I'm not being facetious, I'm genuinely curious:
What is this "feminized" style of teaching that is the cause, some say, for young boys to no longer excel in school? I tried to ask my man, who is an inner-city middle school teacher, but he says he personally doesn't see it (though who knows, perhaps because he himself is a man he doesn't teach in a "feminized" way).
So what are the factors that makes secondary school better for girls but not boys? When did these changes take place?
Yes I'm very interested to know. I think it's just an excuse, schools generally seem to have more dumbed down material and less discipline, that's the problem.
Also in teh UK there are so many subjects. For GCSE there are about 9 subjects which you don't want to do like you have to do arts, histories, technoclogies, languages, religions. Not everyone is good at all these things. They should just focus on severeal subjects that the children are good on.
I don't know nor do I care if this what you would call feminized, but I can say our school systems are declining greatly. I remember when I was a kid, no teacher could teach me math. I learned it too fast from the book that the teacher couldn't keep up with how much I learned. The books used to have amazing examples that were directly related to the problems in the book.
Well, about 5 or so years ago, a friend ask for my help in tutoring her son in math. His entire math book was no more than 75 pages in total. There was a half page of description and two pages of problems that had nothing to do with the description for that section. I couldn't figure out what the book was trying to teach. In fact, the "problems" weren't even math-related. No wonder this kid was failing math...
frankly fereshte, i don't see it either. the main claim is that boys learn better through activity and hands on projects. schools offer little in that way. but really, teaching methods have not changed over the last few centuries. sooo.... the only thing that could be responsible for the recent academic success of young women can be attributed to opportunity.
I don't believe there is some secret feminist agenda out there to "fix" classrooms so boys fail. I do believe new methods are being practiced that allow girls to flourish while boys get passed up.
I've mentioned before that I volunteer at a local school teaching science. If a teacher feels the class is behind in their reading or math lessons, they can skip PE. Recess time is dwindling. And when you do have recess, what can you do? We used to have swings, slides and monkey bars. Not anymore. Heaven forbid a kid gets hurt and the parents sue. Where I volunteer, you can't even play dodge ball anymore! And when the boys get too active, they diagnose them with ADHD and put them on medication. I think these practices are hurting all the students, but are definitely having a greater impact on boys.
I personally don't see it. What I do see, is a series of fashionable teaching methods that have progressed through the public school system over the years that minimize rigid learning through discipline and focuses instead on personal exploration, the elimination of competitiveness (which, of course, harms self-esteem when some succeed where others fail) and less of a focus on the "right" answer than a sort-of-right-personal-impression of reality. Perhaps all these approaches actually do appeal to girls more than boys (I don't know and have no evidence one way or the other). But I can see boys possibly losing interest when their competitive streak is suppressed. But overall, it just dumbs down education and makes Americans stupid in general. Tracey points out a statistic that 39% of PhD recipients in the US are foreign born. I can't imagine why... Discriminations: The Irony of Gender Desegregation::
as fields feminized, men eschewed the fields has not changed much at all, just as the ratio of men teaching at the primary
http://www.discriminations.us/2006/10/the_irony_of_gender_desegregat.htmlHOME |
Macmillan: Women and Teaching: Global Perspectives on the Feminization ::
Pomerantz offers a fascinating look at the importance of style for girls in school Román * Part I: The Daily Encounter of Teachers with a Feminized
http://us.macmillan.com/womenandteachingHOME |
Feminized teaching style is a fallacy.
Boys learn through hands on physical activities and tasks.
Girls learn through more traditional theory based and inquisitive investigation practices.
I'm guessing that for some people, it means not giving boys preferential treatment like what used to be done in the past.
You can't use physical punishment in school any more. Since boys only understand violence, they think they can get away with not learning if they just rebel. They are lazy, selfish, uncontrolled animals unless they get slapped and spanked when it's appropriate.
I'm not sure who posted it but one said asking essay questions as opposed to multiple choice/T&F is female oriented. What I see it as is applying the knowledge as opposed to just reciting facts. Anyone who is aware of Blooms Taxonomy notes it is higher level learning we are seeking.
