My final draft of my Inquiry Project report is now available online:
http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dhfb44p3_17cwptds
and my appendix and bibliography:
http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dhfb44p3_18vvthkm
I wish I'd had time to talk about The Homework Myth and Einstein Never Used Flashcards, since those were both very interesting in a challenging-assumptions-about-learning sort of way. In the end though, I just didn't have the time or energy to write about them, and have far too many things coming due in the all-too-near-future to even think about adding another 4 or 5 pages to my report. Suffice it to say that both are interesting reads, and contain excellent information about the nature of research on education and the state of the nation regarding culturally ingrained learning assumptions which rarely go challenged.
Oh well. I felt it could have been better, as with every paper I write, but that it turned out ok. As to the future of this blog... well, in an ideal world, I'd keep posting things of interest I learn regarding education and other such topics. As it is, it will probably languish in disuse now that there's no outside force forcing me to use it. Such is life, at least for me at this point. I kind of had fun while it lasted; the experience gave me a lot of respect for people who write serious blogs about issues, as opposed to livejournals about feelings, which is all I'd previously had experience with. That's got to take a lot of motivation, especially if you're not getting paid anything to do it.
A great movie once said that if you can't think of a way to end a paper, steal from someone else and go out strong, because there's always someone who's already said whatever you're trying to say better. So in that spirit:
... i began by saying that our history will be what we make it. If we go on as we are, then history will take its revenge and retribution will not limp in catching up with us. Just once in a while, let us exalt the importance of ideas and information. Let us dream to the extent of saying that on a given Sunday night, a time normally occupied by Ed Sullivan is given over to a clinical survey on the state of American education, and a week or two later, a time normally used by Steve Allen is devoted to a thorough going study of American policy in the Middle East. Would the corporate image of their respective sponsors be damaged? Would the shareholders rise up in their wrath and complain? Would anything happen, other than a few million people would have received illumination on subjects that may well determine the future of this country, and therefore the future of the corporations. To those who say people wouldn't look, they wouldn't be interested they're too complacent, indifferent and insulated, i can only reply, there is in one reporter's opinion, considerable evidence against that contention. That even if they are right, what have they got to lose? Because if they are right, and this instrument is good for nothing but to entertain, amuse and insulate, then the tube is flickering now and we will soon see that the whole struggle is lost.
This instrument can teach. It can illuminate and yes it can even inspire, but it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it towards those ends. Otherwise it is merely wires and lights, in a box.
Good night, and good luck.
- Edward R. Murrow, October 25, 1954.
Tuesday, March 20, 2007
Tuesday, March 13, 2007
getting down to it
I created an excel file with my observations of different hours in my field placement, and uploaded it to Google Documents here: http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?id=o02618036266631914408.8326339176739564236.00046417125121973341.6541284192680812311
To make the numbers meaningful, it's necessary to know that there are 14 boys and 11 girls in 1st hour, 12 boys and 14 girls in 2nd, and 9 boys and 20 girls in 6th. The numbers for first hour are the only ones that are really meaningful right now, but I'm planning on going back friday and monday to get 2 more observations in. I'm guessing they'll confirm what I already know, that to be frank, I was incorrect to hypothesize that being in the minority gender would deter those in that situation from participating in a voluntary environment. It ended up telling me a lot more about the environment than the gender issues within the environment.
The numbers for first hour technically support my hypothesis. On average, the boys outparticipated the girls by about 2 to 1, which is way above the 14 to 11 they should be averaging. But looking at the individual cases turns out to be more telling and compelling. There is a march of boy dominance for the first 3 class periods I observed, but in the fourth they only outparticpate the girls by a ratio of 11 to 9, which is actually under, not way over, the rate they should be participating at. That was the day I wrote about where Sancho got put out of class, and didn't participate at all for part of the day. Then in the fifth, the girls actually out participate the boys! I couldn't really offer an explanation for it, other than the overhead activity was particularly hard, and was the only chance the students had to participate that day. On a longer timeline, males tended to outparticipate females, yes. But this is meaningless if only one or two students is or are doing all of the participating.
