Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Learning Environments Need help choosing between two schools, please....

My DS8 goes to a prep school style school, 6th -12th grade. For the middle school years 6-9, the classes are gender separated. This was done based on studies that showed that this age group, particularly boys learn better when they aren't distracted by the opposite sex. They are all together during passing period, lunch etc.

The school is #1 in the state in math and science so I'm not complaining. My son could care less either way since he's still several years from puberty and generally thinks girls have cooties!

I think that mean girls thrive everywhere, but that the adults do make somewhat of a difference. I don't know how to answer this question, because how could anyone know...

but I do know that 'empowerment' can be a double-edged sword. Add 'entitlement' into the mix and I think that there is the potential for mean girls to thrive in an 'exclusive' all-female environment. I can think of several adult 'all-female' environments where they do.

I think sexism is in play wherever one goes, unless specific intentions are in place. I have experienced that in a world throughly soaked in sexism, that it will show up in all-female environments as 'Mean Girl' behavior.

my.02$
Grinity

I read in the not so distant past a paper done on the effects of separating the sexes for math. It was in a compendium of Gifted Child Today articles on math. The article by Stutler. When they separated the girls from the boys interesting things happened. The girls started to relax in class and they started asking deeper questions about the topic before they started working on the problems. The boys didn't even notice there weren't any girls in the class (although it's the first thing the girls noticed). The boys asked almost no questions before they started answering problems, and only asked them if they ran into trouble. The girl's grades improved significantly (compared to their grades the year before) by the end of the semester; the boys grades declined dramatically. I wish I had the article here, because the difference in grades was eye popping. My memory is rotten-- but I think the girls had 5x as many A's as did the boys. These were gifted students.