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Why Girls Do Better At School
An anonymous reader writes "A new study explains why girls do better at school, even when their scores on standardized tests remain low. Researchers from University of Georgia and Columbia University say the variation in school grades between boys and girls may be because girls have a better attitude toward learning than boys. One of the study's lead authors, Christopher Cornwell, said, 'The skill that matters the most in regards to how teachers graded their students is what we refer to as "approaches toward learning." You can think of "approaches to learning" as a rough measure of what a child's attitude toward school is: It includes six items that rate the child's attentiveness, task persistence, eagerness to learn, learning independence, flexibility and organization. I think that anybody who's a parent of boys and girls can tell you that girls are more of all of that.' Cornwell went on about what effect this has had now that education has become more pervasive: 'We seem to have gotten to a point in the popular consciousness where people are recognizing the story in these data: Men are falling behind relative to women. Economists have looked at this from a number of different angles, but it's in educational assessments that you make your mark for the labor market. Men's rate of college going has slowed in recent years whereas women's has not, but if you roll the story back far enough, to the 60s and 70s, women were going to college in much fewer numbers. It's at a point now where you've got women earning upward of 60 percent of the bachelors' degrees awarded every year.'"
Girls in general are natural rule-followers. They do well in school because they follow the rules, work harder, pay attention more, etc. Teachers also cut them a lot more slack, especially when they lay on the charm or waterworks.
But boys are still smarter.
And I'd much rather be smarter in the end. Following the rules, paying attention in class, and kissing your teachers' asses can only carry you so far without real intelligence to back it up. And most of the A-student girls I went to school with were dumb as cold shit compared to me on my laziest B-student day. If you need someone to get the grade, fine--go to the girl. But if you need someone to get you to the moon--your best bet is still the guy.
Of course, there are plenty of exceptions, as I'm sure many of you politically-correct pansies will be falling over yourselves to point out.
"You tread heavily, but you speak the truth."
Cloned foods give the statement "We had that last week!" a whole new meaning.
When it comes to girls learning, their styles of learning tend to be more aligned with the school structure we have in our current education system. Boys have a tendency to "Like Learning" later in life, once they have a better understanding of their physical world. This does not mean Girls are smarter than Boys, or the other way around, but they are just Different from each other, just as a Apple is Different than an Orange, and we should not try to do a one to one comparison.
I saw a documentary on this awesome (yet rarely mentioned) site called 'Naughty America' that covered how girls get good grades in detail. Must watch.
Some apps are WYSIWYG. Some others are WYSIWTF.
Last year my son (diagnosed with mild autism) was required to spend 1/3 of his time doing group work in math class and consistently was graded poorly for these activities. In my mind doing group work in pre-algebra is of questionable value and useless for boys.
love is just extroverted narcissism
I teach highschool math and physics, and by far, a disproportinate amount of my "better students" are female. I will not go as far to say that they are more or less smart (choose whichever difinition of smart that you like) than the male students, but the results among myself and teacher friends from across the region do not lie. The majority of female students I have can solve the assigned problems more accurately, and quickly than the their male counterparts. Is it attention span? Hormones? I can't say. It's merely an observation.
They don't have penius that is thinking "boobs,sex,boobs,sex" , very hard to study when you have something like that in your life.
The first sentence says that doing better at school does not correlate with standardized test scores. What does it correlate with? What is the benefit of being good at school if it does not promote intelligence? Since these grades are being given out subjectively by a teacher, I'd say it correlates with not being a pain in the ass.
This should be less about boys vs girls and more about the fact that neither subjective teachers or standardized tests are very good at measuring intelligence.
I should probably read TFA, but this is Slashdot. So, uhh, if girls do worse on standardized tests, how do we conclude they do better at school?
Let me guess. This is all going to come down to some kind of thing where when the girls underperform, we change the school, and when the boys underperform, we change the boys.
To try to keep a rant short, let's see why boys do so poorly. Could it have anything to do with rampant gender discrimination at the primary level and being forcefed feminist nonsense and guilt-tripping at the secondary level?
Jeebus. I remember many times when we did projects in class in elementary that the girls were given more options for what they could do than boys. Why? Well, everyone knows girls are more responsible than boys. One year even it was a school-wide policy that during indoor recess, the girls had the option to go to the gym to play basketball or volleyball, but the boys had to stay in their classroom.
Hell, I even remember one teacher I had who once decided to punish all the boys because of a few in the back who were acting up. Why? Well, we had it coming. I challenged the teacher about how it was fair to punish me when I hadn't done anything wrong, and I'll never forget the response. "You're just as well-behaved as a girl, but it wouldn't be fair to the rest of the boys if I let you off." Holy shit.
