "honey," the faces of the president or either of my home state's two senators or even the mention of one of their names, misplaced apostrophes, and educational news that resonates with my own experience of public education as a hotbed of incompetence, faddishness, apathy and ignorance on the teachers' parts and bullying on the parts of my classmates for most of middle school - and the added layer of sexism is just icing on the anger cake. It's not so much that I think boys and girls are exactly alike. I mean, hell, I just got done generalizing about adolescent-girl bitchiness as distinct from the crap boys that age pull with girls and whatever they do to traumatize each other. But I can't stand hearing about teachers getting some idea they think is cool and warping a kid's school experience to prove the point, whether the point is "they'll learn parts of speech if we make them chant in unison about diagramming a sentence" - I swear to GOD I will never forgive the Shurley method! - or "teaching kids to spell correctly stifles their creativity!" or "hormones indicate that all boys and all girls will behave exactly like their stereotypical gender roles so let's reinforce those even more."

I mean, I know single-sex education is supposed to be helpful to girls in a lot of ways, but I thought the idea was that you remove them from an environment where they want to seem dumb to impress boys and they'll do better at math, not that you make them talk about their feelings to reinforce their innate girly-hood. I thought the worry was that girls weren't doing well enough in school and (especially) on tests, not that they were doing too well and making the boys feel inadequate. Did I hallucinate the tweaking of the SAT because multiple-choice tests are supposed to be unfair to girls? (Which I found ludicrous and incomprehensible, btw, it's STANDARDIZED, where can the bias hide? But girls outperforming boys on standardized test scores supposedly contributed to the principal in the article trying his plan.) Did I hallucinate teachers ignoring my raised hand to call on boys? What, systemwide change took place in the space of, like, ten years? All the teachers were in reeducation camps and suddenly schools are too hard on boys and standardized tests are unfair in the opposite direction?

It doesn't help my blood pressure any that Gurian, the writer whose work helped spawn this, seems, from what I can find about his other books, to be a big fan of the sacred duty that is motherhood and of biology-as-destiny and all that shit. Good Lord. I do wish it'd clarify what other changes were made to the curriculum beyond the sex-segregated classes, and be a bit more specific about the improvement they've seen - how much are the test scores up? Are class sizes any smaller now? What else changed? Is this an optional program?

I tend toward cynicism about education - I don't think it's possible to come up with a plan that won't shortchange a substantial portion of the student body. I just think teachers ought to try not to make things WORSE than the baseline of education, and forcing girls onto the bonding rug or making the boys roughhouse whether they like it or not... at least in a unisex classroom everyone's shortchanged about the same way.

Comments

[cherry-chiicake.livejournal.com]

I transferred from a regular college to an all girls college, and trust me-- we were not touchy-feely types whatsoever. I found I did better at an all girl's school overall, but it certainly wasn't because I had to talk about my feelings. If nothing else, it's probably because the faculty was so attentive and because I felt a little more comfortable talking out in class (you know, about class stuff. Not feelings.)

Then again, my school has a professor that recently wrote an article to either USA Today or the Post-- I forget which. They had printed some study about girls sucking at math and science, and one of our (male) professors sent a lengthy essay that was essentially a giant "bitch, please."

[lirillith.livejournal.com]

See, that's part of why this threw me. I knew there was evidence that girls tended to do better in single-sex classes, especially in high school and college. But I was familiar with it as a feminist measure - you know, it builds confidence, no deferring to guys, no being neglected by the teachers in favor of guys, etc. Not "talk about feelings because that's what girls do, and we won't make you compete, because appropriately feminine young ladies don't like that."

[mergle.livejournal.com]

The feelings rug sounds like an even more ill-thought-out version of the self-esteem and group bonding and "don't harass your peers" exercises the elementary school counselor made us do. Funny thing, teasing always got _worse_ for me right after those group exercises...

[solielle.livejournal.com]

"teaching kids to spell correctly stifles their creativity!"

Please, please, tell me that there aren't educated people actually saying with any seriousness.

Christ, what a stupid program. Segregating classrooms isn't going to dramatically increase a student's test-taking ability, and I'm really skeptical about the way they went about it in that article. It just seems like grasping at straws the fix the problem, if that makes sense.

[lirillith.livejournal.com]

I know - I mean, if this means that classes are smaller or kids are getting more attention, that alone would account for whatever improvement they're seeing. And just those measures would be likely to help, without relying on offensive pseudoscience.

The spelling thing - I checked with my mother and it seems I sort of misremembered. When my brother was in grade school Mom got alarmed about his bizarre spelling in writing exercises and asked his teacher about it. She said she didn't grade them on spelling there because she wanted them to get into the habit of expressing themselves in writing, but apparently there *were* spelling tests. Which... sounds mostly fine, really. I guess it'd be useful to grade them on their spelling of everyday-use words and not just the ones from the vocab list, but it wasn't nearly as bad as I thought when I was twelve.

[ctrl-a.livejournal.com]

That article, and the practices it describes, was appalling. I would complain, but it only makes me feel so much better to tear it apart.

The thing about multiple choice tests is retarded, though. I thought they were going to say that the girls got free response tests or something, which might make some sort of twisted sense, or at least have some potential justification, but what good does it do to just give boys less time? Is it because boys are competitive and hence work faster? Personally I think it'd be more beneficial in that case to give them more time and then teach them how to slow down and check their answers.

I was also baffled by all these accusations of schools being "girl-friendly". Maybe it's backlash from all the years of people focusing on the dearth of girls in math and science. Maybe I've been deconstructing arguments too much because of the GRE and the LSAT, but reading evidence like how there are more girls in college than boys just made me think, "Y'know, maybe that's because boys still make more money and find jobs more easily." Bah.

At this rate, they might as well segregate schools by race as well. They say that Asians do better on standardized tests if you take them aside beforehand and emphasize their Asianness and emphasize the fact that Asians do better than white people. Just imagine how much we could achieve if we stereotyped them all the time.

I read somewhere, in a book from our ethics class, I think, about how whatever generalizations you make about subgroups of people, there's almost always so much variation that it's pointless. It's like saying boys are taller than girls. Yeah, that may be true on average, but the standard deviations are so huge it doesn't matter because most people are in that murky overlap. I think that's what the people in the article need to figure out.

[lirillith.livejournal.com]

"Boys are competitive" was the rationale behind the timed tests. I guess I'm secretly a boy, which is surprising.

I seem to remember reading elsewhere that in elementary school girls have always tended to get better grades *and* better test scores than boys - it's just around middle school and up that they fall behind, mostly on standardized tests and in math and science. But the response to that was always "what's going wrong with girls?" not "boys should be doing better the whole time, something's wrong!" I don't think things could have changed that much... I'm sure at this school (well, all schools) they want to raise everyone's test scores, but boys trailing a bit at that age apparently isn't a reversal of the natural order. It's not like it's holding guys as a group back once they reach adulthood.

I read somewhere, in a book from our ethics class, I think, about how whatever generalizations you make about subgroups of people, there's almost always so much variation that it's pointless. It's like saying boys are taller than girls. Yeah, that may be true on average, but the standard deviations are so huge it doesn't matter because most people are in that murky overlap. I think that's what the people in the article need to figure out.

EXACTLY.