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!