How about if we just get rid of gender stereotyping and discrimination? How about if we stop imprinting girls with math phobia? How about if we stop treating boys like they're already rapists and thugs?
Or is that just asking too damned much?
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I appreciate your effort to troll us properly, we get too much copypasta and random offensive phrases these days.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
There actually have been a number of studies done that state the way that the male and female mind learn effectively are quite different. The female mind tends to learn extremely well in a more social interaction of sitting around listening and exchanging information. They will actually bond better in relaxed social situations, and learn effectively in that sort of environment which in a lot of ways is very similar to a classroom environment.
Males, on the other hand, are more apt to retain information and forge bonds if activity is involved. This activity may be related or unrelated to the subject being learned. I know myself as a male, I learn more effectively if I am actually doing something related to the subject. Lab was great in school... Sitting there listening to Ben Stein was more difficult...
they get paid 81 cents on the dollar.
Before even clicking on the link, I knew this was an American study. Schools in the US, especially elementary schools, are massively dominated by women. Boys do generally have more difficulty sitting still for long periods, and need to use up their physical energy. This used to be handled by recess periods and sports. They could run around, play games, be competitive, get a bit tired - and be ready the next period of sitting still.
This is no longer allowed. Competitive sports are out, even pretty tame things like tag or dodgeball. Playgrounds have to be ultra-safe, which means utterly boring. Because virtually all teachers and administrators in elementary schools are women, there is very little understanding of boys' needs. They are expected to behave like perfect little...girls.
Is it any wonder they do poorly in school?
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
There was a survey a while back that I heard some NPR commentators bantering about a while back (few years ago, tried to find a link but nothing is popping up)
We all know the standard stereotype is that men are threatend by smart/hard working women, look down at them, don't consider them good mates etc....
What they were finding was that these attridues were becoming less common in younger boys, and younger boys have been,more and more, indicating that they find intelligence and hard work attractive in women and don't really see just a "housewife" as a woman's place.
Leading me to remember an old quote about scientific theories and thinking it may apply to social ones:
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
I can tell you that many of the best GPA students at my school were some of the dumbest in the class. They were good at regurgitating data, but their comprehension was horrible. That's why they scored low on tests that required logical analysis. They just couldn't take the leap from one thought to another.
It's like an old co-worker of mine that a week after passing his Network+ certification, he truthfully asked me what a router was. He had no clue. He was just good at memorizing questions, and he spent a few weeks memorizing a ton of practice tests. He gamed the system. I pity any one who hires him thinking that he has any of the skills he's certified for.
There are many reasons I see girls do better in school on the whole. I think one of the main reasons though is that the majority of teachers tend to be women. These are women who took getting an education seriously, and often times know what worked for them to learn the subject. I think those teachers are often able to reach those that are similar to them. The interesting thing to me though is that I think competitiveness rises for the top spots in classes frequently from the boys still. They'll do anything to be number 1, and sometimes that hard work pays off. Often times though you see a couple boys clustered in the top ten still, with a significant portion of girls following that before more boys. I think the last 6 years of valedictorians in my school district have all been girls.
With only two other male teachers at the junior high campus I teach at, a science teacher and a PE teacher, I really do think that a lot of boys get left behind in learning styles.
No, they are thinking about the new clothes of that bitch sit on the next desk, and in the new hairstyle all the cool girls are using. They are also thinking about how they can get the most attention from their male counterparts. All in all men are busy thinking about useless things a lot less, rest assured.
The original poster is considerably more accurate in his analysis.
When I was young all-boy and all-girl schools were going away. The feminists argued that it was discriminatory against girls.
Then later the feminists started arguing that girls had to be separated from boys in class because they were intimidated by the boys.
Frankly I think single sex classrooms would be better. Taking away some of the sexual distractions. At the same time there is something to be said for mixed ed sex. Maybe what I would do is build all-boy and all-girl schools next to each other.
What about men like me, who swear they were born a lesbian trapped in a man's body?
Seems like I get the best of both worlds, I'm smarter than all the women, but have all the natural rule-following traits of actual women.
Plus the added benefit of being heterosexual gives me tremendously more opportunities to pass my traits on to future generations :)
I had a 2.8 GPA in college and did a presentation on Smalltalk based mainly on the "blue book" for a programming languages class. Our de facto departmental valedictorian, who had pushing on a 4.0, was exactly what you described in terms of the waterworks and charm. She had to get someone to teach her Python because she couldn't learn it in a 1-2 week period well enough to write even basic code in it (same girl who after a whole semester of C++ took several hours to implement the most basic version of "cat" in C).
You are supporting your argument with an exception, namely yourself? Pretty weak.
