a little more McLuhan (& maybe Pynchon)

[alice wellintown]

In the US, Education generally treats young boys (3-12)  like
dysfunctional girls. Again, teaching in America has been and remains,
a female dominated institution. The failure to introduce real working
technologies to classrooms, from Film, Radio, TV,  VCR, Computers is
owed, in large measure to the fact that the culture of school is
driven by a female-conservative agenda. This manifests itself in
reverse as students move along, as females are kept out of science and
math (STEM) and males dominate this culture. Of course, as you note,
there are boy and girl factors, that is sex and the evolution of the
sexes (size, strength, language aptitude, brain structure) and there
are gender factors (not sex but social constructs--boys in blue with
short hair and girls in pink with long hair), and all manner of other
things that give advantage to females in the reading and writing arts
early on and to males in STEM later on, and, as with most everything
else, economics is decisive so we are assuming a level playing field
in terms of where the students come from, but for too long boys have
been treated as dysfunctional girls and are now stuck with an ADHD
label and a drug to keep them clam. The drug companies are making a
fortune. How do you fell about this Rocky? What is your relationship
with your baseball glove telling you about how you deal with things?
Why are you afraid to cry? Here, read this Kite Runner, it shows how a
bad old man who acts the old macho and protects a female who is about
to be raped by a Russian soldier is actually a bad father and a chump
while his son, a sensitive wimp is the real couragous one.

On Wed, Aug 24, 2011 at 8:44 AM, Bekah <bekah0176 at sbcglobal.net> wrote:
> I noticed during my years of teaching kindergarten that if you give a boy two toy dinosaurs he will just start crashing their heads together playing "fight." A girl will start up a story between the two, "Okay, you be the mom and I'll be the dad. Oh look, here's our house."
>
> I've only ever known one girl who greeted her friends with a headlock.
>
> Two boys will sit down with a pile of blocks and without a word start building something (a tower)  coopertively. This is a marvel to watch!   Two girls will sit down with a pile of blocks and discuss to no end how they re building whatever (a house with rooms)  with direction, redirection, and so on - every detail is hashed out as they go along.
>
> Girls pick up and use oral language skills so much faster than boys. This is really general because there are talky boys and quiet girls, too.
>
> I have no idea why boys aren't readers like girls are readers. I suspect it has something to do with the above plus the sedentary nature of reading, no role models in older brothers, dads, uncles, etc. The books in elementary school are fiction and relationship oriented.
>
> From my first day teaching I was aware of this problem boys tended to have and deliberately had "boy" things in my classrooms, trains, car tracks, little rockets along with the play house. And I had books with photographs of snakes and lizards and spiders and so on - monster trucks were quite popular.  But a teacher cannot overcome testosterone - the boys want to run and jump and crash the cars - it's part of boyness.
>
> Bekah
>
>
> On Aug 24, 2011, at 6:58 AM, alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> It takes skill and, while females may master the circle, a reflection
>> of the inner self (Erikson)  boys don't like circles yet and tend to
>> draw towers or big trees with giant creatures that spit fire and
>> destroy the towers. Given blocks, this pattern is almost universal.
>> One of the reasons boys don't read and write as much as we want them
>> to is because teachers in the lower grades, who are usually young
>> females or females anyway, discourage boys from writing and reading
>> and drawing because boy subjects frighten them.
>>
>> On Wed, Aug 24, 2011 at 12:59 AM, David Payne <dpayne1912 at hotmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> On Tue, 23 Aug 2011 11:20:05 -0500, David Morris (fqmorris at gmail.com)
>>>
>>>> ...Given a crayon, one of the first forms a child draws is a closed
>>>> circle.
>>>
>>> Not true. That takes considerable practice. At least for my kids.
>>>
>