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As a man I can confidently say we do just fine and the system teats us very well thank you very much. Rather than stopping the "penalization" of boys, we need t

As a man I can confidently say we do just fine and the system teats us very well thank you very much. Rather than stopping the "penalization" of boys, we need to stop making excuses for and accepting their (our) poor social behavior. Lord of the Flies is basically a middle school boys documentary IMHO. Alternatively, if you really feel like this is a problem, then recognize and speak up about the negative impacts that this behavior has on everyone else in the system, particularly girls. I speak from the perspective of the head coach for multiple elite "travel teams" for both girls and boys in the middle school age range, as the father of many daughters, and as a former boy.

smt88 6y ago
Your anecdata doesn't refute the article, which uses data (such as the astonishingly high ADD diagnosis rate for boys). Asking for fixes to systemic issues (e.g. pathologizing young children just because they can't sit still) doesn't negate girls' issues. We can work on both.
- im3w1l 6y ago
  Disclaimer: I have not gone to school in the US, so I'm not fully aware of the situation. I don't think it's an either or. Boys do need strict rules to some extent, and if there is a lack of them that can be a systemic issue too. But the rules need to take their nature into account, and give opportunities for physical exertion, with play and sports.
- hashmymustache 6y ago
  Not to mention boys have lower grade averages across the country and women make up almost 60% of college students. You don’t have to be a men’s activist to recognize that if those trends were reversed such a disparity would receive a lot of attention with social pressure to recalibrate the learning environment.
  - uberman 6y ago
    Yet somehow men make up the vast majority of senior positions in almost every field including college professors.
    - smt88 6y ago
      Again, I think you can separate these issues and care about both. Men dominating leadership positions is a problem. Men getting degrees at a much lower rate than women is also a problem. They have separate causes. It's not like every gendered trend is a tug-of-war with every other issue.
      - uberman 6y ago
        The article directly suggests altering teaching strategies to favor/accommodate boys that I believe will be at the expense of girls: * Lessons that are structured as competitive games. * Lessons requiring motor activity. * Lessons that require a combination of competition and teamwork. So, I guess I don't really see these as separate issues. I think it is also important to state that men don't just dominate leadership positions, we also typically dominate compensation as well and I'm not talking about equal pay in the context of women and men in different jobs. For example, men are the highest paid teachers and professors despite the reduced participation by men in higher ed. So my opinion remains that men do perfectly well with traditional instruction and we don't need to make adjustments to it to favor them, particularly not the types of adjustments that would disadvantage women.
        jfengel 6y ago
        Unfortunately, we need to fix both problems -- many boys don't do great with traditional instruction, and the problem of the many kinds of job and pay disparity. It's not really great to disadvantage them in school and then flip the disadvantage after graduation. I agree that it's worse to fix the one disadvantage without the other, which is tempting because it seems like the less-intractable one. Wage and job disparity is deeply ingrained; "women's work" has long been poorly compensated because women are seen as wanting to do that work. We lump a huge amount of effort under "homemaker" and don't pay for it at all. We then heap even more effort on women working outside the home, for which we don't even have a single name -- cleaning, note-taking, emotional labor, etc. -- unpaid and often marking one as less valuable. I don't have a good answer to this, and resist fixing the "easier" problem that puts girls at a disadvantage.
- uberman 6y ago
  The article mentions ADHD once. It is clearly not the focus. But, yes over diagnosis of any form particularly when it leads to the unneeded medication of children is a huge problem. I think it is clear that I am not advocating dealing with boys by sedating them. I'm glad you raised this related issue though as I believe that many of the legions downvoting my opinion feel that somehow I am ok with that strategy. I feel that the systemic need to identify energetic and inattentive students and then solve those issues with medication is a travesty that rises directly as a result of increased classroom sizes resulting from school funding shortfalls. I'm not advocating that at all. What I am advocating is that teaching strategies in my opinion do not need to be altered to accommodate boys contrary to what I perceive the article to actually be about. Changes such as: * Lessons that are structured as competitive games. * Lessons requiring motor activity. * Lessons that require a combination of competition and teamwork. Boys (in general) are already proficient in learning though competition and movement, starkly opposed by middle school girls who (in general) are not, at least not when it comes to physical contests with boys. Boys just don't need lessons that reinforce competitive games and motor activity. If anyone would benefit, it would be girls but that would also likely require a single gender school system. Boys go on to dominate (almost) every profession so clearly altering middle school teaching strategies to favor and accommodate them at the expense of girls is both unneeded and would likely lead to larger systemic disadvantages to women.
  - smt88 6y ago
