Boy, what a difference

[Harold F. Schiffman]

January 29, 2007

Boy, what a difference
Marks are up, misbehaving is down when girls aren't in the classroom
By MOIRA MACDONALD

She was a kind-faced principal, on the verge of retirement and clearly
loved kids. I was visiting her for a story about crumbling school
buildings. We'd finished the tour of her school and were chatting on the
bench outside her office, the same one the misbehaving students (mostly
boys) sat on. She leaned toward me and said, "You know, the schools aren't
made for boys, they're made for girls." She is not the only educator who
has said that. Some parents make the same comment. Elementary schools work
better for girls. Girls tend to be more social, more eager to please and
have a much better ability to sit at a desk, be quiet and at least look
like they're paying attention. Boys have more energy and don't sit still
as well.

Sound sexist? You might want to have it out with the human brain first.
Research shows male and female brains are hardwired differently. And those
differences show up early -- for one thing, female brains develop faster,
especially in the area where language is processed. Test data show girls
are reading and writing better than boys. In last year's Grade 6
provincial tests, 71% of girls met the standard for reading, while only
57% of boys did. Writing was worse: 72% of the girls met the standard
while just 51% of the boys did. The trend for girls to do better than boys
is found in Grade 3 results too and has been consistent over time. The gap
is much smaller in math but girls still outperform boys.

So you might also want to have it out with the school system, although,
with little fanfare, a few schools are experimenting with boys-only
classes. Administrators with three school boards I talked to report
boys-only classes have been successful -- marks and attendance are up,
behavioural problems are down -- and popular with boys and their parents.
"If we give further support to our boys, our schools will be safer and
performance will be better," says Chris Spence, director of the
Hamilton-Wentworth District School Board, where one school, Cecil B.
Stirling, offers several boys-only classes from Grades 4 to 8. Spence used
to be a superintendent with the Toronto District School Board, where he
launched a program called Boys to Men. That program has been expanded into
an all-boys class at Rockcliffe Middle School at Jane and St. Clair.

Most boys-only classes have a male teacher -- important for role modelling
and because male teaching styles tend to mirror male learning styles. They
may have more "competitive" activities -- even if it's a competition with
one's own self -- more physical activity and reading material will be more
boy-focused, with more non-fiction books and magazines. Boys report they
find classes with girls more distracting and are less apt to speak up in
class because they don't want to look silly in front of the opposite sex.
In a boys-only class, that pressure is off. Glad Park Public School in
Stouffville has had boys-only classes for language for nearly two years.

"Kids' marks are going up," reports Sandra Mullins, a French immersion
teacher at the school. Boys "feel smarter and are learning more ...
they're having an opportunity to rise and shine." Once the program got
started, Mullins said one Grade 8 boy came to her, saying, "Madame, you
really should read this book -- it's the first book I've ever read cover
to cover." Val Taylor, the now retired principal who introduced the
program at Glad Park, says boys tend to want to "do, then talk about it.
Girls prefer to talk about it, discuss it and then do it." Separate
classes for boys is not for every boy or for every school. But Spence says
our system suffers from a "knowing and doing gap." We know what the
research says but we don't put that into practice. Time to change that,
for the sake of the boys.


http://torontosun.com/News/Columnists/MacDonald_Moira/2007/01/29/3473740.html

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