Sure, because everything you do not agree with is trolling. The poster has a strong opinion about something that is different of yours, which he is entitled to have. Argue against it or stay quiet. You are the troll here.
If the genders were reversed on this topic, it would have been labeled as sexist. But since it's the guys on the short end of the study, it's okay.
Maybe I should start support groups, activist organizations, and demand equality?
I disagree with quite a bit with what the GP said, but I do agree with teachers cutting them more slack. It's like speeding tickets. It's been my observation that females are a lot more likely to get a warning instead of a ticket from a cop than a guy. Girls are more likely to get emotional over the grades.
Maybe that creates an additional incentive for them to study (to avoid their emotional stress), or maybe it gives them additional incentive to use emotional manipulation. It's hard to tell.
How do you determine that "boys are still smarter"? Because they do better on standardized tests? That assumes that standardized tests are a golden standard for measuring how smart someone is. Taking tests is a talent/art form in and of itself. I've known very bright people (male and female) who were very bright and capable yet terrible test takers. I've also known people (again, male and female) who aced all the tests, but couldn't explain or use the subject they just aced the test on.
Well it is no secret, all our tests show women are more average. You get far less really smart ones and far less really stupid ones. You get a far bigger range in me, so if you are looking for someone above average intelligence, you will find way more men than women.
How this translates to grades is obvious. A really stupid person is going to get bad grades, and often a really smart person gets relatively bad grades as well because of "no child left behind" type teaching.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
At what point is writing an inflammatory post with nothing to back it up (his post is nothing more than "boys are smarter because I say so") trolling?
If it's just an "opinion" then there's nothing to argue against, because he's quoted no actual facts.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Willingness to learn or willingness to jump through meaningless hoops?
I disagree with earlier posts about boys being smarter though. Girls are smart too, but their motivations are often a little bit different. The AC at the top seems like someone who tries to measure everyone else in terms of his own self-image and can't recognize other types of intelligence.
Girls and boys learn differently. Research has shown that schools offer an environment more conducive for girls learning styles rather than boys. This is one driver for home education (though a minor one).
http://www.webmd.com/parenting/features/how-boys-and-girls-learn-differently
http://www.rd.com/advice/parenting/how-boys-and-girls-learn-differently/
http://www.cblpi.org/resources/article.cfm?ID=52
http://news.uga.edu/releases/article/why-girls-do-better-in-school-010212/
If women were really doing better then more of them would be in CS. It's improving, but their is still a huge gap. If they represent 60% of all Degrees but only represent 12% of CS Degrees then what Degrees are they being over represented in? They could easily be going into more fluff degrees which would make their quantity meaningless. Figure out why they avoid Math and Science before you go off saying they are doing better compared to Men. Until they do the same things that the Men are doing it's like comparing apples and oranges.
It doesn't seem terribly smart to me to destroy your own future because you don't follow the rules and don't work harder.
This is not a fair statement to make about children. Kids do not have the ability to look that far into the future. Girls aren't better students because they are thinking about their future careers, they are better students because of either biological differences and/or society norms that make them more obedient.
The best students are the ones whose parents do a good job of instilling values which will help them later in life. Almost any kid left to their own devices is just going to want to play.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
Are you serious? GP's post is almost entirely blatant, over-the-top sexism. Replace female and male with a couple of different races and maybe it will be easier for you to see.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Charts? I wanna see pictures.
Men and women each have their strengths and weaknesses and it seems the fear of not being PC is somewhat hindering our greater efficiency.
But as a counterpoint to your example, in all my schooling, the technical people in engineering that were the smartest were usually women.
That does sound kinda sexist, probably because it is.
I too was a lazy screwup that passed with 'b's in every class while sleeping through it and doing no homework. That was because I was a genius and everything came naturally. I've only ever met 1 person that I can unquestionably say was my intellectual superior, and she was a chick.
And all of that has nothing to do with which side has the higher average intelligence.
Girls are not smarter because the smartest person I know is a chick.
Guys are not smarter because most of the geniuses I know, myself included, are guys.
Even if there are more male smart people in my male dominated field of CS/Math, that does not mean that men are smarter either, it is biased by the rarity of women in this field. It would be like going to a construction crew and trying to figure out if men are dumber than women because there are more of them there.
Women on average do better at education and common intellectual jobs.
Oh you're ridiculously sexist yourself, why didn't you say so when responding to my post?
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
The answer is private school. I don't even have to read the article. None of this shit was ever an issue until the feminists got their hands on public schools. Private schools dont see these issues.
I'll work 4 jobs before my kid goes to a public school.
Might learn something about stuff.
