Terrific. I first read that Feynman piece long ago, but it was good to read it again. That piece is a great illustration of just how messed up education can b

Terrific. I first read that Feynman piece long ago, but it was good to read it again. That piece is a great illustration of just how messed up education can be. Not all of US K-12 public education is so messed up, but a lot of it is significantly messed up in similar ways -- formality over reality. And in particular, for the OP, a lot of women trying to teach boys when the women do understand the girls, are happy teaching the girls, but assume that somehow there is something wrong with the boys. Indeed, in the OP, the author does make progress on the problem but for her teaching idea of having team members come to the front of the class to look at something for 30 seconds, she is back to some absurd formality instead of anything close to reality. Here's one: Boys are good at figuring things out. So, mechanical things -- boys are good at taking them apart and then putting them back together. Then one level more advanced, boys are good at making things -- e.g., give them some elementary parts and pieces and ask them to make something, say, something that will be the tallest in the class or a bridge with the longest free span or a bridge between two points that will hold the greatest weight. Have them make, say, rubber band powered cars and then have drag races. There are paper airplane contests with well developed rules -- get the rules and have a paper airplane contest. Redo some of what the Wright Brothers did with the world's first, good wind tunnel. So, measure lift and drag for various airfoil shapes. Then discuss Reynolds number. For selecting the materials for the frame of an airplane, discuss density and Young's modulus. Move to have the students explain how Hughes was able to build the 'Spruce Goose', about the size of a 747, out of wood. There must be some books somewhere with some good projects for boys. If the girls want to do such things, too, okay by me. If the rubber band car, the bridge, the air foil, or the airplane they build wins, terrific. But, then, teachers might want to understand some things about boys! If I was a boy in that class and making a rubber band powered drag race car, it'd all be fine as long as I was racing against other boys -- I'd like to win, but no biggie if I came in second or third. But as soon as one of the girls started to compete with me, it'd be no food, no sleep, nothing else in school, nothing else for 48 hours as I wracked my brains looking for whatever, anything, to totally blow the doors off that girl's car and send her back to decorating her picture of her little pink pony and doing gossip about lipstick! And, uh, I had some pretty good talent with mechanical things, spatial relations, etc. In the US a lot of boys are really good with mechanical things.