quote: Girls are taking the nation's colleges by storm. They're streaming to campuses in greater numbers, earning better grades and graduating more often. The same phenomenal success shows in high schools, where girls dominate honor rolls, hold more student government spots and rake in most of the academic awards.
So says a just-released report from the U.S. Department of Education.
quote: The problem has already grown so severe that three out of every four private colleges (an informal estimate from admissions directors) quietly practice affirmative action for boys, favoring them over girls in admissions to get near balance.
quote: Increasingly, success requires verbal skills, which everyone agrees come more naturally to girls. ... Even in technical fields, verbal skills are at a premium. An auto mechanic or TV repairman now needs to master complex technical manuals.
quote: Yet for most educators — from kindergarten on up — the problem is invisible. Any teacher looking for national research that might define classroom solutions won't find any. They don't exist.
quote: Michael Gurian, author, Boys and Girls Learn Differently: ..."The teachers are therefore not fully prepared to take on boys' minds in schools. Our school classrooms themselves — at all grade levels — favor the female mind's way of acquiring and processing information. Many boys are simply set up not to succeed."
quote: Barbara Sprung, co-director, Educational Equity Concepts: "Boys pick up cues from the world around them — from the toys they are given to the TV programs they watch — that reading and writing are more for girls than boys. This attitude has negative consequences for their future education. The problem begins before kindergarten."
Phew. That was a lot of quotes.
I think that the reason for boys failing to succeed academically is just a lack of interest. I can't ever remember a time in class when a female would flip another students bookbag, throw paper airplanes, or shine the reflection of the sun from into a teacher's eyes.
Come to think about, males and females only differ by one chromosome - the males have the Y chromosome. And if I remember correctly, this chromosome basically deals with mental/physical development and shouldn't have anything to do with how intelligent one is.
If academic stimulation in males comes at a later time than females, maybe the solution, if possible, is to make it somehow more appealing.
posted
American culture, as a whole, is going down the tubes. Mind you, I do not say this with a negative bias. I loved America, I love liberty, and just hearing a patriotic song can make me cry. I say this from the cynical, pessimistic observation that grand empires, such as Rome, Greece, Persia, Bablyon, Assyria, Ottomans, USSR, tend to reach a high-point and from then deteroriate over a period of time.
I personally feel that Americans have become lazy, that they have lost touch with what made them once great, the love and strength and ethic of the people Who Once Were. Americans now are increasingly becoming apathetic, turning to TV, stuffing fat on food, and lazy...
Please prove me wrong. It would make me happy .
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It seems that the common logic is that the only possible explanation for a difference in achievement between two groups is discrimination against the group doing worse, suggesting that our society has become anti-male...
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Actually, I'm working on an extended project in which I modify actuary equations to deal with the lifespan of a society. Right now I'm not too accurate, but America, based on recent statistics, is scoring around one or two hundred years.
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Without information to the contrary, the probability that we are in the middle 90% of any given phenomenon is 90%. By that logic, America will last at least another 11 years, but probably no more than 4500.
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None of those quuote said girls are better or smarter overall than boy, but that the teaching stlyes in schools are more geared to the way most women learn.....verbal interaction.
In my family it was the other way around...I was the more verbal kid, very interested in reading, while my sister was the one who had a tough time in schools because she was very visually orientated and learned better through hands-on learning...a technique usually reserved for shop classes and auto classes.
There are very real differences in the way most boys and most girls learn, and the best teachers are the ones who learn what works and what doesn't for each student.
As far as toys, most ofthe boys toys are guns, trucks, planes..things that cater to their "innate" desire to be more active. There are some studies (sorry, I can't link to them, but they are in the book mentioned in your quotes) that indicate that a lot of that behavior is learned not innate...hence the quotation marks around that word earlier. Boys have different expectations upon them form the first time they meet someone to play with them...it is almost always assumed that as a boy they would rather be playing dodgeball or baseball than reading of learning.