Which is exactly what the environment engenders, to make an awful pun. No one being forced to participate is a great idea in principle, but in practice it encourages extreme apathy in much of the class, who treat it as a time to be idle, silent, and unengaged. This was made all the more clear on 6th observation, when there were an above average 44 chances to participate, 19 of which were seized by females and 25 of which went to males. However, one representative from each camp, Sancho from the males and Andrea from the females, answered 10 questions EACH! It was ridiculous; they were the only two people answering questions from the review sheet for a long period of time. More than one student took the opportunity to grab a quick nap, and were not reprimanded by the teacher. Most settled for slumping back in their seats and looking bored out of their minds.
There are several things this points out that need to change, which I'll get to writing about when I do my paper this weekend. These findings about the classroom environment (and the inadequacy of my research methods) ended up overshadowing anything I initially thought I was going to have to say about gender, and kind of took it over, at least in my mind.
I like how this blog turned out, though. I feel like I have a lot done already that I can draw on during the paperwriting-palooza that will eventually ensue this weekend. It's been a good experience, and I hope I can use it for something in the future!
To make the numbers meaningful, it's necessary to know that there are 14 boys and 11 girls in 1st hour, 12 boys and 14 girls in 2nd, and 9 boys and 20 girls in 6th. The numbers for first hour are the only ones that are really meaningful right now, but I'm planning on going back friday and monday to get 2 more observations in. I'm guessing they'll confirm what I already know, that to be frank, I was incorrect to hypothesize that being in the minority gender would deter those in that situation from participating in a voluntary environment. It ended up telling me a lot more about the environment than the gender issues within the environment.
The numbers for first hour technically support my hypothesis. On average, the boys outparticipated the girls by about 2 to 1, which is way above the 14 to 11 they should be averaging. But looking at the individual cases turns out to be more telling and compelling. There is a march of boy dominance for the first 3 class periods I observed, but in the fourth they only outparticpate the girls by a ratio of 11 to 9, which is actually under, not way over, the rate they should be participating at. That was the day I wrote about where Sancho got put out of class, and didn't participate at all for part of the day. Then in the fifth, the girls actually out participate the boys! I couldn't really offer an explanation for it, other than the overhead activity was particularly hard, and was the only chance the students had to participate that day. On a longer timeline, males tended to outparticipate females, yes. But this is meaningless if only one or two students is or are doing all of the participating.
Which is exactly what the environment engenders, to make an awful pun. No one being forced to participate is a great idea in principle, but in practice it encourages extreme apathy in much of the class, who treat it as a time to be idle, silent, and unengaged. This was made all the more clear on 6th observation, when there were an above average 44 chances to participate, 19 of which were seized by females and 25 of which went to males. However, one representative from each camp, Sancho from the males and Andrea from the females, answered 10 questions EACH! It was ridiculous; they were the only two people answering questions from the review sheet for a long period of time. More than one student took the opportunity to grab a quick nap, and were not reprimanded by the teacher. Most settled for slumping back in their seats and looking bored out of their minds.
There are several things this points out that need to change, which I'll get to writing about when I do my paper this weekend. These findings about the classroom environment (and the inadequacy of my research methods) ended up overshadowing anything I initially thought I was going to have to say about gender, and kind of took it over, at least in my mind.
I like how this blog turned out, though. I feel like I have a lot done already that I can draw on during the paperwriting-palooza that will eventually ensue this weekend. It's been a good experience, and I hope I can use it for something in the future!
Tuesday, February 27, 2007
Come together!
This past week, I overcame the biggest difficulty in writing any paper, especially a research paper: seeing it in my mind. Once I get over knowing what I'm going to say and how things are going to be laid out, all that's left is making the words flow onto a page, which is far less difficult, though much more time consuming, at least for me.
I'll start out with my very un-technologically enhanced foray into the public library, where I was alarmed by how alarmist the literature on educational topics was. Public Education: An Autopsy stood out as a particularly ridiculous title, amongst others like Failing Schools: Why Our Children Are Falling Behind the Japanese and The Death of Bilingual Education, and even some of the more respected classics in the genre, like Savage Inequalities. If the books weren't about how to help a child who was struggling in school, they were almost exclusively about how badly children of various races/ethnicities/genders/economic backgrounds are struggling and/or being failed by the much-faulted "system."
