Perhaps she generalizes a wee bit much, but interesting nonetheless.

http://educationaloptions.wordpress.com/

Very interesting. You know when she describes the difference between herself and her brother at school, I was thinking of my two girls. The younger daughter is more likely to behave like her little brother....I've always assumed it was more of a birth order thing.......

Something to think about.

hmmm - my brother was a year ahead, and he was the one getting in trouble and i was the goody-two shoes. I'm sure there's a combo of gender, birth order, and personality in there somewhere.

That was a good blog post. Here is another interesting article along those lines.

http://www.brainy-child.com/article/boys-behavior.shtml

I think Ruf does generalize often. I'm sure it's a YMMV kind of thing. But my oldest, who is my son, is in general a pretty easy going kid. He follows rules at home no problem. He totally understands consequences. We don't discipline him much because we don't have to. But sitting in a classroom all day, he definitely had a much harder time sitting still, staying engaged, and not being disruptive. He probably wasn't in the top 3 behavioral problems in the class, but he certainly wasn't in the bottom half. But at home, I definitely consider him my easier kid. My daughter however, follows classroom rules to a fault at 4 (she directs other children to follow the rules too), but is definitely my "wild child" at home. She loves to push our buttons.

I had a younger brother. He was just like Ruf's younger brother. And I honestly think he was probably naturally smarter than me. Or at least he didn't have the OE's to overcome that I had. But he was totally underchallenged in school and it took him many adult years to develop any kind of work ethic.

This ties into the parents' reaction to school structure and red shirting for social development. I agree that she is generalizing but the blog piece is interesting. I have to question her reasoning when it comes to girls and the goody two shoes concept... I fear that she is over generalizing that to make her point about schools failing boys. Girls are clearly at risk for their reverse behavior of trying to fit in and taking on the role of the goody two shoes which can lead to the dummying down issues.

Thanks for posting it.

This is very interesting as I was just having this very discussion with a friend yesterday. I am in my kids school very often and have noticed that the boys are (generally) the ones being left behind. Even if it is considered an over generalization, I think there is still truth in the blog. Thanks for posting!

My kids are the exact opposite of what she is describing. LOL. My DS is the one with his hands in his lap behaving, and DD is causing lots of ruckus.

I read a book along the same lines as Ruf's blog "The Trouble with Boys." Much of what it says rang very true. And if the stats are correct and continue as projected, we're in for some tough times ahead.

I read another very interesting book-- it was by Leonard Sax-- Boys adrift : the five factors driving the growing epidemic of unmotivated boys and underachieving young men.

These are the five factors he listed:
The first factor : changes at school --
The second factor : video games --
The third factor : medications for ADHD --
The fourth factor : endocrine disruptors --
The fifth factor : the revenge of the forsaken gods

He claims the research shows that ADHD meds may make for more docile boys, but permanently drain young men of ambition. (I don't know if it's true!)

He also claimed that video games permanently alter the makeup of kids' brains.

Endocrine disruptors are environmental estrogens-- plastics, etc.-- which disrupt the development of both sexes--make girls develop early and boys not at all.

The fifth factor, what he calls "revenge of the forsake gods" had I think to do with the Neitzchian (sp?) concept of the will to power, which grips boys in a way that it does not grip girls.

I dunno; couldn't the girls' quiet reaction to a pace that's too slow or too fast constitute a crisis as well? Girls get rewarded for staying quiet and not making waves. By rewarded, I mean that they don't get into trouble, but they also don't get extra attention because no one knows they need it!

I'm not sure I like the "do what you're told and things will work out" message that's implicit there. It may carry through into their later ability to deal effectively with an adverse situation.

All I can say is that I typically won't get what I want or need unless I make noise. If I stay quiet, no one even knows anything is wrong.

Just a thought...

Val

I agree, Val. I was actually kind of relieved when DS7 acted out in school. I had worried that he would be a teacher-pleaser to the Nth degree, since that's really more his personality. That he acted out when he was miserable seemed a more healthy response to me. At least I knew something was wrong. I worry about the quietly miserable kids, be they male or female.

I have two boys, so I definitely worry about their future school careers. But I'm also a feminist, and I think girls have it pretty rough, too.

I could go on and on, but I won't...

Another big contributing factor around here is that, due to budget cuts, many schools in our district now offer PE only once a week and have done with away with many other specials like music and art.
How can any kid, especially a boy, be expected to sit still for 8 hours with out an energy or creative outlet?

Oh, I totally agree. I was one of those girls. I had a horrible elementary school experience and paid for it for years. I thought something was wrong with me. My daughter could easily be one of these kids too. It'll be interesting over the next year with her - she has been in preschool this year but will be homeschooling next year.

I've seen Ruf write more on boys than girls. Maybe because she had 3 sons.

How do you guys put in those originally posted by: boxes?

