The 'Boy Parent Delimma'
by
Glenn Sacks
© 2002
As we send our young sons back to
school, millions of parents of boys are apprehensive, dreading the
pain of the "boy parent dilemma."
Modern schools are not suited to boys'
personalities and learning styles. This can be seen from the time boys
enter school, when many of them are immediately branded as behavior
problems. The line of 10 kids who had to gather every day after school
in my son's first grade class for their behavior reports--all boys.
The names of kids on the side of the chalkboard who misbehaved and
would lose recess--all boys. The kids as young as five or six who must
be drugged so they will sit still and "behave"--almost all boys.
By any measure, our schools are failing
our sons. Boys at all levels are far more likely than girls to be
disciplined, suspended, held back, or expelled. By high school the
typical boy is a year and a half behind the typical girl in reading
and writing, and is less likely to graduate high school, go to
college, or graduate college than a typical girl.
Success in school is tightly correlated
with the ability to sit still, be quiet, and complete work which is
presented in a dull, assembly-line fashion. The boy parent dilemma is
that as parents we must support the authority of our sons' teachers
and schools, while at the same time it is obvious to us that the
methods and structure they employ are not suited to our sons' needs.
Boy parents agonize and doubt every
step of the way. We punish our sons when they "misbehave" (i.e., act
like boys) because we want them to fit in and do well in school. Yet
in the back of our minds--as we cajole, demand, offer, threaten,
reward, and punish--we wonder, "what is this doing to my little boy?"
Helping our sons will require a
conscious, national effort to retool our schools and create
boy-friendly classrooms and teaching strategies. Since many boys are
bodily kinesthetic learners, lessons need to be more physical,
hands-on, and energetic. Teachers should use the physical and visual
spheres as a bridge to the verbal and written ones. Employing boys'
imagination also helps, as does using boys' tendency to learn by
exploration.
Cooperative learning is useful in
moderation, but educators also need to use boys' natural
competitiveness and individual initiative to their advantage. Lessons
in which there are no right or wrong answers, and from which solid
conclusions cannot be drawn, tend to frustrate boys, who often view
them as pointless.
Also, boys in particular need strong,
charismatic teachers who mix firm discipline with a good-natured
acceptance of boyish energy. Concomitantly, a sharp increase in the
number of male teachers is also needed, particularly at the elementary
level, where female teachers outnumber male teachers six to one.
Same-sex classes can also be helpful, and schools should have the
power to employ them when appropriate.
Administrators, school districts, and,
ultimately, the taxpayer will also need to realize that creating
boy-friendly classrooms can be time-consuming and expensive. Most
teachers are competent and dedicated but they are weighed down by
paperwork and secretarial labor which limits the amount of time they
can spend planning and delivering creative, hands-on, boy-friendly
lessons. In addition, large classes often make it difficult for
teachers to have the time to determine each student's learning style
and how best to connect that student with the teacher and the lessons.
To help boys, both of these will need to change, and while it will
cost money, the cost to society of uneducated, disengaged boys is far
greater.
In addition, we need to rethink the
current focus on testing, which has exacerbated boys' problems by
forcing teachers to narrow their methods in order to prepare students
to take the required tests.
This afternoon, millions of us will
pick our little sons up from school and hope to hear that it was a
good day. Yet many of our boys will have spent much of the day being
scolded and punished, often for doing nothing more than being boys.
And with each of these mistreated little boys--waving their arms and
running toward us across the yard, happy to be away from that place
where everything feels so unnatural and they somehow always seem to be
doing something wrong--comes the boy parent dilemma.
This article originally
appeared on the Glenn J. Sacks
Website
and appears here with the permission of the author.
Copyright 2001 Glenn
Sacks, all rights reserved
