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!

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!