Teaching Boys and Girls Separately

[monk222]

“On an unseasonably cold day last November in Foley, Ala., Colby Royster and Michael Peterson, two students in William Bender’s fourth-grade public-school class, informed me that the class corn snake could eat a rat faster than the class boa constrictor. Bender teaches 26 fourth graders, all boys. Down the hall and around the corner, Michelle Gay teaches 26 fourth-grade girls. The boys like being on their own, they say, because girls don’t appreciate their jokes and think boys are too messy, and are also scared of snakes. The walls of the boys’ classroom are painted blue, the light bulbs emit a cool white light and the thermostat is set to 69 degrees. In the girls’ room, by contrast, the walls are yellow, the light bulbs emit a warm yellow light and the temperature is kept six degrees warmer, as per the instructions of Leonard Sax, a family physician turned author and advocate who this May will quit his medical practice to devote himself full time to promoting single-sex public education.”

-- Elizabeth Weil for The New York Times

A long article that I haven't even skimmed, but I thought it might interest others...

Comments

[neowiccan.livejournal.com]

i don't get why same-sex can't be a viable option. i wouldn't like to see it become mandatory, but every time a same-sex school starts up it seems someone sues 'em and shuts 'em down again. a homeschooler in our area is trying to start a charter school for girls, and was turned down on the ridiculous premise that she's discriminating against boys. if anyone has the same option of starting one for boys, how is that discrimination?
i suppose i'm biased because i went to an all-girl school and loved it and was well-eddicated.
khairete
suz

[miss-next.livejournal.com]

Oh, yes, they took the statistics in that one apart on Language Log; basically these ideas came from someone thinking that if there was a slight statistical tendency for one sex to prefer something, then one could assume that all members of that sex preferred it. To see how daft this is, it's well known that men tend to be taller on average than women; however, if you decided on that basis that everyone who was at least 5'8" should use the men's loos and everyone who was less than 5'8" should use the ladies', you'd be in some pretty serious trouble. This particular set of single-sex educators have done the equivalent to that. Speaking personally, if I had to learn in a room with the thermostat set at 75 F (which is about 23 C), I wouldn't be learning anything much. I'd be thoroughly uncomfortable from the heat.

That, of course, doesn't mean that single-sex education is necessarily a bad thing; like anything else, it has advantages and disadvantages. But I have problems with this particular set-up because it is based on bad science and bad mathematics. It's clear that gender differences do exist, but there is always a vast amount of overlap just as there is with the obvious and visible one of height; if men are on average better than women at A and women better than men at B, you can always still find women who are better than most men at A and men who are better than most women at B. People who don't take that into account are going to end up making a lot of people of both sexes feel very uncomfortable.