There is also a lot of boys that see learning as something distasteful and unmanly. I loved school, but a lot of guys hated it and assumed that any boy who liked it was being "girly", and picked on the boys who liked learning and reading. It was seen alomst as a stigma to be smart instead of a good athelete...and it wasn't just the young boys that thought that way, some of the teachers would be fairly obvious about what they thought about smart boys.
Not that women don't have their own burdens to carry in the educational field, but in the last couple of decades it ahs become acceptable for girls to excell, at least in comparason with the past years. I have seen no such relief for boys though, they are often seen as inferior if they prefer Shakespere to comics, and music trather than Shop class.
posted
I still don't see how the tendency to be physcially active in boys has anything to do with their academic success.
Live obviously isn't just pure academics, that's why schools have sports teams.
Even if the "cues" that boys pick up from around the world "that reading and writing are more for girls than boys" are present, what about the cues from going to school 8 hours a day?
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Your bias is showing....the exact bias I was talking about.
Boys are discouraged from mental activity and encouraged in Physical activity....both by the other students and by the facilty, and even parents.
We just need to do a better job of showing both to be neccessary for everyone, and that starts by expecting all kids to meet minimum standards in education....everyone has to be able to read and write, atheletes are not exempt.
And not all atheletes are dumb either...my dad is one of the smartest people I have ever met, and he played basketball and ran cross country...he set the PA State record for Cross Country when he was in school....but his teachers made fun of him and literaly told him "Bobby, just put your head down and don't worry about it...you will pass. I don't want to have you in my class again next year."
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Because school requires students to be quiet and sit, paying attention to the teacher and absorbing the information through visual and auditory stimuli.
Boys that have been encouraged to be athletic, energetic and generally rambunctious may and usually do lack the self-discipline to make themselves do something they might otherwise not want to do.
posted
Okay, this has brought up something I've been noticing in my classroom, and I'm wondering what other people's take on it is. (especially Irami, if he's around).
There's been much publicity about an achievement gap in this country between white students and minority students, specifically black students. Test scores, performance - a lot of indicators show that white students are outperforming black students, and I have seen the same in my classroom despite my best efforts.
There are a lot of factors here, but I think it significant that this gap is not nearly so much a problem with black girls as it is black boys. And I have a theory that I wanted to bounce off hatrack.
What I've noticed is that girls ask more questions than boys, and not always because the girls are more verbal. It seems that girls are more willing to admit they do not understand, and are therefore more open to having someone explain things to them. Boys very often want to seem as though they know everything and don't need any help, which means they end up with gaps in their learning.
This is especially the case with my black students. The boys seem to think that either a) they know it all and don't need any help, or b) it's not worth knowing, so they're not going to try. Both seem to stem from some a sense of machismo, in that the boys can't allow others to see them fail or do poorly.
So, if they talk big and say they know everything, it gives the impression that they do. And if they do no work and still manage to pass, they can say that if they actually *tried* they'd be smarter than everyone.
Both show an unwillingness to admit weakness, or to admit that they need help. Male students in general, but specifically black male students, do not like admitting they are confused and can't do something on their own. So they don't ask.
On the other hand, my female students ask a hundred questions. They have no problem admitting when they don't understand a concept and work hard to shore up those weak points. Even if it's just an exclamation that they don't understand, that gives me the cue to explain a topic more - which benefits the student having difficulty.
The first step is admitting you have a problem, they say, and it is as true for education as it is for those suffering from addiction. If you can't admit that you don't know something or that you don't understand it, then your mind is closed to that knowledge and understanding.
My black female students are some of my best and brightest, whereas my black male students are on the entirely opposite end of the scale.
My theory is that, for some reason, black male students (and to a lesser extent, all male students) have a more difficult time admitting flaws to others, and therefore are less open to improving themselves.
posted
TomDavidson: My arguement is that America is mirroring the same pattern of social degeneration that other empires suffered and led to their downfalls. It is not judging any of the more liberal attitudes towards race, gender, and sex that have come about. I personally like those attitudes, actually.
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Also, the main point of those articles wwas that the overall teaching style of modern shhools is geared more to verbal skills, which is something that girls excel at compared to boys. There ARE ways of getting past that, but it all starts with making it more accepted for a boy to like learning those things.