    I understand your point, but I think you're combining a lot of different issues into a single argument. Yes, men dominate leadership of most fields. That's a widely known problem. The stats are glaring and blatant. It's difficult to fix, but we generally know some strategies that work. The challenge is building political will. This article is about a problem that is not widely known, which is obviously why she chose to write about it. Forgetting about whether elementary school performance results in leadership positions, first look at the effects of penalizing high-energy children (regardless of gender): - ADD over-diagnosis - poor grades due to teacher bias, which the article mentions (academic grades are artificially deflated based on unrelated behavioral issues) - school-to-prison pipeline (not mentioned in the article, but a huge problem for boys and not at a problem at all for girls) Maybe a solution would be to have gender-only schools, but that might cause other problems. It seems that most of the problems in education are a result of treating children as a homogeneous group instead of individuals, which is another thing this article points out. There may not be enough money to have individual lessons for children, but perhaps a more college-like system (where high-energy children can enroll in physical classes while low-energy children can choose to do something else) would work. For the record, I was extremely high-energy and not athletic at all. The solution for me was not to do competitive, physical classes. It was to do active classes that involved working (even if "working" was just filling out worksheets) instead of sitting still and listening to a lecture.
SamPatt 6y ago
Is it poor social behavior to not want to sit still for hours on end doing incredibly boring things which are only being taught so that you can pass a test? Most of school is a waste of time, and kids aren't stupid, they value their time just like adults do.
runawaybottle 6y ago
I’ll also add to your point that we seem to have this reverse troubleshooting with men. We admonish them in their adult life for lacking self control or rigor (sexual harassment or being a deadbeat), but then excuse them when it matters (not focusing on school, playing video games all day, not learning social skills). Which one do you think comes first, and which do you think is the root cause that needs to be fixed?
pnw_hazor 6y ago
I don't agree with you at all (though I don't think you deserve down votes but that is how goes around here now - I up voted). I have raised high talent children (1 boy and 2 girls). My girls thrived in school while my boy did not. They are all equally brilliant and talented in their own way. My son was on elite traveling basketball teams, all star baseball teams, and earned a podium medal for track at state. He hated school and failed to get his diploma -- one credit short. (He made it up later at a community college.) He excelled as an US Army Ranger in a high-skill combat role with the Rangers (fire support specialist). He was diagnosed with ADHD at a young age, but I didn't believe in such a thing back then. (I believe it now given my late diagnosis and ongoing treatment and struggles.) I hated school too what a boring nightmare. I still feel guilty about taking my son to school when he was 6 years-old and begging me to let him hang out with me instead. That memory will always be a record of one of my greatest regrets and failures.
- uberman 6y ago
  Thanks for not just downvoting me. I appear to have kicked a hornets nest, but as you say downvoting to show disagreement is just how things work here. For what it is worth, I did not down vote you either :-) Your son reminds me a bit of me. I hated middle school, I went on in high school to to be a 3 sport varsity player and ultimately got into and through university as a D1 athlete. Post graduation I as a military dog handler. I hated middle school with a passion but that did not seem to hamper my career at all. Your son sounds great, I was in the Army as well and I know and respect what he had to do to overcome the challenges of the Ranger crucible. Your son has already achieved far more than most could even dare.
hnuser123456 6y ago
Yes, so how about we speak to the boys like they are expected to become future men. Let's not drug boys into a coma because we don't want to deal with them. Let's not give them detention and suspension without someone actually having a 2-way conversation with them. And let's certainly not get angry at children for having more energy than ourselves. If you think hard-handed penalties work, you never received enough education to show that genuine conversation works even better.
- Igalze 6y ago
  Couldn't agree more. One-size-fits-all approach to education, backed by "do as I say or else..." mentality, is outdated. We personalize everything, from cars to ads, we should be making the same effort to create options for kids to maximize their ability to get the most out of the education system.
- kls 6y ago
  So on the drugging I wanted to lend my voice to the fact that while it is over diagnosed in children ADD/ADHD does exist, it is a real condition and at times in a persons life it can be debilitating. I personally was diagnosed with ADHD later in life and from the moment I took my first dose the transformation on my abilities was profound. ADD/ADHD medication is one of the true success stories of mental health treatment. Unlike depression, bipolar and other conditions if a person suffers from ADHD, in the vast majority of cases, they will improve and improve significantly with medication and the improvement has a rapid onset from the first dose. I actually choose not to treat it in myself for a long time because I had already suffered thru schooling and it was not until a life event stacked so much responsibility in top of me that I imploded to the point where I could not put one foot in front of the other that I decided to actively treat it. Immediately I look back at all the struggles I had especially in schooling and realized I choose the hard path. So while I agree that we are over-drugging boys, I agree ADD/ADHD is over diagnosed and I agree that school sucks for all boys even the ones that do not have focus problems. I want to lend my voice to caution about rejecting medicating those that do have a legitimate disorder as looking back I realize I did myself a disservice by rejecting being drugged.
  - 6y ago
LocalH 6y ago
Quite frankly, if you don’t have ADHD, you don’t really have a horse in this race

smt88 6y ago

Your anecdata doesn't refute the article, which uses data (such as the astonishingly high ADD diagnosis rate for boys). Asking for fixes to systemic issues (e.g. pathologizing young children just because they can't sit still) doesn't negate girls' issues. We can work on both.

