“Rather than kindle excitement in anticipation, it smothers enthusiasm with boredom.” I think this is spot on. Children have to know that the thing they are waiting on has value or worth, and even elementary school students often have the sense that something isn’t right when bad pedagogy is afoot and there isn’t anything useful at the end of the wait. It is also possible, maybe due to some of these innate qualities you name, that boys feel more confident taking risks rebelling against that bad pedagogy, which makes them look like “troublemakers” and the girls, who may not be pushing boundaries in the same way, look “compliant.”
Also wondering if these phenomena are connected to literacy issues highlighted by “Sold a Story.” If a child knows he doesn’t have the skill to navigate a certain text, there is no reason to sit still.
Yes, the issue is not that boys can’t sit still. The 10-year-old kid who lives down the road from us sits still for hours, helping out the neighborhood by killing coyotes in the middle of the night.
When I was teaching grade school, some teachers had suggested to the parents of a fun-loving, active boy that he be put on medication because he was a bit too active for their taste. His parents had the wisdom to refuse. When he was in my fifth grade classroom, he could easily spend an hour drawing fish. He could tell you a lot about fish.
Perhaps the way we’ve hurt boys the most is by removing any kind of competition. There are always exceptions, but for the most part girls want to work in a group and boys want to compete. The innate nature of men is what has built the best of Western civilization. To discourage the urge to compete and to explore and to take risks is not only bad for boys but bad for society.
Most elementary school teachers are women and parents of boys have to hope that their kid gets one that appreciates boys. For more than a dozen years, the first book that I assigned my freshman education majors was Tracy Kidder’s Among Schoolchildren. It’s a nonfiction account of Mrs. Zajac, a fifth grade teacher who appreciates boys, especially the boys that are supposedly bad boys.
And looking back at my own Catholic school elementary years, the nuns that I can remember had a special appreciation for the antics of the boys, even the ones that lined up to be paddled.
Great post. Many of our new curriculum is so stuck in what we have to get done, that teachers are forgetting how to make it real for our students. Hopefully with increasing confidence teachers can get back to what makes us teachers- our skills, not the curriculum.
“Rather than kindle excitement in anticipation, it smothers enthusiasm with boredom.” I think this is spot on. Children have to know that the thing they are waiting on has value or worth, and even elementary school students often have the sense that something isn’t right when bad pedagogy is afoot and there isn’t anything useful at the end of the wait. It is also possible, maybe due to some of these innate qualities you name, that boys feel more confident taking risks rebelling against that bad pedagogy, which makes them look like “troublemakers” and the girls, who may not be pushing boundaries in the same way, look “compliant.”
Also wondering if these phenomena are connected to literacy issues highlighted by “Sold a Story.” If a child knows he doesn’t have the skill to navigate a certain text, there is no reason to sit still.
Yes, the issue is not that boys can’t sit still. The 10-year-old kid who lives down the road from us sits still for hours, helping out the neighborhood by killing coyotes in the middle of the night.
When I was teaching grade school, some teachers had suggested to the parents of a fun-loving, active boy that he be put on medication because he was a bit too active for their taste. His parents had the wisdom to refuse. When he was in my fifth grade classroom, he could easily spend an hour drawing fish. He could tell you a lot about fish.
Perhaps the way we’ve hurt boys the most is by removing any kind of competition. There are always exceptions, but for the most part girls want to work in a group and boys want to compete. The innate nature of men is what has built the best of Western civilization. To discourage the urge to compete and to explore and to take risks is not only bad for boys but bad for society.
Most elementary school teachers are women and parents of boys have to hope that their kid gets one that appreciates boys. For more than a dozen years, the first book that I assigned my freshman education majors was Tracy Kidder’s Among Schoolchildren. It’s a nonfiction account of Mrs. Zajac, a fifth grade teacher who appreciates boys, especially the boys that are supposedly bad boys.
And looking back at my own Catholic school elementary years, the nuns that I can remember had a special appreciation for the antics of the boys, even the ones that lined up to be paddled.
Great post. Many of our new curriculum is so stuck in what we have to get done, that teachers are forgetting how to make it real for our students. Hopefully with increasing confidence teachers can get back to what makes us teachers- our skills, not the curriculum.