This leads in well to an examination of two of the alarmist books I happened to look through, those being Raising Cain and How Schools Shortchange Girls. Cain spends pages upon pages arguing that boys are emotionally damaged by a society who expects them to be tough, not to cry or show their feelings, and, of course, still be successful although they're hurting on the inside. More importantly for my research, the authors made several good points about how boys typically develop reading skills at a later age than their female peers, and almost always are more energetic, restless, and distracted in traditional elementary school classrooms. They cite statistics that show that boys are about twice as likely to be diagnosed with a learning disability as girls, that between 2 and 4 times as many boys are diagnosed with ADD as girls, and that fully 95% of juvenile delinquincies result from male culprits.
Probably before I flesh this out, I'll go into Shortchange, which makes a lot of arguments which are flatly contradicted in Cain, such as that classroom activities are structured to meet boys' needs rather than girls' (Cain contends that the quiet, structured learning environments of elementary schools, which are taught almost exclusively by women, are much more conducive to the learning of girls than of boys, who would prefer to run and wrestle and climb and play rather than sit still for long periods of time). Shortchange has its strong points as well, especially about how girls fall behind in science and math by high school, and how their self-esteem takes damage from society's expectations of them that they will not do well in certain subjects while they are "supposed" to excel at others. This creates a well documented self-fulfilling prophecy (which I will duly document with the Slate article I read earlier this year about unconscious gender bias and expectations).
After this, it's natural that I criticize these two books for making a lot of accusations that may or may not have substantial backing, and that if they are true, and both boys and girls are being inadequately served by an outdated system, what aspects of that system need to change? Homework, for one! Alfie Kohn's The Homework Myth and a team of female researchers' Einstein Never Used Flashcards have proven to be the more provocative and interesting of the books I've gotten out of the library. The former is a diatribe against a rarely questioned institution which deprives children of countless hours of their childhood, causes family tension, extinguishes passion for learning, and has no proven benefits among older children, and has been experimentally proven to be detrimental to the development of young children. The latter is more of a manifesto against the shortening of our childrens' childhoods by way of educational tools to be employed while children are still in the womb, and then an endless stream of educational flashcards meant to inspire early cognitive abilities in infants and toddlers. Both come to the conclusion that children need to spend more time playing, learning by doing and from interacting with each other, and less time being turned off to learning by stilted, boring, mindless activities.
Which brings me nicely to my examination of the classroom I'm currently observing. Here I'll return to my original thesis and hypothesis about gendered learning, and talk about how it turned into a departure into the realm of structuring participation and the learning environment. I have a lot to say about it, but, I'll leave it for another time. Throughout, I'll hope to sprinkle articles or podcasts I've read or listened in on thanks to the magic of RSS feeds and google reader and itunes, and i know melissa and my field placement teacher have both said they possess studies that deal with the topic I've been researching, which will surely be interesting, and useful.
All that's left after all of this is a nice succinct conclusion, where I explain how I've grown as an individual and as a teacher, and list off all of the concepts and learning strategies supported by the research I've done, and strike down the ones that deserve to be stricken from the record. I can honestly say I've enjoyed doing most of the research so far, and have found things I really didn't expect to find. But now the hour grows late and my laptop battery grows dim, so, until next time, I bid you adieu!
I'll start out with my very un-technologically enhanced foray into the public library, where I was alarmed by how alarmist the literature on educational topics was. Public Education: An Autopsy stood out as a particularly ridiculous title, amongst others like Failing Schools: Why Our Children Are Falling Behind the Japanese and The Death of Bilingual Education, and even some of the more respected classics in the genre, like Savage Inequalities. If the books weren't about how to help a child who was struggling in school, they were almost exclusively about how badly children of various races/ethnicities/genders/economic backgrounds are struggling and/or being failed by the much-faulted "system."
This leads in well to an examination of two of the alarmist books I happened to look through, those being Raising Cain and How Schools Shortchange Girls. Cain spends pages upon pages arguing that boys are emotionally damaged by a society who expects them to be tough, not to cry or show their feelings, and, of course, still be successful although they're hurting on the inside. More importantly for my research, the authors made several good points about how boys typically develop reading skills at a later age than their female peers, and almost always are more energetic, restless, and distracted in traditional elementary school classrooms. They cite statistics that show that boys are about twice as likely to be diagnosed with a learning disability as girls, that between 2 and 4 times as many boys are diagnosed with ADD as girls, and that fully 95% of juvenile delinquincies result from male culprits.