im3w1l 6y ago
Disclaimer: I have not gone to school in the US, so I'm not fully aware of the situation. I don't think it's an either or. Boys do need strict rules to some extent, and if there is a lack of them that can be a systemic issue too. But the rules need to take their nature into account, and give opportunities for physical exertion, with play and sports.
hashmymustache 6y ago
Not to mention boys have lower grade averages across the country and women make up almost 60% of college students. You don’t have to be a men’s activist to recognize that if those trends were reversed such a disparity would receive a lot of attention with social pressure to recalibrate the learning environment.
- uberman 6y ago
  Yet somehow men make up the vast majority of senior positions in almost every field including college professors.
  - smt88 6y ago
    Again, I think you can separate these issues and care about both. Men dominating leadership positions is a problem. Men getting degrees at a much lower rate than women is also a problem. They have separate causes. It's not like every gendered trend is a tug-of-war with every other issue.
    - uberman 6y ago
      The article directly suggests altering teaching strategies to favor/accommodate boys that I believe will be at the expense of girls: * Lessons that are structured as competitive games. * Lessons requiring motor activity. * Lessons that require a combination of competition and teamwork. So, I guess I don't really see these as separate issues. I think it is also important to state that men don't just dominate leadership positions, we also typically dominate compensation as well and I'm not talking about equal pay in the context of women and men in different jobs. For example, men are the highest paid teachers and professors despite the reduced participation by men in higher ed. So my opinion remains that men do perfectly well with traditional instruction and we don't need to make adjustments to it to favor them, particularly not the types of adjustments that would disadvantage women.
      - jfengel 6y ago
        Unfortunately, we need to fix both problems -- many boys don't do great with traditional instruction, and the problem of the many kinds of job and pay disparity. It's not really great to disadvantage them in school and then flip the disadvantage after graduation. I agree that it's worse to fix the one disadvantage without the other, which is tempting because it seems like the less-intractable one. Wage and job disparity is deeply ingrained; "women's work" has long been poorly compensated because women are seen as wanting to do that work. We lump a huge amount of effort under "homemaker" and don't pay for it at all. We then heap even more effort on women working outside the home, for which we don't even have a single name -- cleaning, note-taking, emotional labor, etc. -- unpaid and often marking one as less valuable. I don't have a good answer to this, and resist fixing the "easier" problem that puts girls at a disadvantage.
uberman 6y ago
The article mentions ADHD once. It is clearly not the focus. But, yes over diagnosis of any form particularly when it leads to the unneeded medication of children is a huge problem. I think it is clear that I am not advocating dealing with boys by sedating them. I'm glad you raised this related issue though as I believe that many of the legions downvoting my opinion feel that somehow I am ok with that strategy. I feel that the systemic need to identify energetic and inattentive students and then solve those issues with medication is a travesty that rises directly as a result of increased classroom sizes resulting from school funding shortfalls. I'm not advocating that at all. What I am advocating is that teaching strategies in my opinion do not need to be altered to accommodate boys contrary to what I perceive the article to actually be about. Changes such as: * Lessons that are structured as competitive games. * Lessons requiring motor activity. * Lessons that require a combination of competition and teamwork. Boys (in general) are already proficient in learning though competition and movement, starkly opposed by middle school girls who (in general) are not, at least not when it comes to physical contests with boys. Boys just don't need lessons that reinforce competitive games and motor activity. If anyone would benefit, it would be girls but that would also likely require a single gender school system. Boys go on to dominate (almost) every profession so clearly altering middle school teaching strategies to favor and accommodate them at the expense of girls is both unneeded and would likely lead to larger systemic disadvantages to women.
- smt88 6y ago
  I understand your point, but I think you're combining a lot of different issues into a single argument. Yes, men dominate leadership of most fields. That's a widely known problem. The stats are glaring and blatant. It's difficult to fix, but we generally know some strategies that work. The challenge is building political will. This article is about a problem that is not widely known, which is obviously why she chose to write about it. Forgetting about whether elementary school performance results in leadership positions, first look at the effects of penalizing high-energy children (regardless of gender): - ADD over-diagnosis - poor grades due to teacher bias, which the article mentions (academic grades are artificially deflated based on unrelated behavioral issues) - school-to-prison pipeline (not mentioned in the article, but a huge problem for boys and not at a problem at all for girls) Maybe a solution would be to have gender-only schools, but that might cause other problems. It seems that most of the problems in education are a result of treating children as a homogeneous group instead of individuals, which is another thing this article points out. There may not be enough money to have individual lessons for children, but perhaps a more college-like system (where high-energy children can enroll in physical classes while low-energy children can choose to do something else) would work. For the record, I was extremely high-energy and not athletic at all. The solution for me was not to do competitive, physical classes. It was to do active classes that involved working (even if "working" was just filling out worksheets) instead of sitting still and listening to a lecture.

