Respond to the following: As a student have you noticed that teachers pay more attention to boys than girls? Why do you think teachers favor boys in class? What steps can you take to prevent yourself from shortchanging girls when you become a teacher?
It sure seems that teachers pay more attention to boys, but is it because they favor them more? I say certainly not. I believe it is because a teacher knows that if he or she stops paying attention to the boys in the class for even just a moment, the average boy will have enough time to tear his books in two, jump on his desk and prance around the room screaming something about root beer and jellyfish sandwiches. OK, so I exaggerate, but only by a little. The heart of the matter is that a boy's attention span and learning method is different than a girl's, and it requires a much more hands on approach. Boys, and men for that matter, like to do, build, and experience to gain new learning. As our textbook even states " A researcher at Harvard University argues that schools don't accomidate boys' learning styles and classroom needs." That is how the male mind works. My favorite way to play when I was little was to take things apart and try and put them back together. Did I want to spend the morning reading a manual, or did I want to spend the morning building through trial and error until I fixed it again? I learned by doing, and there is the problem. There is a time for lecture and listen. Far too many teachers in my many years of classroom experience however have made lecture and listen their bread and butter. Boys, and really all children, can only take so much of that. Teachers need to, and I believe slowly are, expanding their teaching repertoire to include alternate teaching methods to reach all the children. That's what I love about our textbook. It addresses that need in the hope of weeding it out entirely. The more children are engaged in the classroom, the more they will learn. Until all teachers add alternate learning methods however, teachers eyes will be firmly focused on the boys.
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2 comments:
well put. My sixth and seventh grade classes were boy dominated (7th grade had 15 boys and 4 girls) so I was compelled to have these kids building their own understanding of the topics at hand, rather than simply telling them the important things.
What's challenging in middle school is that these boys have the same way of learning, at the heart of it all, but half of them don't have the higher level thinking skills to build their own learning yet. But you do the whole class a service by making them use their heads to develop and discover the subjects they study. I think I hit on most of the 'inquiry' buzzwords in that response.
In all honesty, my response would be no, I have not noticed that. Your post makes a lot of sense and I can see that being the case in actuality, but in my student days, my perspective was different. I had a lot of struggles in school, mostly in middle and a little in high school. For me, it didn't seem like an issue of gender, but rather one of performance. I had a difficult time trying to get the attention of my teachers because my grades were average to low-average. I often felt that I only had their focus long enough to get me out of poor grades and into "acceptable" ones. To me, it seemed like the teacher mostly responded to students who could completely engage in class, boy or girl.
Not that I can blame a teacher for having done this though. If a student is proactive, he or she is easier to teach. My problem was in the fact that I was proactive and still struggled. So when a teacher would put more focus on other students, I would get the feeling that I was a lost cause. And don't get me started on teaching to the creative minded vs the factual minded.
Sorry to babble on about this, I just had a completely different student observation. Yours was well written though.
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