The Minds of Boys
It seems like we are seeing an increasing amount of social problems arise, too often with boys at the center. Perhaps we need to step back and re-think how we evaluate, teach, and train our boys. Obviously, victory is assured by making God the center of our families and instruction. However, the following article exposes some of the ways we might be "missing the boat" when it comes to setting boys up for success in the different areas of their life. As a dad of two boys, I pray you'll find the following article as stimulating as I did.
Daren Overstreet
The following is a reprint from pugetsoundparent.com:
November 2005
The Minds of Boys:
Author Addresses Mismatch between Sons and Schools
by Wenda Reed
When I read Michael Gurian's newest book, The Minds of Boys: Saving Our Sons from Falling Behind in School and Life , I thought of William.
William was in my daughter's fourth-grade class, and the teacher said his name all of the time. In anger. In reproof. In disappointment. In exasperation. Several kids would be goofing off or not listening to directions, but it was him she singled out. This always-moving, speaking-out-of-turn, rebellious boy was everything she didn't want in her ordered classroom. I don't think he did much better in fifth and sixth grades. By junior high, he was skipping school and had a neighborhood reputation as a delinquent.
Michael Gurian, the Spokane therapist, educational consultant and director of the Gurian Institute, describes himself as a boy like William in the introduction to The Minds of Boys, his 21st book. His co-author, Kathy Stevens, director of the Gurian Institute Training Division, recounts a similar experience with her son Karl Michael, who also encountered problems in the fourth grade.
"His teacher didn't understand his energy, his way of learning, his boyishness, his difficulty sitting still," she writes. Karl came to hate school. He was diagnosed with ADHD, was placed in a special education class and began taking Ritalin. Not until he had a new start in another state - even changing his name to Mike - did he begin to catch up, to find motivation and mentoring, and, ultimately, to graduate.
The Williams and the Karl Michaels are part of a frightening pattern that Gurian and Stevens describe as a "crisis." They point to statistics like these:
- Boys get the majority of D's and F's in most schools - in some, they receive as many as 70 percent of the lowest grades.
- Boys make up 80 percent of reported discipline problems.
- Seventy percent of children diagnosed with behavioral disorders are boys.
- More than 80 percent of schoolchildren on Ritalin or similar drugs are boys (approaching 5 million total in 2004).
- Eighty percent of high school dropouts are boys, and
- Young men now make up less than 44 percent of U.S. college populations.
In the United States and in 35 developed countries, girls outperform boys in educational assessments, and the U.S. Department of Education found boys, on average, to be a year and a half behind girls in reading and writing skills.
There is a serious discrepancy between the ways boys learn and the ways they are taught in most of our schools, Gurian and Stevens conclude.
"We are losing the uniqueness and genius of individual boys," Gurian said in a recent visit to Seattle. "We lose it if we shove it down or medicate it." He describes a boy's identify, the result of genetics and family nurturing, as his "core self."
"If we keep squishing down their core self, the boys hit a mismatch between their core self and the school system," he elaborated. "They have to separate who they are from the system that's supposed to be educating them, and so they withdraw or drop out."
How did we get to this point?
Different Brains
We made a mistake in believing that boys and girls learn in essentially the same ways if they are nurtured and taught in a gender-neutral environment, Gurian and Stevens say. They ground their theories of different learning styles in neurobiology: PET scans, MRIs, SPECT scans and biological research tools show that male brains and female brains are not the same.
Males, for example, have more dopamine in their bloodstreams, which can increase impulsive risk behavior, and more blood flows through their cerebellum (the part of the brain that controls "doing" and "physical action.") They learn better if they can be physically moving and manipulating physical objects, facing spatial challenges and using tools. They discover things through trial and error.
The connecting bundle of tissues between the brain hemispheres is larger in female brains, allowing more cross-talk between the two halves of the brain. As a result, girls and women are usually better at multitasking.
Girls have stronger neural connectors in their temporal lobes than boys do, and they have a more sensorially detailed memory storage and better listening ability. Boys pick up less of what is going on around them, especially when it is said in words.
The hippocampus (another memory storage area) works differently in boys and girls. Boys will usually need more time to memorize classroom items, especially written ones, although boys memorize better if information is organized in lists or outlines with points and sub-points.
Girls have earlier and more advanced development of the main language centers in the brain and have more of the chemicals estrogen and oxytocin that have a direct impact on use of words.
Boys compartmentalize brain activity, using less of the brain and operating with less overall blood flow than girls do. They do better when focusing for long periods on one task in which depth learning takes place, than they do switching from task to task.
The male brain needs to renew, recharge and reorient itself between tasks by moving into periodic "rest states." Boys are more like to "zone out" or fall asleep during long periods of lecturing.
"The schooling system in place since the Industrial Revolution does not fit guys' brains," Gurian summarized in the recent interview. "Schools are so word-oriented, and females have double the verbal centers in the brain. Boys are using so much of their brain for spatial work, there's not so much available for verbal skills."
The school environment discourages the impulsivity and risk-taking that is part of a boy's learning style, and emphasizes fine motor skills at an early age, over the gross motor skills that develop sooner in boys, Gurian added. "It's a sit-down world, and boys need to move. The calmer, more verbal atmosphere favors girls."
