Voegele-Bidnick, Malissa
How Sex Differences Affect My Middle School Teaching
As a middle school English and history teacher, I am always looking for ways to better teach my students. I always look at ways to tap into their potential and try to plan my lessons accordingly. No matter how much thought I put into my lessons, there are some students who struggle with the lessons I plan and teach. This has caused me much frustration throughout my many years of teaching, and I am always looking for more ways to help my students. Doing additional research on sex differences in learning has left me with more ideas how to better help my students. Throughout this paper I will outline what I have learned about sex differences in learning and
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Because I teach middle school English and history, I believe that this finding was the one that most greatly affects my classroom. Kimura’s book prompted me to do additional research about the way that sex differences affected the performance of children in school and why I have noticed a large number of boys failing in middle school. Bill McBride provided me with some additional insight into this phenomenon. He stated that boys and girls require different teaching methods due to their different learning styles. Much of the way that we teach in middle school is through lecture, which caters better to the way girls learn. We ask kids to sit still and stay on task for long periods of time, which is much easier for girls to do at this age due to the emphasis on listening and school language skills such as literacy. McBride went on to explain the importance of providing opportunities for boys to move throughout the day is necessary because boys are mesmerized by movement, and testosterone only adds to their need and desire to move. Because girls’ brains are better equipped for our current education system, they tend to do better in school (McBride). As a member of my school’s behavior management team, I began to wonder if sex differences were key in the amount of boys versus girls to be labeled as behavior problems. There are significantly more boys identified by my school as having
Evidence suggests that girls are more likely to spend their leisure time in ways which compliment their education and contribute to educational achievements. Mitsos and Browne place considerable emphasis on reading. Women are more likely to read than men, and mothers are more likely than fathers to read to their children. Therefore girls are more likely to have same-sex role models to encourage them to read. Poor language and literacy skills are likely to affect boys' performance across a wide range of subjects.
Deborah Tannen, who is a professor of linguistics, says in her essay, "How Male And Female Students Use Language Differently", that after she made her book, “You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation” that one of the unintended benefits was that she gets to reevaluate her teaching strategies and see how male and females act differently in class. As you read through her essay you can tell that Deborah Tannen wants her readers to think about why males tend to speak more in discussions than females and the reason for this difference in the classroom and also how we can improve the classroom for both men and women.Although Tannen tends to get off topic and doesn 't have much evidence to back up some of her claims, she states
There are multiple reasons why Kelley King, Michael Gurian and Kathy Stevens are on the pro side. For one reason, they believe that the differences exist due to boys being more interactive with certain topics and methods that don’t usually interest girls or vice versa. For example, the Wamsley Elementary School in Rifle, Colorado has both boy and girl students. However, in the past, the girl students over accomplished the boy students due to the school staff being more experienced in understanding how to teach girls than understanding how to teach boys. So, the school focused on teaching the boys with their own learning styles that are also girl friendly such as online courses. The result of this was successful as boys became more accomplished than they were from before. (Pages 147 – 148).
It is no secret that, in general, boys and girls differ in their learning styles. Capitalizing on these differences could advance classroom performance. With on-going concerns about student success in school, any changes in the classroom that could increase student achievement should be considered. Recognizing the learning differences between boys and girls, one of the changes that could be instituted is single-gender classrooms.