Probably before I flesh this out, I'll go into Shortchange, which makes a lot of arguments which are flatly contradicted in Cain, such as that classroom activities are structured to meet boys' needs rather than girls' (Cain contends that the quiet, structured learning environments of elementary schools, which are taught almost exclusively by women, are much more conducive to the learning of girls than of boys, who would prefer to run and wrestle and climb and play rather than sit still for long periods of time). Shortchange has its strong points as well, especially about how girls fall behind in science and math by high school, and how their self-esteem takes damage from society's expectations of them that they will not do well in certain subjects while they are "supposed" to excel at others. This creates a well documented self-fulfilling prophecy (which I will duly document with the Slate article I read earlier this year about unconscious gender bias and expectations).
After this, it's natural that I criticize these two books for making a lot of accusations that may or may not have substantial backing, and that if they are true, and both boys and girls are being inadequately served by an outdated system, what aspects of that system need to change? Homework, for one! Alfie Kohn's The Homework Myth and a team of female researchers' Einstein Never Used Flashcards have proven to be the more provocative and interesting of the books I've gotten out of the library. The former is a diatribe against a rarely questioned institution which deprives children of countless hours of their childhood, causes family tension, extinguishes passion for learning, and has no proven benefits among older children, and has been experimentally proven to be detrimental to the development of young children. The latter is more of a manifesto against the shortening of our childrens' childhoods by way of educational tools to be employed while children are still in the womb, and then an endless stream of educational flashcards meant to inspire early cognitive abilities in infants and toddlers. Both come to the conclusion that children need to spend more time playing, learning by doing and from interacting with each other, and less time being turned off to learning by stilted, boring, mindless activities.
Which brings me nicely to my examination of the classroom I'm currently observing. Here I'll return to my original thesis and hypothesis about gendered learning, and talk about how it turned into a departure into the realm of structuring participation and the learning environment. I have a lot to say about it, but, I'll leave it for another time. Throughout, I'll hope to sprinkle articles or podcasts I've read or listened in on thanks to the magic of RSS feeds and google reader and itunes, and i know melissa and my field placement teacher have both said they possess studies that deal with the topic I've been researching, which will surely be interesting, and useful.
All that's left after all of this is a nice succinct conclusion, where I explain how I've grown as an individual and as a teacher, and list off all of the concepts and learning strategies supported by the research I've done, and strike down the ones that deserve to be stricken from the record. I can honestly say I've enjoyed doing most of the research so far, and have found things I really didn't expect to find. But now the hour grows late and my laptop battery grows dim, so, until next time, I bid you adieu!
Tuesday, February 13, 2007
Two weeks have gone by?
Time is going by way too fast for my taste this semester! But, I have at least begun my initial research into the issue of minority gendered students in the classroom. In regards to phase one of my plan which involves me monitoring participation in the classes I observe in Holt Jr. High, I've collected some good data from both the first hour (14 boys, 11 girls) and the sixth hour (20 girls, 9 boys). My results from first hour were initially incredibly supportive of my hyp0thesis that being in the minority gender causes a decrease in participation in the classroom. Over three class periods, the boys consistently out-participated the girls by more than a 2 to 1 ratio, far larger, in other words than the actual ratio of boys to girls. I should mention that all participation in our teacher's class is voluntary, and students are expected to raise their hands and answer questions to earn "participation points" for everyday, which are factored into their final grades. This makes counting who gets called on to answer questions somewhat useful as a tool to show who is motivated and, in fact, learning.
However, the last class period I observed threw my hypothesis into question. During that session, Sancho (not his real name), who is by far the alpha male in the class, by which I mean to say the loudest, most talkative, and the one who most often is waving his hand in the air to answer questions, was put out of the room for five minutes for being disruptive. In this time, Sara (also a pseudonym), the alpha female, started answering as many questions as Sancho normally would, and the girls in general answered just as many questions as the boys that period. So, while there might be some correlation between gender and participation in first hour, this observation seems to point to personality being a more causal factor in participation. Although, the fact that it took putting the dominant male out into the hallway for the females to start participating at the same rate as the males might be saying something... I don't know. It's interesting either way you look at it.
