According to this article they do.


.....


Here



Titana

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Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius (and a lot of courage) to move in the opposite direction....Albert Einstein.

Have I finally lived long enough to see white called black and up called down? Who wrote that? What planet do they live on? Studies have shown? I think if livescience.com can't filter their reporting any better than that, it makes the whole site suspect. I guess they didn't see the 50's, 60's and 70's. Whoever wrote that must have been born in the mid 80's and was probably a misogymist. Help me out here ladies.

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Gimme a minute to read through Jay's latest observations...

Did you actually READ the article??
Guess what -- schools and their approaches changed A LOT since 50's, 60's and 70's.
The study was done by a WOMAN psychologist.
Does that sound misogynistic to you?

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Fiction has to be plausible. Reality is under no such constraint.

Thanks, Ilya. [Original post removed as it is no longer necessary.]

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In Fallout 3, 'happiness' is a warm junkyard dog and a loaded gun. It's mostly the loaded gun.
- Moose's one-line review.

"your going to regret that one. You are now a colonoscope...
- Chrissy, corrupting PraedSt's wish.

More to the point, I also am surprised by and am somewhat suspicious of the conclusion of this study. It doesn't really jybe with my own experiences. Either as a student or (briefly) as a teacher.

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In Fallout 3, 'happiness' is a warm junkyard dog and a loaded gun. It's mostly the loaded gun.
- Moose's one-line review.

"your going to regret that one. You are now a colonoscope...
- Chrissy, corrupting PraedSt's wish.

Ok; so literature as a whole is slanted toward the female. But what about other subjects? I've heard all my life that math and science favor the boys. And what about socioeconomic class? "If buffy drove her mercedes...". Does that mean they favor the rich? YOU CANT PLEASE EVERYONE (although you can try).
I do think it is an important point to consider when designing curriculum, but to make a big public deal out of it is a little un-necessary.

After a friend read the article out loud for me, I can only say that the male reading problem does not exist .

Seriously though. I am not interested in 99% of fictional literature. That was a problem when we were obliged to read some in high school. However, the texts we read to learn to read were short, so there it never was a problem. At the end of primary school we used books to read, but as this was in a controlled class environment it was just an obligatory read, so disinterest couldn't stop me there .

Conclusion: I learned to read even though I don't like literature, because up to the point where you're supposed to have learned all about reading (speed), there were no long texts for us to read outside the controlled school environment.

I can imagine though, that it must be quite bad if you have to wrestle yourself through a book you're not interested in, in order to get the reading practice, but you have to do it in your own time. But the same goes for early maths. I made all the exercises because it was during class. At home it would have been a pain. But of course you can't skip a math exercise (homework) as you can skip parts of a book .

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To the regular visitor of internet bulletin boards it is clear that it's an excellent idea your parents get to choose your real name.

Did you actually READ the article??
Hi Ilya, no I didn't, it sounded like bullsugar to me from the start. You got me there.

Guess what -- schools and their approaches changed A LOT since 50's, 60's and 70's.
Yes they have. I never denied it. And change does not ever mean "Change for the better" I know.

The study was done by a WOMAN psychologist
You've never met a woman who hated her own gender? How lucky for you.

Does that sound misogynistic to you?
Nope. Sounds like cherry picking to me. I was at a party and at our table was a male model who got very uncomfortable when the subject turned to liturature. Until he actually blurted out, "I read a book once!" What does that prove? I can tell you with some truth that I lost count on all the books I've read by the time I was 17. Haven't slowed down yet. Does that negate the guy in your study? Are we back to zero evidence? No.

All this shows is people aren't instilling discipline in their children and are expecting the school to act as parents. That or pharmacopia. Boys are hard to control, and are not going to bear down when given all kinds of options not to.

I see it around here all the time. They walk down the street without fear of their fellow man's opinion like any old behavior is acceptable. (I'm referring to extreme rudeness, clothing that reveals their bare backsides, or guys that think they can slap their girlfriends around in public and not get their asses kicked hard.) So yes, there is a problem. Just not the problem that author states.

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Gimme a minute to read through Jay's latest observations...