There are ways of teaching subjects using hands-on methods, and that helps boys to comprehend faster too....and even some girls, like my sister.
She went to a tech school after high school, and now has a 4 year degree and is a recruiter for that college. She loved learning Radio and Video Production and Editing because it was hands on....she made the deans list for the first time in her life there, and graduated with a 3.4 GPA.
quote: Boys are discouraged from mental activity and encouraged in Physical activity....both by the other students and by the facilty, and even parents.
I'm from a different region of the country than you, I guess . Never have I seen any member of any school's facility I've been in discourage mental activity, nor any parents either. Apathy I've seen, but never discouragement.
quote: Because school requires students to be quiet and sit, paying attention to the teacher and absorbing the information through visual and auditory stimuli.
Boys that have been encouraged to be athletic, energetic and generally rambunctious may and usually do lack the self-discipline to make themselves do something they might otherwise not want to do.
That may be true. But if these students do things that the teachers don't approve of, are they not punished? And who likes punishment?
And I still think that cues from school encourage learning, even to students who don't pay 100% attention.
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I don't think that attitude is limited strictly to black males - how many women lament that men will not stop and ask for directions?
We don't like to appear weak - and "weak" can be defined in a number of ways for this context.
By exposing a vulnerability, we invite other males to take advantage of that weakness - in the classroom, that aggression will take the form of snickering, laughing and ridicule. And we do it for no particular reason - because someone asking a question is rarely funny.
posted
First let me say that anecdotally, I agree with the quotes from this recent report about girls in school. It certainly seemed to me that girls are more studious, and raised their hand more than boys did.
But the quotes fly in the face of accepted teaching: The "Reviving Ophelia" theory, which claims that boys demand more attention from teachers, and girls learn to be invisible in classrooms. Thus girls start sliding behind boys in academic areas.
Some schools have gone so far as to have all girl classes so the girls don't have to compete with boys, especially in the traditionally male dominated math and science courses.
HUH?
So which one is right? It seems to me that both sides are only looking at a part of the picture, and we need a more overall look in order to get a real sense of what's going on.
Flying Cow's questions about black students (again my anecdotal experience is similar to hers) makes me think that it may break down along socioeconomic lines. White upper middle class girls may suffer the Ophelia thing (for example) more than other social groups. (or maybe just blondes... I'm only half kidding. Do pretty girls fall into a trap of learned helplessness?) Also, teachers have been taught to make special efforts to include girls. Are they not bothering to include boys now? Are we going to swing back and forth every 20 years?
This is one I have no answer for. So I'm throwing out lots of questions as a brainstorming excercise.
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In general girls do better in an academic writing classes and boys do better in a more hands-on environment. I've read that splitting classes improves boys' scores, especially in math and science, although I'd never want to be in an all-girls class *shudder*.
I've never heard of girls doing worse, just because they don't make a ruckus . I also have this belief that in many cases, male teachers are more successful in getting results from male students.
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quote: Never have I seen any member of any school's facility I've been in discourage mental activity, nor any parents either. Apathy I've seen, but never discouragement.
Oh I have. But you have to know what you're looking for. The worst offenders are math teachers, who will tell a student to follow a rule (i.e. stay-change-flip) without telling them why it works. (a lot of the time it's because the teacher doesn't know either) When the student says they don't understand, the teacher just reiterates the rule, without encouraging thought. "Don't think about it too hard, just follow the rule, and it works."
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kai, I was talking about people on Hatrack and I shouldn't have. I had no expectation of what I said having a good effect. It was just an expression of strong emotion. I pretty immediately thought better of it. I'd appreciate it if you'd clear out the quote from it, but it's totally your right to do whatever with it you want.
edit: I'll leave this up though, because I did do that and I'll own up to it.
quote: And I still think that cues from school encourage learning, even to students who don't pay 100% attention.
Sure... thats why the academic superbowl team gets ignored... despite the fact that we've had a winning team for the past 3 or 4 years. While every time the basketball team... HIGH SCHOOL basketball team wins or loses a game it makes the paper. With a full article about it. The same goes for college teams, even worse. The sports teams make national television. The players often get as famous as professional players.