Why inflammatory? He is just stating his opinion, which happens to be the same opinion many people have about this subject. He is given his anecdotal experience as fact. If you want statistical data, just look for it and you will find it. Choose any field, anything at all, anywhere, at any time of human civilization, at the top women are from rare to non existent. Do you need more evidence than that?
Astonishingly, this post has reached +2 insightful. It is anything but.
Girls in general are natural rule-followers.
[citation needed]
IOW, Since when? You need to meet more girls, dude.
They do well in school because they follow the rules, work harder, pay attention more, etc.
[citation needed] See above.
Teachers also cut them a lot more slack, especially when they lay on the charm or waterworks.
[citation needed]. So how come they do better in exams where the students are anonymized?
But boys are still smarter.
[citation needed] Also even if it is true that male mean intelligence is higher, the variance is such that there is almost no useful information. It certainly doesn't mean that *you* are smarter than a girl. Odds are that you're not, given your post.
And I'd much rather be smarter in the end.
You have my deepest sympathies, then.
And most of the A-student girls I went to school with were dumb as cold shit compared to me on my laziest B-student day
That sounds unlikely.
Of course, there are plenty of exceptions, as I'm sure many of you politically-correct pansies will be falling over yourselves to point out.
Well, you, for a start.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Intelligence + Breast size = Constant
"Most teachers are female."
Boys have no time to learn, they have to produce 20 times the testosterone that the girls need.
Additionally that causes pompous, aggressive and dangerous behavior so that 5% of them die from it.
It also makes people more selfish, so that they are not as likely to become teachers.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Testosterone#Behaviour_and_personality
That's why usually Nature produces 105 males for 100 females, unless you're in India or China where they fuck with the numbers. That will bite their asses in a very short time.
Understand that in average both sexes are not equally fit for every task and equally gifted in everything is not sexism it is lucidity. Sexism is to think that a member of one sex is always better than a member of the other in anything, which is obviously false.
I concur. I went to a very wealthy public high school where there were multiple "tracks" one could be in mathematics. Your placement in one of these "tracks" depended on the teacher's recommendations from 6-8th grade. I did no homework, never raised my hand, never studied and still pulled down B+ averages through innate ability. Frankly, I was bored by the material. I was placed in lower tracks by the teachers. Meanwhile these girls who tested at C levels but stayed after school every day, kissed ass had tutors bought by their parents were placed in the advanced tracks.
To this day I am extremely biter about the outcome. I had to take extra courses and summer classes to get myself back into the AP tracks in high school. I went on to graduate with honors in mathematics and received a PhD in Computer Science. I imagine the girls who struggled with 6th grade mathematics material aren't still in technical fields but hey, they were the ones who "worked hard" and accepted the system so they got accelerated.
I once read a summary of a study that indicated this is somewhat wrong. Boys and girls both have roughly the same averages, but boys have a higher standard deviation. This means there are more "smart" boys and more "dumb" boys; but boys aren't smarter overall. It did mean that if you asked, "How many of [gender] have [intelligence at some high sigma]?" it would indicate there were more boys, unless you were looking for people around the median. No idea if this was ever corroborated but I thought it was interesting.
Time for a Calvin Coolidge classic:
I don't see the additional bachelor's degrees or the additional brains as a guarantee of anything. The genius who flunks out of college because he discovers for the first time he actually has to study and actually has no idea how to do it is almost proverbial.
his post is nothing more than "boys are smarter because I say so"
Actually, no.
He posted the application of Occam's Razor to to situation described in TFA. Instead of grasping at straws and coming up with insanely convoluted reasons why girls "look" better but perform worse in school, he bluntly stated the most straightforward explanation.
That doesn't make his explanation correct, but class grades describe performance viewed through the social filter of the professor; test scores have no such filter.
Or... Girls socialize better. Film at 11.
Asians in general are natural rule-followers. They do well in school because they follow the rules, work harder, pay attention more, etc. Teachers also cut them a lot more slack, especially when they lay on the charm or waterworks.
But whites are still smarter.
And I'd much rather be smarter in the end. Following the rules, paying attention in class, and kissing your teachers' asses can only carry you so far without real intelligence to back it up. And most of the A-student Asians I went to school with were dumb as cold shit compared to me, the caucasian, on my laziest B-student day. If you need someone to get the grade, fine--go to the Asian. But if you need someone to get you to the moon--your best bet is still a white person.
Of course, there are plenty of exceptions, as I'm sure many of you politically-correct pansies will be falling over yourselves to point out.
Will this get modded to +5 like the parent post? Why or why not?
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Girls in general are natural rule-followers.
I submit my co-workers as a counterexample. Anything but rule followers. Nearly every woman I have worked with wants to do things her way and her way only, standards be damned.
That being said, the problem here is gender discrimination.
What do we do with this study?
