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How Sex Differences Affect My Middle School Teaching

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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…show more content…
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
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