In my school at least the teachers who are very much into their students often get kicked out. One of my favorite biology teachers was essentially driven into quitting by my schools administration. Our principles talk about academics in a boring, verbose monotone, but genuinely grin and talk excitedly when talking about the sports teams or talking to sports players.
The priciple didn't even know who the two candidates for the valdictorianship last year were (one boy and one girl, both insanely inteligent). Yet he knew all the basketball, baseball, and football players by name it seemed.
You're telling me this doesn't send a negative message about academics?
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posted
I wasn't talking about extracurricular activites.
I'm just talking about the 8 hour school day, since every student has to go through this, while only a fraction of those do extracurricular activites as well.
I stand by that going to school encourages learning.
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Arg, Alcon- I've had a principal like that. What a joke. The worst thing was that we were the "easy" school so we got the worst principals the ones who didn't give a hoot about academics.
All the teachers in the school could have done a more convincing job. You know those books "Help! I'm stuck in my ________'s body"? It was like that, only it was like ten year old ex-football player who treated us like we were ten!
He was nice and you could tell he was trying but he honestly didn't have a clue.
posted
6 hours for me. If even. And going to school encourages learning? When even in the school all the signals are, except from a few individual teachers, saying: learning? Who cares about learning? Sports!! Thats what school is all about! What, the people who have taken the hardest classes in the school and blown the schiz out of them? Who are they? That guy on the basketball team who scored six points last night in two three's, how about him!! He was awesome! That girl who took 5 Ap tests and scored a 4 or a 5 on all of them? Who cares?
That does NOT encourage learning, and that attitude is present through the entire 6 hour school day, bombarding you from the administration. Believe me, I know, I go there every damn day save the weekends.
I could name several other things that discourage it: the teenage rebellious streak is stronger in guys than it is girls generally. At least, in an unconstructive way from what I've seen. We have no choice about going to school. We have to go. If we miss, its saturday school, if we miss more is a visit from the cops. This does not ecourage learning, learning cannot be forced on someone, and school forces it on people. They come to resent that, but guys seem more likely to actually act on that resentment with open out rebellion.
Also the fact that once you are in the high school, you get treated like prisoners, assumed that if you're up to something its no good. They want to know where you are every second of the day, you have no freedom, it is not a democracy, you have no say in what goes on in your own education aside form... sort of choosing your classes, you have no say in where you are at any point in the day. Who has total control of the school? Those principles who are constantly sending out messages that academics don't matter, sports matter.
I'm in school everyday, and my high school at least, manages to strongly discourage academics without appearing to to someone looking in from the outside.
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quote:This is especially the case with my black students. The boys seem to think that either a) they know it all and don't need any help, or b) it's not worth knowing, so they're not going to try. Both seem to stem from some a sense of machismo, in that the boys can't allow others to see them fail or do poorly.
A lot of the problems I see concern a shared disposition among white people about what is important and what is not important about education. There is a hint of this between girls and boys, too. A lot of black kids, myself included, had trouble seperating what is perceived to be important and what is not.
None of it made sense, and we can't see how anything that goes on in class has to do with anything else. Or even, how anything that goes on in class addresses what it says it addresses. It's like the academic world is speaking an essentially foreign language that everyone knows but the black kids, and more importantly, seems to care about learning for reasons unknown or uncompelling.
Hell, the problem could be one of ontology, where black kids are flooded with so many mixed signals that they come into school with a fundamentally different sense of being.
Getting oriented in school is the tricky part, and there are all sorts of assumptions that even regular white kids bring to school to which black kids are oblivious.
I wish I could come up with a clear metaphor. Have you ever played a card game where everyone else knows the rules and you are just figuring them out as you go along? You don't really know what you are doing, but everyone else seems to know? Now assume that you have been doing it for eight years and that's what it's like for a high percentage of black kids in junior high and high school.
