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Dayton Daily News education reporter Scott Elliott writes about schools, kids, teaching and learning.
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Wednesday, March 5, 2008
Boys vs. Girls: A scientific divide?
Give my seven-year-old daughter a box of crayons with a sheet of paper and here’s what you’ll get — a drawing of a girl with a multicolored dress and brown hair standing on green grass with a friend and a dog and a cat beneath a blue sky with a yellow sun and a rainbow over a field of colorful flowers.
She draws that picture all the time.
My friend has a son about the same age. Give him the same crayons and paper and you will get a very different picture — perhaps a scene filled with gray soldiers carrying swords, chopping and swatting at each other across a battlefield and lots of red blood everywhere.
Apprently, many other parents have seen the same drawings — colorful, detailed pictures of people and animals from girls and less colorful fast action drawings from boys. The question is why?
One expert says its biology and argues schools should be single gender to account for the differences in learning styles in boys and girls. But Sunday’s New York Times raised questions about whether the science behind the exploding movement in favor of more separate schools for boys and girls is legit.
The first time I saw Leonard Sax speak about gender differences, he flashed up on a Powerpoint screen of a drawing nearly identical to the one described above that I had seen my daughter draw so often. There was the girl, the dress, the friend, the pets, the sun, the flowers, the rainbow and all those colors. Then he flashed the same picture up several times. The interesting thing was these drawings, he said, were not from the same girl but from girls all over the world.
Then he went through a series of boys’ drawings — bloody red battle scenes, gray rocket ships and black speeding vehicles. Same story — similar drawings from boys all around the world.
Sax, a doctor and psychologist and the biggest star of the recent movement toward single sex education, argues that there is a biological reason for the similarities of those drawings within gender and the differences across it. It’s all about the way they process information in their brains. Boys and girls, Sax argues, develop at different paces when they are very young. By the time they are teenagers, those difference virtually disappear. But in elementary school, he says, they are pronounced enough that educators should be accounting for them.
Sax has been hugely influential in Dayton. The city school district now has an all-boys and an all-girls school and it has experimented with single gender classrooms at one other school. He has been here to visit, including a training session for teachers that I wrote about in 2005.
But on Sunday, in a long story in the New York Times Magazine, reporter Liz Weil examines the Sax-led explosion in single sex education in public schools in the U.S.
Weil really dismantles the science behind some of Sax’s most interesting claims — such as the argument that a young boy’s eye is more adept at seeing motion while a girl is better able to see color and texture — showing much of the evidence is flimsy. And Weil exposes a rift in the single-gender movement between those who believe in seperate schools because of the science Sax cites and those who think Sax’s ideas are bunk but support boys and girls schools for other reasons.
Sax’s presentations are very persuasive, in part because much of it rings true to parents and teachers. Who doesn’t notice that girls and boys will draw different sorts of pictures and come up with different ideas for how to play with each another? It is credible to many that there could be scientific explanations for the differences.
But not everyone is ready to go to single gender schools for all, even if they see some advantages to it. My older daughter is in third grade and her best friend for three years has been a boy. As hormones have begun to emerge, she has been confused by the insistence of other kids that they are “a couple” and she complains often about kids who tease them or other boys who act out because of jealous crushes.
These issues certainly are distracting and sometimes truly upsetting to her. Even so, I haven’t thought about looking for an all-girls altentative for elementary school. The fact remains that the world has men and women in it. I guess I’ve always been of the mind for my own children that they might as well start now to learn how to navigate the always choppy waters of gender interaction.
What do you think about the idea that boys and girls should be taught differently based on biological differences or perhaps even seperated completely?
UPDATE: This week in Education’s Alexander Russo interviews Liz Weil about the story.
(Image credit: Blueyonder Blog)
Permalink | Comments (9) | Categories: Teaching and Learning
Miamisburg appears to pull out a squeaker
Dallas Jackson
It looks like Miamisburg’s levy is going to barely pass. If the final, unofficial results hold up, that is a big win for the district, which has been pushing hard for a major construction project to combat overcrowding. Superintendent Dallas Jackson should be a happy man this morning.
Overall, seven of the 10 school levies we were tracking in Greene, Montgomery and Miami Counties won. The big winners were Miamisburg, where they overcame opposition to get their building project approved; Piqua, where they managed to convince voters to approved its first income tax after a tough campaign; and Jefferson Twp., where they are always cutting it close financially.
The big losers were Beavercreek, where they again saw their construction proposal defeated in another close vote, and Valley View, where their levy was trounced with nearly three-fourths of voters saying no.
Here are the final, unofficial results for all these races:
Montgomery County (final results)
Jefferson Twp.: 56 percent yes; 44 percent no
Northmont: 62 percent yes; 38 percent no
Valley View: 27 percent yes; 73 percent no
Miamisburg: 50.75 percent yes; 49.25 percent no
Miami County (final results)
Piqua: 56 percent yes, 44 percent no
Milton Union: 55 percent yes; 45 percent no
Greene County (final results)
Beavercreek: 48 percent yes; 52 percent no
Greenview: 47 percent yes; 53 percent no
Sugarcreek: 58 percent yes; 41 percent no
Yellow Springs: 65 percent yes; 35 percent no
Permalink | Comments (3) | Categories: Schools and Politics
Montgomery County still not all in
Northmont finally has all precincts reporting. Looks like we’ll have to wait until morning for Miamisburg:
Montgomery County (see below)
Jefferson Twp.: 56 percent yes; 44 percent no (100 percent reporting)
Northmont: 62 percent yes; 38 percent no (100 percent reporting)
Valley View: 27 percent yes; 73 percent no (100 percent reporting)
Miamisburg: 50 percent yes; 49 percent no (97 percent reporting)
Miami County (final results)
Piqua: 56 percent yes, 44 percent no
Milton Union: 55 percent yes; 45 percent no
Greene County (final results)
Beavercreek: 48 percent yes; 52 percent no
Greenview: 47 percent yes; 53 percent no
Sugarcreek: 58 percent yes; 41 percent no
Yellow Springs: 65 percent yes; 35 percent no
Permalink | | Categories: Schools and Politics