The narrative here is that since girls are getting more college degrees that they're somehow better. Why do they earn less? Why do they do more poorly at standardized testing?
It could be that percent of degrees being awarded to women is a bad metric. I'd suspect it's simply because higher learning is simply more accessible to women. Let's skip over the gender-specific scholarships, because frankly they're probably not significant. How many women end up clashing swords with their families over trivial matters? How many parents try to push their daughters out to the streets instead of letting them stay at home while they finish a degree?
There's a whole lot of crap that's being missed by this troll story.
But boys are still smarter.
No, no, a thousand times NO. You cannot judge somebody by the contents of their pants. Ok?
That is the big fucking elephant in the room that gets missed every time here. We want gender equality, right? We want career women, right? What about house-husbands? Oops, can't have that, sounds too much like homosexuality and weakness.
Women are never going to be equal until we get rid of gender stereotypes. And I mean really equal, as in being required to sign up for selective service, as in protecting boys' genitals from mutilation as well as girls' genitals. And that will never happen as long as we continue to judge, categorize, and discriminate against our children by their body parts.
Socialization starts in the cradle. Are boys and girls different? Yes. I couldn't be transgendered if male and female brains were biologically the same. What that doesn't mean is that we can take women who have been told from day one that their biggest achievement in life will be having children and compare them to men who have been told from day one that if they don't get a real job it's the gutter for them.
The way forward in my view is to find some middle ground. Of course, I'd be happy just extending that same threat of "in the gutter" to girls and taking away benefits for getting pregnant (welfare, subsidized housing, medicaid etc). Of course put in the exemptions for rape, etc.
Either that or let's just give up on this whole idea of gender equality if we can't move past the men are expendable meme vs. protect women so they can get pregnant, fuck all who pays for the pregnancy and child care.
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Really smart/intelligent people usually end up as lackeys for other people, but hey, lots of men now a days like to have clueless bosses ruling their lives. So if that's your sort of thing...
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
A really smart person will get the same grade as a reasonably smart person, because tests are made so a reasonably smart person can get the top mark; any better than that is simply trimmed off; you can maybe get an A+ or A++, but at some point they just stop adding plusses and any smarts (or effort/talent/etc) beyond that is ignored.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Fair enough, maybe it is.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
(most) Girls don't have penises. When your attention is divided between what you're learning and said penis, these things happen.
Totally making shit up here because i didn't RTFA, and my reason and the science behind it seem to be about the same as their study.
Please do better science, or science in general.
B's? I see they're dropping the bar for genius.
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
There's no insight here, no data. The parent just spews his own feeling that "girls are rule followers" and "boys are smarter". The scientists with actual data found that the qualities were actually "attentiveness, task persistence, eagerness to learn, learning independence, flexibility and organization", but don't let science get in the way of your shit headed misogyny.
And yet this anti-science post makes it instantly to +5, why? Because it strokes the ego of the Slashdot anti-female crowd who think that feminists are coming to take their balls away.
"learning independence, [snip. I think that anybody who's a parent of boys and girls can tell you that girls are more of all of that"
No, I can't say that.
Everything I've heard over the last two decades, repeatedly in many contexts, is that girls are much better working in teams. Moreover, it is this ability that was previously mentioned as why they do better in school, as well as adding value to workplaces (basically having a woman in a team improves the entire team performance).
It is true that "learning independence" is not an antonym of "teamwork", but I suspect they are not synonyms either. Of the two extremes, I would guess that it lays closer to the antonym end of the line.
Man stuck in woman's body should be more careful in storing glue separate from lube.
Too funny, all those requests for citations and your retorts are exactly the same, devoid of any proof but your belief.
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
"Most generalizations are false, including this one." -- Samuel Clemens
Anytime someone claims that group X is better than group Y at task Z, I usually call bullshit, and when the metric by which the standard is measured is a purely subjective and arbitrary one, doubly so.
People who generalize tend to do so because it absolves them of the need to apply critical thinking skills.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Test scores have a huge filter. Since at least the 70s/80s that filter has been widely studied and debated. The only thing op used occams razor for was to cut up his lines of meth.
I dare say it's much more that both are right but the key culprit will still probably be puberty.
Regarding the Grand Parent - Young men are less likely to be followers and thus less directly teachable because testosterone kicks in. They'll still learn but they're going to need to either seek it out themselves or be interested in what you're offering in some way. The negative is obvious, they might not bother to learn what you're teaching them. Still being able to think for yourself and decide what you feel you need to learn and then dedicating yourself to that on your own back will have its positives too.
On your Parent- Thiniking about stuff you like and care about is not the same as a biological compulsion to want to jump on every girl in the class. I was a big computer nerd at school but I can easily put that down when I'm with friends or I'm in class learning about something else. The cute girl in the corner? Can't stop thinking about her.
