http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10965522/site/newsweek/

you can read the gist of it here, I'm not going to post it because its too long

Basically, I blame the feminization of society and I'm dead serious.

OK, build on that ... flesh out an argument for your case ...

Yeah, I guess it's about time for another Newsweek/Time fake panic story.

I would have to agree with you on this one.

Boys do well when they are taught to be men. The emphasis on parity in the class room may help girls learn but I don't think it does anything for boys. I believe that boys need competition and, in general, they respond well to it. We've become so obsessed with not hurting anyone's feelings that there isn't any reality in classrooms. Without winners and losers in the classroom we aren't preparing kids for the real world. If you never know what it's like to work hard for something and win, being average will always suffice. Boys aren't stupid, they know if they can do a minimum and get away with it, they will. You also have to experience harship and losing in life to learn to hate it. If there's always someone there to pick
you up and "validate your feelings" you'll never learn to pick yourself up and do things on your own.

Could one of the reasons that many marriages fail is because women really want to marry men but there aren't any left? You can't have your cake and eat it to. Equality is good but if we don't respect and recognize that there is a difference in the sexes and being masculine and competitive is a natural thing, we might be denying that which is biologically important for men to express in order to have good mental health.

This is all due to the Women's Movement of the 1970s, so its only occurring recently. What it really comes down to is that these empowered women think that they have a penis, which they don't.

I'll elaborate more after lunch.

These days, boys do great in my classroom.

What I did notice when I first started teaching was that boys more than girls struggled with traditional classroom processes. Any sort of lecture or discussion, notetaking, or skill they didn't believe they'd use, it came apart. There is also a HUGE, undiscussed conflict between male students and female teachers...tremendous numbers of boys show up with no respect for female authority figures at all. Not a problem for me, since I'm male and twice their size. But it happens, and it affects the school setting in general.

Of course Spanish speakers, special education students, and even gifted students seem to have a hard time in a traditional classroom, for different reasons.

The way my classroom functions today, boys do great. They have the freedom to guide their learning, they have leadership and competition opportunities (and the ability to avoid either of those, if they wish), one-on-one assistance whenever it is needed, opportunities to address their behavior problems without conflict, and they only face two 20 minute sit-still-and-discuss-this situations each week.

The fact that I started with a traditional classroom setup, and had so many problems (trouble with male students included), and moved away from that and saw those problems evaporate, is one of many reasons I believe the major problem with education today is that the design itself is faulty.

I'm curious if you think that by changing your classroom structure to eliminate problems you've really helped the students or just eliminated the problems? The kids may like only have two 20 minute sit still sessions a week but does that really prepare them for life? We all know that kids have short attention spans but does catering to that mean that's what's best for them? We had to sit still in class and pay attention all the time while our teacher taught. Did some kids have trouble with that? Sure they did but if we'd changed just for them would we also have never learned patience, respect and how to behave?

I just remembered where I left my retainer in the second grade!

Research has been pretty consistent that subjecting children below the age of 16 to longer lecture-style lessons not only has no impact on their attention spans or ability to focus for long periods, it results in a great deal less learning in the classroom. My classroom is not full of 20 minute,sort activities, but the traditional elements that are not supported by research are minimized. I would say that by guiding themselves, solving their own problems, and using resources to find answer to questions rather than being handed assistance, children seem far more responsible and well-behaved than they did when my class was more traditional. This is especially the case for the boys, who generally have many more behavior problems in school settings.

When people talk about education reform they think of more money, or tougher standards, or more computers, when what they should be talking about is the fact that education has remained fairly unchanged over the last 30 years in spite of the growing amount of cognitive research, long-term behavioral studies, and child psychology documentation that proves it faulty.

In case you can't tell, I bolded an important element in why he doesn't know where the fuck he puts his stuff.

I think that analysis sucked. I hope you've got something better after lunch.

Unnecessary.

How do you know this? How do you gauge it? I see it as more of a social problem. Fact is, my parents learned more when they were in high school than I did, and their parents learned more in high school than they did. Even when you compare the cirriculums that I went through to my little sister who's presently in the 11th grade, what she's learning is dubbed down from what I learned just 7 years ago at the same level.

Look at other societies. 12 year old kids here know three languages. How do you think they teach kids how to read, write, and speak Arabic here? By group discussions and learning on their own? No. They do it with hours upon hours of pure lecture and note taking. They teach kids at about age 8 trigonometry here. Again, how do you think they do it?

