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Politics : President Barack Obama -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mac Con Ulaidh who wrote (69081)	2/14/2010 7:44:27 PM
From: tejek	Respond to of 149317

No? That surprises me. I'll ask my niece-teacher-to-be what she thinks. niece-the-scientist-to-be partly chose to go to a woman's college for her ungergrad degree because of her field and in that field, as math, still a woman will get much more going on amongst other women. Now she's at Notre Dame for degree step #2, but I think it was a smart move for her undergrad. I saw a news bit awhile back about a school in... I 'think' it was Oakland, it was urban, anyways... and they were offering the children a chance to be in same-sex classes and a lot were doing it and both boys and girls thriving in them. I don't recall mention of teachers but the one class shot segment of a boys class had a male teacher. If not in the earliest years, or maybe in the later high school, but the tweeners years, I can see it making a lot of sense. at least for a portion. There have been many studies that show boys have started to fall behind the girls over the past 20 years. To give you just one example back in the 1970s, 70% of the kids graduating HS and going on to college were boys; 30% were girls. Fast forward 30 years, in 2000, 65% of kids going onto college were girls; 35% were boys. And on the grad school level, the ratio is much worse. We know from Title IX in the 1970s girls started to get much more equal treatment in schools than previously.....a good thing. And the gap between boys and girls started to narrow. But then something happened in the 1990s, that accelerated the trend and things flip flopped and the girls steamed ahead. They overcame the gap in science and are narrowing the gap in math. I see three possible reasons for the change. Girls are inherently smarter than boys.....however, general test scores don't support that thesis. Girls have gotten considerable support from their mothers who were feminists....which I think is true. And the last, which I can't prove, is that women teachers who make up 98% of the teaching staff in this country, favor the girls over the boys. I saw that with my mentor teacher who I consider to be a good teacher. If she had any problem with a student , mostlikely it was a boy. In fact, when I took over her classes, the girls whom she favored were really angry and gave me a hard time at least at first.....and no matter who fairly I treated them, they couldn't wait til the mentor teacher took back over. Not every girl but many of them. Meanwhile the boys who had trouble in her classes started to turn their grades and behavior around. I knew exactly how to motivate them....because well.....I am a guy. Not very scientific but I think its worth looking at more closely if we can get over the fear that the goal is to make one gender superior to the other. I want both genders working at their best because then we will have that many more cures for cancer, that many more inventions that will make life easier, that many more people who lead productive, happy lives etc. And I also am for World Peace! ;-)