While well-publicized reports on girls losing interest in science, math and computers in later grades are bringing needed changes in schools, Gurian said the fact that boys are falling behind, especially in reading and writing, has not been addressed. "When there were shortcomings in math and science and computer skills for girls, we never blamed the girls for not doing well - we blamed the system," he added. "Now we target the boy as defective if he isn't doing well in school. We are not as supportive."
A Different Society
The ways of teaching boys before the Industrial Revolution more nearly matched their learning styles.
"Until about a hundred years ago, in all parts of the world, our sons' primary teachers were not lone individuals in schoolrooms, but families, tribes and natural environments," Gurian and Stevens write. A variety of people with strong connections to the boys mentored them. Boys learned by imitation, by practice and by doing.
One teacher in a box-like classroom, no matter how talented, cannot duplicate those extended family teams and intimate mentors.
One solution, say Gurian and Stevens, is for parents to take a lead in their sons' - and daughters' - educations, and to form parent-led teams. The team can include relatives, tutors, coaches, neighbors, friends, members of faith communities and service agencies. Each person can contribute from his or her areas of strength. A grandfather who is a retired engineer can help with math and science homework, by phone or Internet if he lives out of state. A grandmother who loves literature can read with a grandchild a couple of times a week. A friend's father who is a computer designer can meet with the boy and his friend to share computer knowledge. Or an older sibling in college can connect with a boy once a week.
"We have to do a whole circle of school changes and family and home support," Gurian summarized.
Finding Solutions
Having established the problem of boys falling behind, Gurian and Stevens devote more than three-quarters of their book to solutions. They work from two sides - what parents can do to prepare their boys to meet the demands of schools and what teachers and parents can do to make classrooms more boy-friendly. Gurian, the father of two daughters, emphasizes that none of the changes will adversely affect girls.
Here are a few of the dozens of ideas for parents:
- Build strong emotional attachments with boys before they begin school, with plenty of "good touch," bursts of attention, physical play and enthusiasm.
- Work on verbal development by using lots of questions and answers and word games, by putting labels on objects all around the house or setting language to music. Read a lot to a boy, but have him look at the pictures and then read the words to him so that he can link the pictorial information with the words.
- Find fun ways to work on fine motor skills - like stringing beads, putting together puzzles and collages, or knitting - without ignoring gross motor skills.
- Promote "brain health" by having boys checked for any possible brain injuries, limiting screen time and paying attention to nutrition.
- As boys move into the school years, help with language arts skills in a variety of ways - including making sentences with magnetic letters, having children make grocery lists, playing word games, making visual dictionaries and letting boys make their own reading choices.
- Help with math and science skills by making an "All about Me" record book of all your son's statistics, creating detailed calendars, linking music with math, connecting athletics to math statistics, playing chess or making an older boy responsible for his own finances.
One of the parents' biggest roles can be advocating for their sons in the classrooms. The Gurian Institute's Training Division, directed by Kathy Stevens, has trained more than15,000 teachers in the last three years, and has found that many adaptations can be made with little or no cost or disruption to class schedules.
As your son enters preschool, ask some of these questions: Is there is enough room for boys to move? (They need more floor, wall and table space than girls do and more than many preschool directors imagine.) In addition to books and blocks, is there room for "karate kicks" - the nurturing physical aggression boys need? Is there enough light? (All children need light, but boys, with lower natural serotonin levels, need more than girls do.) Are there chances for boys to make choices and take personal responsibility? Is there time and space to mess around with the natural world?
In the school classroom, boys will do better in language arts if they can read boy-friendly books and if teachers increase the use of visual and spatial media, such as movies, CD-ROMS and PowerPoint. Since their fine motor skills develop later than girls' do, it may help them to take notes on laptop computers. Boys' brains will be more stimulated when reading and writing if they are allowed to move around, in a controlled way, while they are working. The grading criteria for boys' papers may need to be different than the standard for girls, as boys generally use far less sensory detail. They could be rewarded for good organization or logic. Since boys are so spatially and pictorially oriented, they may do better on writing assignments if they can create drawings during the "brainstorming phase" of the project.
In the higher grades, Gurian has had success with Math Olympics and other competitive efforts and with some single-gender classes, particularly in middle school.
The Minds of Boys also explores strategies for boys diagnosed with learning disabilities, ADD or ADHD or behavioral disorders, as well as those who are undermotivated or underperforming and "sensitive boys" who share some brain characteristics or hormone levels with girls.
"We should have different expectations for different brains," Gurian summarized.
Wenda Reed is editor of Seattle's Child and Puget Sound Parent and the mother of a son and a daughter, who definitely came with different brains from each other.
For Further Reading
The Minds of Boys: Saving Our Sons from Falling Behind in School and Life, by Michael Gurian and Kathy Stevens, Jossey-Bass, 2005.
Boys and Girls Learn Differently! A Guide for Teachers and Parents, by Michael Gurian, Jossey-Bass, 2001.
Raising Cain: Protecting the Emotional Life of Boys, by Dan Kindlon and Michael Thompson, Ballantine, 2000.
The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Our Young Men, by Christina Hoff Sommers, Touchstone, 2000.
A Mind at a Time, by Mel Levine, Simon & Schuster, 2002.
For more information on the Gurian Institute and its training programs for teachers and parents, call 877-382-7653 or visit www.gurianinstitute.com .
|