The first source is title Observed Classroom Behavior of Children with Relationship to Gender and Comorbidity. Something this study suggests is that boys display more outer conduct than girls do. Boys appear to act out more through high levels of energy, squirming, or being too loud in inappropriate situations. Girls seem to show symptoms of ADHD with things like losing things, being
When you send your children off in the morning to go to school, no matter what grade they are in whither it be elementary, junior high, or senior high, you expect that they will receive the best education that they can get. They should be asked challenging questions, encouraged and called upon to participate in class, they should also be given as much help as they need to secede by the teacher. However, this is most commonly not the case. Parents and the children themselves are unaware of what is going on because gender bias is not a noisy problem. Most people are unaware of the secret sexist lessons that occur every day in classrooms across the country. In this essay I will use two essay's from the reader:
An ever changing, yet common issue, in today's generation revolves around how society views gender. The general consensus dictates that gender, as a whole, is a spectrum, rather than a standard set for each individual male and female to follow throughout everyday life. However, there are those individuals who wish to remain reluctant in changing their view of society. Some believe it is better to allow the education system to be segregated by gender, in order to provide more resources to both girls and boys. One person in favor of this public education reform is David Brooks, a neuroscientist who published the article titled “The Gender Gap at School.” A thorough analysis of the effects of literature on men and women, biological factors
Schlosser. She carried out the study while on a post-doctoral fellowship at Princeton University, and will study the effects of gender in higher education lecture halls next. This is one of few studies of its kind to use scientific data to address the question of gender effects in school. Boys with more female peers in their classes show higher enrollment rates in both advanced math and science classes, but overall benefits were found in all grades for both sexes. Prof. Schlosser found that primary-school classrooms with a female majority showed increased academic success for both boys and girls, along with a notable improvement in subjects like science and math. In the middle schools, girls were found to have better academic achievement in English, languages and math. And in high school, the classrooms which had the best academic achievements overall were consistently those that had a higher proportion of girls enrolled. A higher percentage of girls lowers the amount of classroom disruption and fosters a better relationship between pupils and their teacher, a study of the data suggests. Teachers are less tired in classrooms with more girls, and pupils overall seem to be more satisfied when a high female-to-male ratio persists. Prof. Schlosser was inspired to the study by a “renewed interest on the effects of classroom gender composition on students’ learning, since a new amendment to America’s Title IX
She mostly had students in her class right before they hit puberty, which eliminated many potential issues. Still, she noticed “girls tended to be better behaved. Boys [were] more of the troubled, really difficult one” (Huffman). Of course, studies have shown that, for most boys, “testosterone isn’t causing aggression, it’s exaggerating the aggression that’s already there” (Testosterone Rules). Carolyn also observed that “girls tended to be more studious; but a lot of the time really brilliant ones were boys. Girls tended to work harder, so more of them would have been better” (Huffman). This observation aligns with current interest in why girls perform better academically. The “last decade has seen a growing popular and academic obsession with boys’ underachievement” (Reay). Carolyn made specific efforts in her classroom to treat students fairly and equally, regardless of their gender or academic success. She also intentionally taught units on famous women and famous African Americans, hoping to ignite the same desire for equality in her students that she herself
Did you know that single-sex classrooms are the worst classes ever? Over the past decade, single-gender classrooms have been opened in at least 230 schools in the rural, suburban, and the urban areas. Single-gender classrooms are classrooms where either young girls’ are in one class together, or young boys are in another class together. Single-sex classrooms were created because studies showed that boys and girls learn differently and they could benefit from being in a classroom with peers to whom they can relate. Since 2008, single-gender education has been the key to improved educational performance among boys and girls throughout the years. Today, gender differences among girls and boys are steadily rising in the classrooms they are in,
Through her use of the rhetorical devices of personal experience, ethos, and comparison, venerated Georgetown linguistics professor Deborah Tannen persuaded me to concede with her argument that males and females communicate differently in the classroom, as indicated in her 1991 article How Male and Female Students Use Language Differently. In this composition, she emphasizes that because of intersexual differences in utilizing the spoken word in class differently, instructors, including herself, consider reevaluating their teaching strategies. In her case, revising the approach involved building experience through closely monitoring her classes and collaborating with colleagues.
In chapter 9 of Trelease, we look at an age old topic, the learning chasm that exists between boys and girls. One of the concepts I found most interesting and relatable was that boys are twice as likely to be diagnosed with a learning disorder or attention-deficit disorder in comparison to girls. Partly why i find this so interesting is because I am the only girl of my siblings and all three of my younger brothers have been tested and diagnosed with some form of ADD whereas it was never even discussed having me tested. The chapter goes on to provide various excuses for these differences between sexes. These include faster development, natural organization, and most significantly that the person who is supposed to be raising the boys is the
In my opinion gender difference exits for many years. Some areas women are treated low compare to men in some areas men was above the women. I will be talking about where gender difference exits.
51). There are some people that believe there are behaviors that reflect socialization: girls are praised for cooperation and compliance, while boys are rewarded for activity and competition. The thought that many girls prefer to learn one way, and many boys another, suggest a useful generalization that can present information about gender that can help a teacher plan more successfully. Based on this information as an effective teacher it is important to include competition and cooperative activities.
Gender differences occur in many aspects of a person’s life whether it is culture, politics, occupation, family and relationships, or the economy (just to name a few). One major difference in gender occurs in learning and education in the elementary and secondary levels. Research has found that males and females learn differently in many aspects of education. First of all, female and male brains are constructed differently affecting the way they learn; this leads to basic differences in learning and also gives an introduction into why the way one learns differs according to gender and how males and females learn subjects and tasks differently. Second, males and females are treated differently, sometimes unconsciously, in educational