Either way I think puberty messes us up. As time goes on the better of us learn to control it, it seems silly that we're testing and deciding the future of so many at such a time in their lives though. Still, everythings different and sterotypes are just that.
Right on brother, +5 Misogyny.
In average races are not equally fit for everything either. Most long range runners at the top, for example, are black people from African countries, for example. There are exceptions, but the vast majority follows the rule. That may applied to everything. There is no motive why a given group should be in average equally capable of doing any task as another one, except by a very unlikely coincidence.
With absolutely no sense of irony the study's authors say girls do better at school because the subjective judgment of the teachers is that they are "better students" while the objective judgement of the standardized tests say the boys retain more of the information- meaning "are better students". Is the purpose of school learning or social control? No wonder many boys find school to be so false; like the old Soviet system it trumpets inputs (she works so hard) instead of outputs (he got the right answers). At least in the old days the conduct grade and the subject grade were kept apart- now the teachers honestly seem to think they should be the same thing. The Mensa test does not ask about "task persistence, eagerness to learn, learning independence, flexibility and organization". Neither does the Google job interview. Thank God.
Maybe that creates an additional incentive for them to study (to avoid their emotional stress)
Anecdotal evidence, but:
Social competition. For females, it's much, much more brutal and vicious, and happens earlier, than for males. In the schools I attended, girls were clique-ish and segregating themselves by the second grade. That shit didn't start happening for boys until around seventh grade, as I recall.
Girls who did badly? We ostracized them, led in fact by members of their own gender.
Boys? Nobody cared who did what, and everybody - everybody - loved the scholastically inept but hilarious class clown.
I'd need a doctorate to even begin to describe the convoluted social pecking order they fairer sex had set up for themselves, but for whatever reason, doing terrible at school seemed to be the quickest way to be thrown to the bottom of the heap. I actually suspect it may have something to do with primarily having female teachers at young ages - it perhaps sets a certain expectation. I'd be curious to see if there's any difference in the lower grades where male teachers are the primary instructors.
But school was a goddamned nightmare, and I'm not going through that again. :p
questioning feminism and state sponsored discrimination is not hatred.
It could have something to do with the predominance of women teaching kindergarten through eighth grade. My kids didn't have a male teacher until they got into eighth grade and only one. Most reading assignments tended to be biased towards the girls, little to interest the boys. Schools are reducing physical activity time (recess), so boys tend to be a lot more restless and disruptive in class.
I have both girls and boys, and these are observations from just two schools; but I believe the observations to be descriptive of the problem with boys. I haven't looked at the stats for college entrance in 2012, but last time I looked the percentage of young men entering college as Freshmen nationally was only around 35%. Boys are definitely being under served in schools.
I don't know about smarter, but men have a broader distribution in just about anything wr can measure, why not also smarts? That would mean that we would see more men excelling, and more men doing horribly, which is what you observe if you look at the number of high earners and the prison population.
You're using the fact that women didn't receive the same education as men until.... well, the 1970s in the US as an excuse to continue in your misogyny. Not to mention that until about the 1920s, women's jobs were housewives, house maids and possibly cooks. After that, it expanded to secretary.
So yeah, you're not really doing well in your argument.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
Women good at learning/implementing patterns. Left. Negative.
A person in balance will have both aspects, but always each sex can reach greater heights in it's own field. The societal pendulum swung the other way the past century so you'll a lot more right sided women and left sided men.
The best leaders are always the best followers and vice-versa.
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
Again, use the race analogy to help yourself.
"Oh nobody's categorically better, but I think whites generally have better cognitive skills and blacks are generally weak in this area but better at manual labor. NOT RACIST! ^_^ "
I don't disagree that the OP was being ludicrously sexist ("boys are still smarter" what?), or that your rephrase is certainly racist.
But to go slightly off-topic, if someone says that black runners seem to have a significant advantage in high-performance sprinting due to physiology, and whites are generally weak in this area but are better at swimming, would that be considered racist...?
There are differences in all people, which are highlighted across ethnic and gender lines due to both biological and cultural factors. Discussing these differences should be okay, as racism and sexism is not in noticing the differences, it is in hating those who are different. We should be able to embrace each other in our differences without bigotry.
And top hockey players are mostly white, would you therefore say that black people can't perform in the cold and white people are slow, as a rule? Maybe bring that up if there were an article about selecting people for a polar expedition?
Got any "un-PC truths" to share about race too?
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Sure. Keep finding excuses if that makes you sleep better. but the fact remains that still today, with the same legal rights (or greater rights it could be argued), and in countries that give them the same or better opportunities than men, women creators are still a minority by more than a factor of ten.