If I give tests they are open book, open note. Some people think they can whiz by - they can't. It has been proven that open-book tests are harder than closed book ones. The questions can be trickier and harder to solve. Also, if it is for a class in which you actually have to read, the test might be easy if you have read....but there are people out there that do not read and when it comes to test time they will not know where to find those answers. Same if you are able to use your notes, if you take good notes and actually understand what you wrote then you will be fine.....again, there are some people that just do not bother going to class, sleep during class and not take notes, or simply just write down everything without actually knowing what is going on which means they will be completely lost during the exam.
I don't know. Boys fail in school because they are more involved with video games and other distractions.
We are talking about feminist social engineering baised on the kooky belief that boys and girls are the same and that everything is learnt. There was no discussion with parents... it was decided that boys would be turned into girls by the looks of things
Copy and past rampage to follow...
If you were an energetic nine-year-old boy who loved school, did your best but also loved charging about, trying to beat your friends at every game possible, imagine the hell of our currrent state school system where ball games are banned from the playground in case someone gets hurt, there is no outside play in bad weather and you are constantly in trouble for being too competitive because winning is not what it's about. And, worse, Jamie Oliver fruit smoothies have replaced sponge pudding in your school dinner, so you're starving by two o'clock.
Sue Palmer is a former head teacher, literacy adviser and the author of 21st Century Boys. She says it is a biological necessity that boys run about, take risks, swing off things and compete with each other to develop properly. If they can't, a lot of them find it impossible to sit still, focus on a book or wield a pencil, she says, so their behaviour is considered difficult', they get into trouble and tumble into a cycle of school failure.
Boys are three times as likely as girls to need extra help with reading at primary school, and 75 per cent of children supposedly suffering from ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) are male. We are losing boys at a rate of knots, particularly in literacy, Palmer says, because at some point in the past 30 years, masculinity became an embarrassment.
Research by Simon Baron-Cohen, a respected Cambridge professor, that began as an investigation into autism, puts a solid case for biological male/female differences in the brain, with boys tending to be systematisers and girls empathisers . This explains why boys generally are less keen on reading and comprehension, and lag behind girls in literacy. A lot of boys find it easier to explain the workings of a watch than to discuss how a character in a story is feeling. But now, says Palmer, apart from the very bright ones, boys aren't even doing better at maths and science.
Some people blame this nosedive, first noticed in the mid-Nineties, on the feminisation of education - too many women teachers, girl-friendly classroom environments and modular exam systems that suit girls' study skills but disadvantage risk-takers. Geniuses are much more likely to be male, Palmer says, but if you don't tick the right boxes, you fail.
There are seven times as many women primary school teachers as men, but Christine Skelton, Professor of Gender Equality in Education at Birmingham University, argues that there have always been far more female teachers than male. Obviously there are some women who understand active boys, and some men who don't, just as there are energetic girls and inactive boys, she says.
The current generation of teachers, though, were born and raised in an atmosphere dominated by women's liberation and non-gender-specific education that began in the Seventies. Barbies were banned, most protagonists in books were female and there was no tolerance of war or superhero play. As a head teacher, Palmer remembers making her reception teacher remove all the cloakroom pegs that depicted tractors for boys and bunnies for girls.
The belief was that you were shaped by your environment, and it was the teacher's responsibility to socialise' boys away from their natural inclinations and to encourage girls to study traditionally male subjects such as physics and technology, she says.
Palmer would never deny that some of it was absolutely necessary - but with movements such as Reclaim the Night, Greenham Common and Gay Pride, groups that offered an alternative perspective to the traditionally dominant male view taking centre stage, masculinity became suspect. I really think, she says, that the almighty cock-up of the sisterhood in the Seventies was that we believed we could turn boys into girls.
Palmer says that most women are not natural risk-takers, so for teachers who have not helped to bring up brothers and who don't have sons, boys' behaviour can be frightening. Play-fighting, for example, reaches a peak at age 7 or 8 but is not actually aggressive, she says. It's social - it's the way boys get to know each other and see how the other one ticks. A lot of women teachers are horrified when I suggest that they should let boys get on with fighting and shouting because eventually they'll come out the other side and start negotiating.