Contrast this with the white punk movement. Those kids are rebelling against the machine. To rebel against the machine presupposes some basic understanding of the machine. As often as not, when they are done rebelling against it, they can just as easily become a part of it. Black kids don't know the machine well enough to rebel against it, they are gracelessly fumbling from the get go.
There are a lot of unexplained and unshared assumptions built into the curriculum and the school agenda. It's not a concious rebellion amongst black kids as much as it's often a sincere befuddlement.
One thing that you can say about sports. You know that everybody on the field knows the rules. You know that everybody on the field wants to play according to these rules. With school, most teachers don't even know what assumptions they bring concerning the transparency of the import of the material they are trying to teach. As a consequence, black kids are phoning it in without understanding, and have been for years. *thinks* Teachers are like politicians trying to explain a tax hike to Americans. There are some people, who through their disposition and comportment in the world, are going to be easier to sell, whereas other very good people are just going to see the politician as trying to take their money.
The extent to which a politician can speak clearly about the national debt and the cost and the worth of social services, and understand where this voter is coming from, is the extent to which the politician can reach some shared understanding about the import of the tax hike.
It's the same with black kids and formal education. The irrelevant and unexplained curriculum doesn't help.
The answer is that we need to think about what we are trying to do in school and why. I think that we are going to find out that many of our assumed goals are devoid of dignity and granduer.
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Kaioshin, I'm talking from a students perspective. I'm telling you what I pick up on, what my fellow students pick up on, and what we all see.
Clearly something is being done wrong or what is being done isn't working. The message that is making it through is that sports matter to everyone, not academics.
quote:grades matter to the point that the administration will be in trouble if we didn't get good grades, and sports matter in that EVERYONE REALLY CARES ABOUT SPORTS.
You can quote funding, statistics and percentages all you want. The message that has been picked up by the student body of my high school is that our administration and community does not care about learning.
I agree with Alcon. Now Alcon, can you explain why you care about learning?
The fundamental problem with NCLB is that Bush started administering tests without making the case about why the material on these particular tests is important.
One would think that someone who has been derided by the intelligensia would be especially sensitive to administering standardized tests without thinking hard about the worth of the standard.
posted
Well Alcon, we're talking about different things. You're talking about your high school experience. I think I can say for the majority of junior high, high, and university schools that the main focus is NOT sports, but rather academics, for the following because:
- Teachers have the most influence on students. - Teachers are especially trained to teach students academics. - Schools receive funding based on academic success, at least where I am from.
posted
Irami... I don't really know... and sorry your quote looks weird now. I editted my post cause it was leaning more towards yelling unhelpful rant than anything helpful.
But I've always just been one of the geeks. When I was in elementary school I loved being considered one of the smartest kids and one of the weirdest kids. In middle school I was in the Alps(gifted and talented or accelerated learning program) program and fell in with a group of brilliant students who valued the weird and the inteligent over everything else and stuck with them. I was never the smartest amoung them, but I was always a geek and considered one of the smartest. And I love that. And... I dunno, even before I discovered I liked being considered smart, I loved learning. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that both my parents are university professors and they managed to instill that value in me. Or maybe I'm just weird Posts: 3295 | Registered: Jun 2004
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And Kaioshin... maybe for some it is true. But for a lot of the public ones... I'll bet you find it isn't true. Its certainly not at my local university either. Where the school's athletic department gets more attention than any other. At least from the surrounding community. And this is a Big Ten university. I'm talking from observational expierence, from what I see of students and from the message I get.
How do you know what message is being picked up in other schools? Are you in school right now? Or have you been in the past five years or so? Have you talked about this to students who are?
The statistics you seem to be going off of would suggest the same conclusion you are coming to: that academics are the focus for my school as well as all the others. But that is not the message that reaches students. That is my point. We are not talking about different things, becuase I'd be willing to bet quite a bit that a similar message, maybe not quite as strong reaches students all over the country.
EDIT: (to account for your edit )
quote: I think I can say for the majority of junior high, high, and university schools that the main focus is NOT sports, but rather academics, for the following because:
- Teachers have the most influence on students. - Teachers are especially trained to teach students academics. - Schools receive funding based on academic success, at least where I am from.