SamPatt 6y ago

Is it poor social behavior to not want to sit still for hours on end doing incredibly boring things which are only being taught so that you can pass a test? Most of school is a waste of time, and kids aren't stupid, they value their time just like adults do.

runawaybottle 6y ago

I’ll also add to your point that we seem to have this reverse troubleshooting with men. We admonish them in their adult life for lacking self control or rigor (sexual harassment or being a deadbeat), but then excuse them when it matters (not focusing on school, playing video games all day, not learning social skills). Which one do you think comes first, and which do you think is the root cause that needs to be fixed?

pnw_hazor 6y ago

I don't agree with you at all (though I don't think you deserve down votes but that is how goes around here now - I up voted). I have raised high talent children (1 boy and 2 girls). My girls thrived in school while my boy did not. They are all equally brilliant and talented in their own way. My son was on elite traveling basketball teams, all star baseball teams, and earned a podium medal for track at state. He hated school and failed to get his diploma -- one credit short. (He made it up later at a community college.) He excelled as an US Army Ranger in a high-skill combat role with the Rangers (fire support specialist). He was diagnosed with ADHD at a young age, but I didn't believe in such a thing back then. (I believe it now given my late diagnosis and ongoing treatment and struggles.) I hated school too what a boring nightmare. I still feel guilty about taking my son to school when he was 6 years-old and begging me to let him hang out with me instead. That memory will always be a record of one of my greatest regrets and failures.

uberman 6y ago
Thanks for not just downvoting me. I appear to have kicked a hornets nest, but as you say downvoting to show disagreement is just how things work here. For what it is worth, I did not down vote you either :-) Your son reminds me a bit of me. I hated middle school, I went on in high school to to be a 3 sport varsity player and ultimately got into and through university as a D1 athlete. Post graduation I as a military dog handler. I hated middle school with a passion but that did not seem to hamper my career at all. Your son sounds great, I was in the Army as well and I know and respect what he had to do to overcome the challenges of the Ranger crucible. Your son has already achieved far more than most could even dare.

hnuser123456 6y ago

Yes, so how about we speak to the boys like they are expected to become future men. Let's not drug boys into a coma because we don't want to deal with them. Let's not give them detention and suspension without someone actually having a 2-way conversation with them. And let's certainly not get angry at children for having more energy than ourselves. If you think hard-handed penalties work, you never received enough education to show that genuine conversation works even better.

Igalze 6y ago
Couldn't agree more. One-size-fits-all approach to education, backed by "do as I say or else..." mentality, is outdated. We personalize everything, from cars to ads, we should be making the same effort to create options for kids to maximize their ability to get the most out of the education system.
kls 6y ago
So on the drugging I wanted to lend my voice to the fact that while it is over diagnosed in children ADD/ADHD does exist, it is a real condition and at times in a persons life it can be debilitating. I personally was diagnosed with ADHD later in life and from the moment I took my first dose the transformation on my abilities was profound. ADD/ADHD medication is one of the true success stories of mental health treatment. Unlike depression, bipolar and other conditions if a person suffers from ADHD, in the vast majority of cases, they will improve and improve significantly with medication and the improvement has a rapid onset from the first dose. I actually choose not to treat it in myself for a long time because I had already suffered thru schooling and it was not until a life event stacked so much responsibility in top of me that I imploded to the point where I could not put one foot in front of the other that I decided to actively treat it. Immediately I look back at all the struggles I had especially in schooling and realized I choose the hard path. So while I agree that we are over-drugging boys, I agree ADD/ADHD is over diagnosed and I agree that school sucks for all boys even the ones that do not have focus problems. I want to lend my voice to caution about rejecting medicating those that do have a legitimate disorder as looking back I realize I did myself a disservice by rejecting being drugged.
- 6y ago

LocalH 6y ago

Quite frankly, if you don’t have ADHD, you don’t really have a horse in this race