Test scores do NOT have a filter like classroom learning does. It's you VS the questions. Not how well you play nice with others or how often you look the prof in the eye. You don't have a damn leg to stand on. You raised no counterpoint and you offered no proof to anything you said.
So in short, you were a lazy fuck and got left behind, and they worked hard and got ahead? Wow, I'm shocked by that outcome. I'm sure once you join the workforce, you'll find that's totally not the case, and that people will reward you for your innate ability to pull B-level work with no effort.
Totally.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
A very small proportion of the population have always been responsible for most of the creativity. As such, your observation indicates that there is a higher proportion of men amongst the smartest people, but it doesn't say anything about the general population.
Men have a broader distribution than women in just about everything. If this is also the case for smarts, that would give the same observation. It would also mean more men are at the bottom of society, which is the case.
It doesn't matter who is smarter. All that matters is who makes more money.
And men still get paid more than women in equivalent positions.
So, men still win.
Maybe. Or maybe in countries where the population is majorly black they just don't have the same cold weathers to practice this sport, in this specific case, but if they did they could be better. what I can't believe is that they would be exactly as good. Surely "some" ethnic group will have an advantage at this sport as in any other. Again that does not mean there can't be individual exceptions. We are analyzing groups here.
If you took a look at my elementary school the reason the girls got better grades was because we had all female teachers. I wish I was joking but honestly the teachers gave better marks to the girls because they were girls! The lesson plans where always slanted towards female friendly directions, examples always were slanted with female ideas and basically they gave off an attitude that men couldn't / didn't live up.
In grade 8 I pointed this out and got sent to the office for offending the teachers. When I finally got to high school I got to have male teachers, hands down male teachers make better overall teachers because they focus lessons more evenly over genders, female teachers slant towards female only subjects but male teachers don't.
I think this study needs to look at girl vs boy marks vs male / female teachers. I'm willing to bet that the study would find that marks get a better spreed when you have male teachers and girls do better when you have female teachers.
There is one other reason that I think this happens. Boys aren't receptive to women when they are kids, we don't show the same respect and attitude to them because frankly we don't care. If boy are showing a learning attitude to women in elementary school then try to put a male teacher in the same place and see if that helps, if it does then the answer is simple.
In either case I think it's important to look at the gender of the teacher vs student and that will lead to it's own unique result.
While it is true that he's supporting his argument with anecdotal observations, and he is a bit heavy handed, I'd say it's a pretty common observation.
/. posters that identify the same thing and it'll always be anecdotal, sexist and untrue.
I've noted pretty much the same thing going through school. My older sister and I were in the same Chem class at one point and were lab partners. I did the work, she got the A I got the B. It was very clear comparing our tests and labs, where we had extremely similar answers, that the teacher preferred her work to mine even though her work was mine with nicer hand writing. The end result is I finished university, got married and have a great job and she's a college drop out and depends on her boyfriend to support her, despite her perfect GPA being double mine all through school.
I'm not saying men in general are smarter than women, it just strikes me that in the general sense maybe we have different strengths. Grading in the school system favors the strengths of women and practical application favors the strengths of men.
I've also observed is several cases teachers, epically male ones, are more likely to provide help to female students as opposed to male students. This could have some affected on why girls seem to do better in a controlled environment where regurgitation of knowledge and complying with a superiors is more valued over practical application and challenging authority.
Of course it doesn't really matter, there could be thousands
That was the first intelligent argument I have read in this subtopic. And the answer depends on how you define creation. Creation as defined by me is not only original creation but any creation at all, as constructing things. Anything at all.
You have all the evidence in the world, you just need to stop blindfolding yourself. Women are responsible for very little creation of about anything in this world, no matter which time span, location or field or you decide to analyze. Sure, there are exceptions, as in everything, but as a rule women are consumers, not creators.
If you were trying to say that women are underrepresented in STEM (and many other) fields you would be correct, but this is not due to some inherent inability or inferiority.
Women historically have been culturally handicapped by the need to birth and rear children, which consumes extraordinary amounts of time and energy. They have also been physically dominated by men due to sexual dimorphism. It is only in the last century that women have even been generally enfranchised in society. Since childbirth and rearing is much easier now, we are seeing the gaps between women and men close drastically in many fields. Eventually, as we no longer have a need for physically powerful men to protect their female counterparts from like, bears and shit, sexual dimorphism might even be bred out of the species (though it might take thousands of years).
Also, your comment of "as a rule women are consumers, not creators" is clearly ridiculous. There are many, many women in art, music, and literature who create extraordinary masterpieces. These fields have been historically more open to women than STEM and others, so the gap between male and female participation is narrower. There are also numerous brilliant, creative women in STEM fields...far too many to write them off as "exceptions".