In the bottom of the reply box are three boxes, click "Switch to Full Reply Screen.

Once in full reply screen there is a row of fun looking boxes. Highlight the text you want to quote and then click the box that looks like a quotation mark.

you should see a parenthesis, the word quote and then the text you chose. If you want to attribute the quote to the author, click in after the word quote and put =author

For example (quote=neato

Also, in this box you'll see the smiley face icon, here you can choose to add all the wonderful emoticons.......

I'll admit to feeling a little frustrated when I see lots of stories about how we're shortchanging boys, with no emphasis on what happens to girls. Dr. Ruf's note about sitting the girls in the back of the classroom bothered me. We've been shortchanging girls... you know, forever. But they're quiet so no one seems to notice.

Val

I think we should pay attention to both issues!

I'll throw in with: I was a girl who acted out like the boys, so I was REALLY the red-headed stepchild of elementary school!



Neato

Oh wait, I still AM a girl............ you know what I mean!!!

When I was 10 or so, I told my mother that I wasn't going to grow up. Twenty-odd years later, she said to me, "You really meant it!" (She still says that.)

Val

I would have to add a sixth - less interaction with their fathers and other male role models. The pivotal event in my intellectual development was meeting a computer scientist in a bookstore when I was 12. That contact is like food and growth - you need it when you need it and if its not there then the growth will not occur.

And society in general places more value on compliance over independence or expertise and equates compliance with "learning" when in fact that is not the case.

You nailed that one nicely.

Though to be fair (ahem), our society puts a high value independence in two cases:

1. After the independent person is shown to be right (never before, rare support provided for that person)

2. In ads for SUVs, as in "rugged independence," whatever that means

!

Val

Austin, I think he might have included the loss of role model in the fifth factor.

I'm sure I'm biased by the fact that I have two sons-- one of whom is PG and about to flunk first grade-- but when I look around, I see this everywhere. In my niece and nephews-- nephews all struggling, niece doing great. In my teenage stepchildren-- 16 yo stepson, who took the SAT in 7th grade and got a DYS-qualifying score but is going to barely graduate from high school and hopes to become a tattoo artist; while his 14yo sister, not as "naturally bright," is absolutely thriving and dreaming of big things. In my younger first cousins, now in their 20's-- boys all barely graduated from high school and, not knowing what to do with themselves, joined the military-- girls professionally achieving great things, their only problem (according to them) that they can't find a decent, solvent, independent guy.

In my son's classroom, only the boys are struggling, and half of them are medicated.

Totally unscientific sample, obviously, but it does make me wonder what is happening...

Not to take away from the difficulties of girls... I was one... still am... and a feminist too. As a gifted girl, school was a haven for me... the real world was another matter!

Ha, I think those SUV ads are going to go bye-bye!

Boys do not want to read Charlotte's Web. They want Old Yeller. That may be the biggest problem. I look at the all-male PS here with an all male faculty and the kids are thriving. But the reading list is heavily male oriented as are the foreign language texts and the day's activities with lots of sports.

One of my nephews loves backetball. He is short and will never play after HS, but I buy him any book he wants on basketball. Now he is reading the bios of the great players and coaches and learning a lot about real life and now wants to learn more about historical events that trickle into those bascketball books such as the 1980 Olympic Games and the end of the Cold War.

I got two very useful parenting tips from this book (Boys adrift)

--The first was that boys tend (generalization, obviously) to not be motivated by the desire to please their parents and/or teachers. Just not a motivator for them.

I vividly remember the strong desire I had to make my mother happy as a young child, and so I was repeatedly frustrated by my son's apparent immunity to my feelings. I kept trying to manipulate him-- don't you care how I feel?-- but once I realized my approval didn't motivate him, it became easier for both of us.

--The second is that boys often thrive on competition-- competition IS a motivator. Competition has been removed from much of children's experience, especially in school, in favor of an "everybody wins" mentality. Many successful boys' schools divide the class into two meaningless "teams"--red and white-- at the beginning of the year, and frame almost everything into a meaningless competition between the teams-- to keep the boys engaged.

Now when I want my son to do something, I often present it as a competition-- for example if I want him to take pictures at the zoo, I will present it as a photography content-- and this works like a charm.

Ummm....Go to http://educationaloptions.wordpress.com/ and scroll down to the preceding blog if you are worried that Ruf is saying that girls are doing it right...

Does Ruf Overgeneralise? She never says 'all' she says 'most.' That matches my experience. Of course the girls who step into the 'boy behavior line' get triple the flack for it.
Here's my take on it. If you are the person saying, "The Emperor has No Clothes" as Ruf has chosen to be for the 'tracking/anti-tracking' debate, then one had better be prepared to talk in sound bites and repeat oneselve quite a bit.