Sixth hour I have only gotten a chance to see once, and obtained the also intriguing result of having exactly 9 instances of male participation and 20 of female participation, or in other words, exactly what you would expect from a class of 9 males and 20 females if you thought gender did not matter in classrooms. I hope to go in to observe them at least once a week until the end of my research, and hopefully will get to more often.
As for phase two (I love how diabolical I sound by phrasing my research in terms of phases, by the way), that being the macro part of my research, I've checked out several promising books from the library, and am starting to mine websites for information. The two books I'm most excited about are Issues In Focus: The Gender Gap In Schools (Girls Losing Out) a book by Trudy J. Hanmer that was published in 1996, and Michael Thompson's Raising Cain, a book about how boys are being left behind in public education, which was published a decade later. I figure the opposing arguments of these books will give me a fair understanding of the gender issues in classrooms from both male and female perspectives. I have also subscribed to the RSS feeds from the New York Times and NPR, and am filtering them to try and get articles on gender and education, which so far has been largely fruitless, but I'm sure it will turn up something.
That's all for this update!
However, the last class period I observed threw my hypothesis into question. During that session, Sancho (not his real name), who is by far the alpha male in the class, by which I mean to say the loudest, most talkative, and the one who most often is waving his hand in the air to answer questions, was put out of the room for five minutes for being disruptive. In this time, Sara (also a pseudonym), the alpha female, started answering as many questions as Sancho normally would, and the girls in general answered just as many questions as the boys that period. So, while there might be some correlation between gender and participation in first hour, this observation seems to point to personality being a more causal factor in participation. Although, the fact that it took putting the dominant male out into the hallway for the females to start participating at the same rate as the males might be saying something... I don't know. It's interesting either way you look at it.
Sixth hour I have only gotten a chance to see once, and obtained the also intriguing result of having exactly 9 instances of male participation and 20 of female participation, or in other words, exactly what you would expect from a class of 9 males and 20 females if you thought gender did not matter in classrooms. I hope to go in to observe them at least once a week until the end of my research, and hopefully will get to more often.
As for phase two (I love how diabolical I sound by phrasing my research in terms of phases, by the way), that being the macro part of my research, I've checked out several promising books from the library, and am starting to mine websites for information. The two books I'm most excited about are Issues In Focus: The Gender Gap In Schools (Girls Losing Out) a book by Trudy J. Hanmer that was published in 1996, and Michael Thompson's Raising Cain, a book about how boys are being left behind in public education, which was published a decade later. I figure the opposing arguments of these books will give me a fair understanding of the gender issues in classrooms from both male and female perspectives. I have also subscribed to the RSS feeds from the New York Times and NPR, and am filtering them to try and get articles on gender and education, which so far has been largely fruitless, but I'm sure it will turn up something.
That's all for this update!
Tuesday, January 30, 2007
Does being the minority gender affect learning/participation?
Given that these past couple weeks I've been in the category of people Anny mentioned who "don't have time to eat," this will be a rather short entry. I've decided to look into the topic of how being in the minority versus the majority in terms of gender affects how students learn, specifically in the 8th grade Spanish class I observe twice a week as well as in general.
In regards to the specific aspect, the first two hours of the class I observe have a first hour with 4 more boys than girls, and a second hour with 3 more girls than boys. These will be useful, and from my first observations at least, it appears that my idea that those in the majority form a "tyranny of the majority," and disproportionately participate in class. I'm especially interested in getting to observe my field placement teacher's sixth hour, however, which is composed of 20 girls, and only 9 boys. This observation of participation will hopefully be coupled by examining the grades of those in the majority vs. the minority, as well as possibly interviewing a few students to get their feelings about class participation.