Another problem for boys seeking adventure is that, because we live in an increasingly risk-averse society, children are rarely allowed to play unsupervised. When did you last see a group of boys climbing a tree?
There is a rational fear of increased traffic but also an irrational fear of stranger danger, fanned by media reporting of child abduction, says Palmer. Parents are worried about being considered irresponsible, so they never let their children out of their sight. And because we are not used to seeing boys playing outside, when we do it feels hostile even when what is going on is not particularly boisterous.
Dan Travis, a sports coach, argues that it is very important for boys to muck about on their own. Coaching is formal and necessary but should only take up 20 per cent of the time they play, he says. The informal 80 per cent is where most of the learning and practising occurs - away from adult supervision.
Travis is running a campaign to bring competition back to school sport. The Sport for All ethos took hold in the Seventies and never let go, he says. Games are only about inclusion, with no winners allowed. This is disastrous for boys, who need to compete to establish their place in the hierarchy, which is how they organise their friendships and something that they understand from nursery age onwards. It is also bad for sport. Palmer adds that self-esteem arrived from America and now no child is allowed to lose at anything.
Palmer is not suggesting that boys should be allowed to behave in any way they want. What we need, she says, is to celebrate what makes them boys and help them to understand the things that don't come naturally to them. That means getting them outside more, particularly as space gets squeezed in urban schools. Not letting boys be boys is not only detrimental to them but also to girls, many of whom become overcompliant with what is considered good' behaviour and could do with a shove outdoors to take more risks, she says. I certainly wish that had happened to me.
Palmer is especially enthusiastic about the few outdoor nurseries that we have in this country, and about the Scandinavian system that puts off formal learning until the age of 7 or 8, concentrating instead on playing outside and the development of social skills.
In the ideal Palmer world, everyone would go to a Scandinavian-style school. What we are doing instead is bringing in the Early Years Foundation Stage, a new government framework that becomes law in September. It says that by the age of 5 children should be writing sentences, some of which are punctuated. That would be impressive for a seven-year-old, says Palmer. So rather than tackling the imbalance in the way that we have treated boys for too long, we are going to make them sit still and learn even younger. I'd call that little short of state-sponsored child abuse.
Maybe it's the idea a feminist perspective is actually being offered in university text books. I'm not sure why anyone would think that schools are feminized. Most of the text books I've read are simply offering an alternative theory...and I do not see this in elementary , junior high, or high schools. But, that's just me.
When I was in school, the teacher would litterally give extra credit questions based on sports trivia from the last weekend's game... I assume "Feminized Teaching" is doing away with that kind of thing...
I started in a school this year that has just switched from a private all girls school to limited co ed. They have only allowed ten guys in this year in a school of 250. They had the best academic record in our area which is why parents wanted to send their boys there too. Not everyone is happy though. To me the classes are more strict and its more listening and notes and more formal, but its ok so far. I kind of expected that if it was more academic anyway. I dunno, it's okay but takes adjusting too.
http://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/...
Try this article.
What's all this talk about there not being enough "hands-on" stuff for boys, and what's with the assumption that boys *need* to be more rough and tumble, and girls don't? I have FOUR kids. My son is rather quiet, introspective, and thoughtful. My oldest daughter is the athletic one who likes sports and 'charging around'.
I highly doubt the pejorative use of the word "feminized" is an accurate assessment of whatever the problem actually is. Women, who are "feminine" are not taking ANYTHING away from masculinity in any way shape or form. Femininity contributes TO and compliments.
This style of teaching you mention, I rather think has much to do with many complicated layers that underpin a teacher's ability to do his or her job - lack of funds and resources, for example, bureaucracy, red tape, school boards, unions, regulations, hopping mad parents, etc,... this is what makes teaching lame - not gender-bent mentalities.
/end rant
=0) Good question (0=
 What do i do or say ?
 If you would like to change 5 things about the modern woman what it would be?
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What is the "feminized" style of teaching?