I went to school in a fairly liberal school in the 90s, and in some of my math/science classes, I could actually see the bias. Not all of them, gods know--for one, there were only two boys in my physics class, and that's out of about fourteen people--but I remember it fairly vividly in algebra. The boys got real answers. The girls did, too, but they also got an attitude of surprise that they'd asked the questions in the first place.

Actually, now I think about it, I think at least some of the time, my beloved English teacher from 11th and 12th grade also showed a certain bias towards the boys--and the substitute who briefly replaced her when she died certainly did.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

I think this is just the latest trend in looking for excuses for those that fail.

I'm relatively familiar with the topic because our school district is going to conduct an experiment next year in single gender classrooms. They sent some brief summaries home with the kids, and referred to a few studies.

Their experiment is based on findings like:

<> Boys and girls learn differently, on average.
<> Boys are better at some things than girls, on average.
<> Girls are better at some things than boys, on average.
<> Girls mature faster than boys, on average.
<> Girls are more studious than boys, on average.
<> Boys are more rowdy than girls, on average.

(The one thing you can always count on from these kinds of studies is that they are very good at spending money to tell us things that only someone living in a cultural vacumm would not know).

My guess is that if a student is not average in most, if not all, ways; they will not be very well served by separation from the opposite sex. Which will then send the apologists looking for the next excuse for failing.

Put it another way, how many other variables in learning ability can we identify, and should we start splitting classes into finer and finer graduations until everyone is set up in their own little perfect learning environment?

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Don of Borg - Cool, Calm, Collective.

"Within the next generation I believe that the world's leaders will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging them and kicking them into obedience." -- Aldous Huxley

Well actually that's what the article suggests we do .

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When I die I want to go peacefully in my sleep, like my grandfather. Not screaming in terror, like his passengers.

I live in Texas and the favored group is the football players.

Teachers tend to teach the way they themselves learn. If I am a visual learner, I will probably use lots of graphics. This does not reach the child that learns by listening. Plus, the short stories on the HS approved curriculum in Texas really suck. Even I cannot get interested in the stories.

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Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
Albert Einstein

Evidently I'm abnormal, as is every single male LotR fan...

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Okay, my younger brother who posts mainly on political forums and apparently hates people who comment on articles they haven't read took Ilyas side and made me read it. I was right in my first post.

Having wasted 45 seconds of my life that I can't get back only confirmed what I had already intuited. Mainly that its National Enquirer grade reporting.

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Gimme a minute to read through Jay's latest observations...

An impossible goal, of course, but not at all undesirable IMO.

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Fiction has to be plausible. Reality is under no such constraint.

Yup, boys don't like fiction. Or literature. That's why most Star Trek fans are female. Same with Star Wars. And why every single guy I know has not read Hitchhiker's Guide and Ender's Game. And why nobody ever read the Conan books, or Dune. Or the masses of shounen manga produced in Japan every week. Beowulf? Guys are sure to hate that one.</sarcasm>

*nonchalantly pushes new book cases into a corner*

Anyway, I was always taught that you get out of school exactly what you put into it, regardless of anything else. I had some teachers who favoured girls, and some who favoured boys, and it didn't matter in the slightest as long as I didn't worry about it and just did my best. Did I hate having to read stories about horses for the entire sixth grade? Heck yes. Did that really change how much I learned? Not likely.

Splitting classes up is a poor idea, I think. The most important thing to learn in school is how to deal with other people, people with different interests and beliefs and ways of thinking. If my parents had just wanted me to learn math and reading, they'd have just taught me themselves (and I'd have graduated many years earlier). But that's not the most important part of early education.

Speaking of school-age stories... anyone remember "Leningen Versus the Ants"? There's a perfect example of a story written with the male audience in mind.

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"It's turtles all the way down."

Yeah... girls always have it easier... teacher's pets...

ducks thrown objects and runs for cover!!

Oh come on... it was just a bad joke...

Well put........



Titana

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Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius (and a lot of courage) to move in the opposite direction....Albert Einstein.

Indeed, this in only beaten by studies presenting facts, and then giving a political correct interpretation to it as if it is a fact as well.

I have seen this study result:

Girls