Schools receive funding based on grades. Grades and academic success and teaching students to care about learning are all completely different things.
If you are trying to teach students to care about learning then you have them take the hardest classes and push themselves to limits of their learning ability academically. You want them going into detail on subjects and pushing to get farther and learn more. BUT if they do that, grades will probably drop. If they take the easier, boring classes where the teachers say: you are here to get a good grade, we all know it. Then they will get good grades and not have to work as hard.
The good teachers in my experience, the ones who care about their students and how their students learn generally teach the higher level more difficult classes. The teachers most students get are teachers like Mr. Green in my high school. He's been nick-named the walking potato - becuase he looks like one and he has the brains of one. For some reason he was assigned to teach AP US History so some of my friends were forced to have him. They caught him on all kinds of errors. And there are other teachers like him in my school.
Also, can teachers really compete with the fact that:
-the principles know the sports teams by name. As do many of the teachers!
-the papers print the sports teams successes and failures in the paper everyday, with their names. The result: most of the town knows the names of the basketball players.
-The teams successus and failures are stated on the morning announcements every morning, and there are always big pushes to go out and support the teams at games. Students are named and given fame.
Are students named for getting good grades? No. Are they named for taking hard classes? No. Are they named for doing both? No. Does anyone seem to care besides the teachers? No. Do even all the teachers really care? No, in fact most don't.
It took me four years at my high school to sift through the teachers and find the good ones. Many see so many students that they don't even bother to learn all of their students names during a class, they just learn the names of the loud ones. Which are often the sports players and the cheerleaders.
posted
Heh - I'm a sophomore at the Univ. of Florida.
My HS experience was very much the opposite of yours. I, too, was one of the geeks, I was on the county academic as well, but my school cared about learning.
Of course my school was ranked #40 best High School w/an IB program in the nation by Newsweek magazine(they REALLY rubbed that in). Academics, especially the FCAT test which determines the school funding, were stressed much more than sports. And since our school repeatedly got "A" ratings from the FCAT test, we got more and more funding, and this only further stressed academics. Heck, we didn't even have a football team.
posted
Kaioshin... you did get lucky. Your school sounds awesome. But somehow I suspect that my school is far more representative of the nation at large...
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posted
And moreso, my school was intentionally located within a black neighborhood, so that people living nearby would automatically be zoned in to the school.
For students not in the zones, the parents have to put their children on a waiting list years prior to enrollment.
Do the schools with football teams get this? Nope.
So yes, my experience is that parents from around the county care, and faculty care.
Edit: to account for your edit of my edit
quote: Schools receive funding based on grades. Grades and academic success and teaching students to care about learning are all completely different things.
I think the people who direct schools on the state level have realized this, that's why funding is based on performance of a statewide test, once again where I live. Is it like that where you live?
posted
Clearly Kaioshin, your high school was one of the best.
But whats frightening is: My high school is one of the better ones. And it still sucks in this regard. The only reason we get academic recognition is becuase:
There are good teachers in the school, and quite a few of them. But that are difficult to find and often students don't recognise them for what they are becuase the subject matter they are teaching is very difficult and all the student cares about is their grade and not learning the material. They don't learn the material, their grade suffers, they don't use the teacher well, and then decide the teacher is bad.
The primary reason is that it is based in a university town. So many of the students are the children of proffesors at the university. They are, same as I was, instilled with a value that learning and getting good grades is a very very good thing. So there is a fairly large portion of teh student body that does care, and they create a little haven for themselves amoung the good teachers and do their best to learn. But even for them (I should say us, I'm amoung them), the message received from the community and school's administration is that sports matter far more than learning.
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quote: Getting oriented in school is the tricky part, and there are all sorts of assumptions that even regular white kids bring to school to which black kids are oblivious.
What assumptions do you speak of? Isn't the whole process of school sitting down at your desk, taking out your notebook, and listening and writing down what the teacher says?
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Alcon, you say that for you, the group of students that desire to learn, you get the message that sports are more important.