Love and More Love,
Grinity

The top 20 students of graduating 2009 class (over 600) appeared in our paper today - 11 girls (55%) and 9 boys (45%). Those aren't as bad as the stats presented in the book "The Trouble with Boys" where in some schools only 1 boy is in the top.

My DS2 is way ahead of his peers because he can't stand the fact that his older sister can do something that he can't. He will even run to load the washing machine if I ask his sister to do it.

My son�s all boys� school has a house system (multi-grade, like Hogwarts). The boys compete against other houses for everything from G.P.A. to cans collected for a food drive.

I wasn�t sure about the idea previously, but since my kids began this year, I have become a big fan of single gender education.

My son likes competition in anything that isn't physical because he can't really compete physically, except to try to improve his own individual score. He liked studying for and competing in the spelling bee. He liked to be the first to memorize lines in musical theater. He likes competing with his dad on computer and video games. He likes buying used games like Brain Age and competing with the person who owned the game previously. He likes competition in trivia games.

He told me one of the things he didn't like about the new scout group was that it seemed like they encouraged what he called "socialized badge earning" so that nobody earns more badges than the next person. He says this takes away any incentive for him to work hard on what he can do. They seem to want the kids to earn badges at the same time with the rest of the group (most of them at the camps) and not work on them on their own. The Boy Scouts requirement book says any boy scout can earn any merit badge at any time and you don't need to have had rank advancement to be eligible. So I know we need to talk to someone else in the group. But it may be that our local rules are different than some other groups because when he was a cub scout they wouldn't let him earn academic pins until he was in Webelos because they said it wouldn't be fair to the other kids.

That's not the way scouts is supposed to be run. Talk to the leaders and if it's not changed, take it higher, if you still don't get satisfaction, find a new troop.

I talked to the parents of another boy who is my son's age, but will cross over to Boy Scouts next year. Their son has similar sensory issues and would have difficulty with some of the same physical requirements. Their son was diagnosed with autism but it looks to me like it is very mild. They want my son to stay in scouts and I would like for my son to stay in scouts so maybe we can work together to get some changes made.

My son had a couple of friends over for his birthday party and sleepover and we asked the 14 year old friend why he dropped out of scouts. I was really surprised that he had quit because he called us last year to tell us he was having a lot of fun at scout camp and had just hiked up a hill in 100 degree heat. It was then that I realized we might have some problems if my son crossed over to Boy Scouts so I asked my son's 15 year old friend if he thought my son would like it. He said no and he only stays in it because his parents make him. This is the boy who seems the most like my son but doesn't have my son's physical issues. He has a lot of sensitivities and even some that my son doesn't have, but he loves doing musical theater and quickly learns those difficult dances that my son has trouble with and he has no fatigue issues. I think because he is also gifted and highly sensitive he understands my son's difficulties better than any of my son's other friends.

The 14 year old friend told us he dropped out because it got boring. I think we definitely need to make some changes. I hope we can talk the 14 year old into going back into scouting. I know he and my son's two other friends in scouts would help him if he needed help without making fun of him for his lack of coordination and physical strength. He and my son have been friends since my son was 4 1/2 and first joined the musical theater group. He never complained when he had to do dance routines over and over so my son could get it and he talks about how smart my son is and how he should go back to public school where he thinks they would have to put him in the same grade as him. He told my son about a math competition he is involved in at school and I would love for my son to do something like this if only they would allow part time school, but they don't and there are no homeschool groups near us that do this.

I had to fight this "dumbing down" approach to Girl Scouting in my area. Scouting is one area where one can succeed by working hard. My daughter has always had more badges than all of her troop and she enjoys all the extras and goals.

This is why only five percent get the higher awards and is why they mean so much.

It angers me when local areas try to keep everyone down.

This is why I'll never discourage my DS5's obsession with monster trucks. He knows more about the series, drivers, trucks, etc than any average 5 year old should know. And I will be equally as proud of him if he turns out to be an extremely skilled mechanic, etc, as I would if he graduates top of the class at yale and becomes a doctor.

Note: I haven't read anything else but the last couple of posts on this thread... going back now.

This was my issue growing up. No one knew. No one. Even when there were attempts at "suicide" (which my attempts were what they would call cutting these days and not suicidal tendencies), there were quiet reactions from me, my parents, etc. And no one viewed it as a reaction to being bored, etc, because I was "bright". It was written off as possible manic depression (bipolar) and/or teenage hormones.

But, the generalizations about boys, and seeing first hand into a school system of overly medicated boys, I vow to stay on top of DS's educational journey.

I made Senior Patrol Leader over the objections of other parents whose sons were older than I. After that, I quit scouts. I was done. There was nothing left to do. Had I stayed connected, no doubt I could have had other roles when I turned 18.

Scouts can be fun if its approached at the right speed and the other dimensions are exercised such as leadership.