gender+in+the+classroom

Gender discussion: 4/29/09

Did last year’s opening discussion re: gender, with Abigail Norfleet James, affect how we taught, thought about students, planned lessons, felt about our own gender throughout the school year?

Is gender as important at BC as our other two themes: technology in the classroom and using outside resources?

How can we keep our sensitivity to gender alive in the coming school years?

Mental health and gender: research shows that extremes of femininity or masculinity are unhealthy.

Girls/women are somewhat more vulnerable to anxiety and depression and not, as we used to think, only because they admit to it more, but because they worry about themselves AND others.

Can boys still not cry and how bad is that for THEIR mental health?

Do we limit students if we think: “oh, she’s a girl, so spatial tasks will be more difficult for her” or “oh, he’s a boy, so he won’t want to read”? Can we recognize differences in students’ aptitudes and inclinations and then teach them to strengthen those weaknesses, maybe even make some new neural connections?

We discussed Carol Dweck and her ideas/research about how the brain is like a muscle and that we should be teaching students that they’re not good or bad in certain subjects. Rather, they need to work the muscles of their particular brains in order to get the most out of them.

In the Lower School it was noted that, maybe due to hardwiring, the girls tend to "nest" in front of the bowling pins in the P.E. game where they were to knock over as many of the opponents’ line of pins that they could, whereas the boys ran and threw with great abandon, leaving their pins unguarded in the process.

Activity choice differences in pre-k and kindergarten sometimes seem gender biased, so to speak. Should we be nudging kids in directions that go against their inclinations, at least for some part of the school day?