As to the general approach, I've read several articles reviewing books over the years loosely tied to the subject that I've meant to check out, but have never had the time to (including and especially during the past two weeks). I'm thinking specifically of books examining gender bias in primary education, how it is geared toward girls' learning styles and has systematically left boys behind during the past few decades. This would certainly help explain why the entering class of college freshman now contains significantly more women than men in many large universities, which is a statistic I read somewhere that I also will dig up and post. I'm also interested, knowing several women who either are currently or were originally in undergraduate engineering programs, at looking at how women perform in math and science classes, this being spurred in part from the former dean of Harvard's comments two years ago to the effect of "women's brains are different from men, and are more likely to have an aptitude for languages and the humanities and not do well in math and the sciences." Given that I know only a quarter of the undergraduate engineers in U-M are women, this is something I want to read about that I'm sure other people have been looking into as well.
In regards to the specific aspect, the first two hours of the class I observe have a first hour with 4 more boys than girls, and a second hour with 3 more girls than boys. These will be useful, and from my first observations at least, it appears that my idea that those in the majority form a "tyranny of the majority," and disproportionately participate in class. I'm especially interested in getting to observe my field placement teacher's sixth hour, however, which is composed of 20 girls, and only 9 boys. This observation of participation will hopefully be coupled by examining the grades of those in the majority vs. the minority, as well as possibly interviewing a few students to get their feelings about class participation.
As to the general approach, I've read several articles reviewing books over the years loosely tied to the subject that I've meant to check out, but have never had the time to (including and especially during the past two weeks). I'm thinking specifically of books examining gender bias in primary education, how it is geared toward girls' learning styles and has systematically left boys behind during the past few decades. This would certainly help explain why the entering class of college freshman now contains significantly more women than men in many large universities, which is a statistic I read somewhere that I also will dig up and post. I'm also interested, knowing several women who either are currently or were originally in undergraduate engineering programs, at looking at how women perform in math and science classes, this being spurred in part from the former dean of Harvard's comments two years ago to the effect of "women's brains are different from men, and are more likely to have an aptitude for languages and the humanities and not do well in math and the sciences." Given that I know only a quarter of the undergraduate engineers in U-M are women, this is something I want to read about that I'm sure other people have been looking into as well.
Tuesday, January 16, 2007
3 rules for my classroom
1. Be respectful, to everyone at all times. I think this is paramount in any classroom, because while we may not exactly be here of our free will, if we are civil to each other, this class will be a whole lot more fun and easy for everyone than if we were not. As a general rule, ask yourself before you do something questionable whether or not you would mind if you were teaching the class, and one of your students was doing what you're doing. So, specifically, if I or one of your fellow classmates are addressing the class, no one else is talking. Do not use foul language. Do not come into class late, unless you have a valid reason for doing so. Raise your hand if you wish to answer or ask a question, and wait for me to call on you. Most importantly, do not make fun of your classmates for trying to use the language. Everyone here makes mistakes, including me, and while it is good to correct each other, it is important that everyone feels safe in trying to use the language; NOT fearful that others will ridicule them. Other things probably fall under this general category as well, though they are not spelled out here. Punishments for breaking this rule range in severity depending on how badly the rule is broken, from having me point out that you have broken the rule (in private, after class), to being sent to the principal's office for the rest of the class period and taking a zero on any work due that day.
2. Follow the school's policies as outlined in your student handbook. There is nothing I can do about these; they are the law of the land while you're here. This includes things like not wearing hats in class; if cell phones or pagers go off, I have to send you home; and if you tell me you killed somebody, I must alert the proper authorities.
3. I will not accept late work. I will be judicious with all of my deadlines for having things done, and will alert you well in advance. If you're concerned that you aren't going to get something done ahead of time or that I haven't given the class enough time, talk to me in private or bring it up in class and I am certainly willing to consider moving the due date back (for everyone). However, once the date is set, and passes, I will not accept late work, because doing so would not fair to those who turned it in on time.
2. Follow the school's policies as outlined in your student handbook. There is nothing I can do about these; they are the law of the land while you're here. This includes things like not wearing hats in class; if cell phones or pagers go off, I have to send you home; and if you tell me you killed somebody, I must alert the proper authorities.
3. I will not accept late work. I will be judicious with all of my deadlines for having things done, and will alert you well in advance. If you're concerned that you aren't going to get something done ahead of time or that I haven't given the class enough time, talk to me in private or bring it up in class and I am certainly willing to consider moving the due date back (for everyone). However, once the date is set, and passes, I will not accept late work, because doing so would not fair to those who turned it in on time.
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