But what about those students who aren't at the peak of academics like you, and are neither on a sports team. Is the average student better at academics than at say, basketball or football? I think so. Therefore I think they favor academics over sports.
quote:What assumptions do you speak of? Isn't the whole process of school sitting down at your desk, taking out your notebook, and listening and writing down what the teacher says?
It's deeper than that. Let's say that it were 2000 years ago, and the teacher starts teaching about how across the sea is the end of the world, and if you cross, you are going to fall off because the world is flat.
Of course the world is flat. Everything seems as if it's flat. And the entire society is built around the world being flat. Now let's say that you don't think that the world is flat, and you can't really understand why everyone assumes that it is flat. You don't have a reason why you think it's round, but you can't see the reason to think that it's flat. And if everything in school is predicated on this assumption, you are kind of suspicious about the worth of school.
The issues that lead to the achievement gap between races lie in the fundamental assumptions that white kids and teachers and administrators don't even view as assumptions. It's a difference in dispositions. It's deep. It's as deep as if I were to say, "2 + 2 = 4" is neither true nor false, but a matter of convention dependent upon the preconditions for our understanding of the world, but since the statement itself is not of anything in the world, it is neither true nor false.
You see, since we assume that truth is correctness of assertion, the statement "2+2=4" is true. But it's perfectly reasonable-- and I think more appropriate-- to understand truth as the greeks did, as aletheia, or unconcealing, and there is nothing about pure arithmetic that is a matter of the world revealing itself to us, therefore, there is nothing about mathematic propositions which can be judged as true. These propositions can be judged as merely correct, orthos, but that's not the same, or nearly as dear, as truth. *shrugs* If you followed all of that, then good for you, but most people probably shut off half way through the paragraph, and that, my friends, is an example of black males in school.
It's these kind of deep assumptions that happen everyday in our classrooms that caused Bush to believe that the Iraqies would welcome us with open arms. This is about disposition and comportment. People bring a fundamentally different understanding of the world and each other to the classroom. Some of it is addressed, but some of it isn't.
And since we are talking about social mores and priorities instead of the flatness of the world or the nature of truth, it poses a special set of problems.
posted
I don't know how representative this is of the rest of the nation, but my high school was very similiar to what Alcon is talking about. I was relatively average as a student grade-wise, but I took a ton of advanced classes. I was friends with many different people from all over the spectrum of cliques. Many of the teachers were coaches for various sports teams and they would always announce meets or wins in class. Sports were also announced every week over the PA system. Academic events were barely given a footnote. I also participated in different extra-curricular activities throughout my high school career, some sports, some academic, some arts related. Let me tell you that the majority of funding went to sports. Some of the larger academic groups were secondary, and if there was anything left, then the rest of the academics, special interest groups and arts related groups split the rest.
When I was in college, I also noticed the same thing. I was a teasurer for the school's chapter of the United Nations Association for a while. I did a lot of research into the school's spending practices and frankly, I was appalled. On top of everything, the student government controlled activity money so the situation was worse than it should have been. Of the activities money alone, at least 20% was spent on the student government themselves. Most of the expenses weren't even legitimate. There were things like "team building or leadership retreats" to ski resorts with airfar, hotel and food paid for. Sports activities recieved the majority of the remaining funds and other clubs were lucky if they got anything at all. The school itself spent most of its money on newer sports facilities (as in they already had some, but wanted an upgrade) and sports teams. I could concievably understand if our school was good at any of the sports, but we sucked. Horribly. Many of the programs at the school suffered due to lack of funding for teachers and facilities to even hold class. I know of at least two of the majors losing accreditation because they just didn't have the funding to maintain themselves.
As for the original topic, I was part of a scholarship program and 95% of the people accepted were female (the majority were in fact black). I think there were only two guys in the whole group (myself included). I don't know if this shows anything, but thought I'd throw it out there.
posted
I hate it when I read through a discussion and then realize that I no longer have the heart to post the stupid, flippant (yet strangely funny) comment I intended to when I first saw the topic.
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. Never have I seen any member of any school's facility I've been in discourage mental activity, nor any parents either. Apathy I've seen, but never discouragement.![[Wink]](wink.gif)
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