Again, it's just social problems. I'm not saying we shouldn't adjust to the social problems, and the models may necessitate change. But how does someone like you, who doesn't believe in tests, gauge progress or success in the educational field? Particularly when compared to other societies around the globe. Study after study shows that we are behind the curve when compared to many other nations.

I agree with social problems being the problem. It is an impossibility in western society today to get public school kids sitting down for hours taking notes. I have taught in schools and this is the reality. The initial respect for teachers is totally zero until you 'earn' it. You can ask someone to do something reasonable like sit down and 'get fucked' can be the reply.

Also the world has changed, brilliantly rote learning facts and figures will not help much in today's workforce. As they say 'most jobs the kids in high school will get have not even been invented yet'.

McParadigm makes alot of sense to me.

[quote="McParadigm"] Research has been pretty consistent that subjecting children below the age of 16 to longer lecture-style lessons not only has no impact on their attention spans or ability to focus for long periods, it results in a great deal less learning in the classroom. My classroom is not full of 20 minute,sort activities, but the traditional elements that are not supported by research are minimized. I would say that by guiding themselves, solving their own problems, and using resources to find answer to questions rather than being handed assistance, children seem far more responsible and well-behaved than they did when my class was more traditional. This is especially the case for the boys, who generally have many more behavior problems in school settings.
quote]

Good summary, spot on, from a fellow teacher in Australia.

This statement feels true to me:



Of course, if you're particularly tricky ... you can tie the nation's growing divorce rate to feminism.

There is a difference between old-school feminism and modern, the same way there is a difference between modern civil rights and the civil rights movements of the past. The moderates ahve been marginilized and the extremists rule. Both of those movements have gone from nobel moral standing, equality of oppurtunity, to "special rights" movements.

Blaming feminism is a little shortsighted. We should blame our society in which everyone considers themselves a victim. Once circulums in schools where changed to adress percieved vicitmhood, that's when it all went downhill. In order to "include everyone", our schools had to start moving reasources and time away from more traditional methods. Why does that color/gender/religion of an author matter? It's quality of their work that counts.

Well, then I guess in terms of education we come to this: Do we want to make education the best that it can be, or are we just satisfied with making it better?

It seems to me that you guys are content to simply make it better, while students from other nations with other educational models continue to outpace us. It seems to me, that you guys are content to treat the symptons of the disease, but not cure it.

Why?

If it's clear that there are better models out there. Why not take the necessary steps to achieve those goals?

Education is the solution to everything. And we are putting other petty little things ahead of education in these scenario's.

But, you can directly tie the divorce rate to this problem of boys not being able to get their shit together in school. Divorce causes all manner of social and developmental setbacks. If boys do not have a solid role model at certain crucial ages, his development is stalled. This is true for girls as well, but not as dramatic as in boys. Girls just develop a little faster in the pre-adolescent years, so we are a little bit better in adjusting to classroom requirements at that age.

Example: my sister and I learned to read before we were 5. When my brother was 5, one of those crucial ages for boys, our dad left. He was in remidial reading for a few years. He caught up finally and he has no reading problems and he has just written his first screen play.

But what is more significant is the scattershot educational theories all kids are subjected to these days. When I was a kid, the older generation had just started to fuck around with education models, forcing us into things liek open classrooms and classrooms without grades and all that crap.

Now it is even worse because every school system has a different education model, and if you are a kid who moves around a lot, then you end up learning in often conflicting styles. That's no good at all. I had to teach myself long division because it was just about to be taught in the classroom I was leaving, and it was already finished being taught in the classroom I was entering.

And then there are the parents who are just not paying attention and providing poor role models for their kids.

If it were up to me, I'd institute a broad based curriculum that allows the teacher flexibility to teach to individual learning styles and teaches the basics in an interdisciplinary problem solving format in which the children are expected to meet certain standards through written and verbal dialogue with each other and the teacher. That includes the maths and sciences.

i think educators are trying to be more realistic and applicable to modern society. I certaintly do not agree with everything they are doing here, but I do not think living in the past is not the answer, however much it appeals to the masses.

Educators cannot change the nature of society. We can't make kids who have no interest in tradition education and their parents who constantly actively support this lack of interest, become excited about this tradition style of education because we tell them to. At the school I teach, this unfortunately applies to a large number.

My persepective is from Australia so it is obviously different to your experience.

p.s. i hate talking about work while i am on my 7 week holiday especially after having quite a few beers and probably making no sense...