131–140 of 227 posts
[0] http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/13/business/media/13atlantic....
Public school is essentially an obedience camp. Is it any wonder boys are lagging?
The sitting and listening without moving is the problem.
Public school is essentially an obedience camp. Is it any wonder boys are lagging?
Are you arguing that boys are intrinsically badly suited to a highly regulated environment that expects them to do exactly as they are told as soon as they are told? You should tell the army.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you arguing that boys are intrinsically badly suited to a highly regulated environment that expects them to do exactly as they are told as soon as they are told? You should tell the army.
why do you think the armies around the world have to threaten recruits with corporal punishment, prison, and even execution when they don't follow orders?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe it's a metabolism thing? If they're used to burning calories a a certain rate, homeostasis will cause their bodies to seek to maintain that rate. Fidgeting burns a lot of calories. Maybe tensing up core muscles for balance fills that need?
I seem to recall studies in controlled environments where people were not allowed to exercise, and there was a significant difference in calorie burn attributable to small movements. So the homeostasis argument seems totally plausible to me.
"While Reichert and Hawley's research was conducted in all-boys schools, these lessons can be used in all classrooms, with both boys and girls." Not true, research shows that girls do worse when their performance is evaluated in relation to others (competitively), as opposed to when their performance is evaluated against an objective standard.
Spend some time doing searches on terms like "gender grading gap" and reading the recent research. What you find may surprise you, is consistent across multiple Western democracies, and can be summarized thusly:
* When assessment is left to teachers, there is a grading gap in favor of girls; girls receive grades that are inflated relative to their performance on non-teacher assessments. This seems to be partly due to teachers including factors like "engagement" or "focus" in the classroom, which is known to favor girls, and partly due to bias by teachers in favor of students of their own gender (and many teachers are women, meaning the effect is most pronounced for girls).
* By surprisingly young ages, girls in public school systems internalize "we're better than boys" and boys internalize "we're worse than girls" (one UK study estimated boys internalize this by age eight), producing a performance/effort gap similar to that associated with racial stereotypes.
* This has ramifications all the way up the system, including an achievement gap which starts early and only grows with each milestone. Boys and young men are increasingly more likely to be held back and/or disciplined/medicated in early school years, increasingly less likely to get into advanced courses in later years, less likely to graduate local equivalent of "high school" and less likely to enter college/university or earn a degree.
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why do you think the armies around the world have to threaten recruits with corporal punishment, prison, and even execution when they don't follow orders?
Do American football programs have to do the same thing?
School is half education and half babysitting. The problem is that schools aren't aware of that, and they try to cram too much learning/work into a day at school. Kids just don't have the attention span. College isn't taught this way. Colleges realize that even young adults can't handle 40 hours a week of continual instruction, why do we do this kids can? I think the reason, is that we're always behind other countrie…
My school will be different, and America doesn't deserve it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I seem to recall studies in controlled environments where people were not allowed to exercise, and there was a significant difference in calorie burn attributable to small movements. So the homeostasis argument seems totally plausible to me.
But if you sit that same twitchy kid in front of a video game or stimulating TV show, the fidgeting doesn't happen. Interesting...