On the other hand genetics do effect the brain. My layman's thinking is that genetics effect all of our organs, bones, sinew, muscle, etc. why would the brain be any different. So: would it not be fair to say that there may be a possibility for the brain to correlate in myriad ways to myriad genetic bits? To try to use aspects of that as a reason behind law or social policy institutionally is the trouble in my mind. But to try to understand complexities of brain and behavior can still be a rewarding pursuit.
I am a math educator and do notice some difference between boys an girls, but also that there are girls who have a typical "boy" attitude and vice versa. I believe that any categorization would have to be very fine grained to be any help to "bin" and that girl vs boy would not be right. But that if one was able to have 5 categories in math based on increased understanding of learning styles, some would be weighted towards gender.
So there is a science to education and having a complex field summarized in a sentence does not make the article a troll.
Uh no, it's not. It's clearly an opinion, which does not need a citation.
Being obedient isn't always a good thing.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
This isn't anything new, we have known for quite a long time that the biggest predictor of classroom success is "Can I align my desires with the expectations being placed on me enough to overcome my other impulses." By all accounts, boys have stronger impulses and over a period of decades have been socialized to be more oriented toward self-fulfilment than other-fulfilment. This is incongruous with classrooms and other current teaching heuristics which demand high levels of conformity and are rather intolerant of behavioral and interest diversity.
The answer is also nothing new. Education needs to change its curriculum and practices both to accommodate and to adjust the dispositions students possess from external sources. The problem is that education is among the most conservative institutions in our society and despite numerous efforts to change it, about the only things which have changed in education is a sharp reduction in corporal punishment and the desks now often face each other instead of the front of the room.
As for learning, do you not understand that regardless of all the similarities between male and female, the biggest difference is that all of our cells, including brain cells, are floating in a chemical soup that is greatly different between the two sexes. If you don't understand the effect of environment on gene expression...
Don't allow the collective stupid belief of sexual equality to stifle any logical thought. Use science, not your pissant societal indoctrination.
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
Girls are better at sitting there and looking "decorative"
Boys are better at pulling the wagon the girls are sitting in
Males and Females ARE NOT EQUAL AND NEVER WILL BE
the closest we can get is to in first grade teach boys and girls Dance (continue as each has Talent) to get both boys and girls used to seeing each other in minimal clothing and not thinking sexually (bonus it teaches them how to MOVE).
Of course if the Public Education System actually Educated this would also help.
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
The study covered from kindergarten to 5th grade (i.e. girls and boys) and is not applicable to older ages other than outlining an advantage that girls are given early on. In my opinion, It does seem that girls in this age range tend to follow the rules more than boys. This could be due to culture, socialization, etc. However, this cannot be extrapolated to men and women as the maturing process and experience more fully develops our personalities.
Yes, a 'B' because they take of 10 points for not giving a fuck.
I read the article ( shocking! ), and walked away with more questions than answers. Mainly, did they track the gender of the teachers? Do male teachers buck the trend?
Most teachers, especially at primary level, are female. I wonder how much of an impact this has.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
Apples and Oranges -- A Comparison
by Scott A. Sandford, NASA Ames Research Center, Mountain View, California
http://www.improbable.com/airchives/paperair/volume1/v1i3/air-1-3-apples.html
Being slightly more relevant, comparing how men and women learn is worth while. Even if they are different, both are trying to accomplish the same thing. Men and Women obtain an education and learn skills in an effort to be economically self reliant within a modern economy. Apple's and Oranges are both fruit products that can be consumed to provide calories and nutrition.
Trying to compare something entirely different (ie, the Geopolitical ramifications of the collapse of communism within the soviet union vs an Apple) is truly useless.
END COMMUNICATION
females are a lot more likely to get a warning instead of a ticket from a cop than a guy.
This is arguably more the fault of the (about 80% male) cops, who are sexually attracted to women and let this fact affect their decisions.
There is one very large fundamental difference. "black" and "white" are socially perceived categories very loosely based on some genetic traits that relate to appearance.
Gender is a legitimate biological difference that has a massive impact biologically, chemically, and socially. It isn't a made up category based on some arbitrary perception of appearance but a real tangible distinction. I am of course not accounting for the oddball chromosomal flukes that sometimes pop up that can't be easily fit in either category.
But even on the race factor. Take out the political winds of today and the social taboo of suggesting a difference. In the US at least african slaves were literally breed for physical performance while the "white" counterparts succeeded in breeding on different standards particularly economic success which loosely correlates to management and leadership ability. The result is that those with african american heritage have a predisposition to a great count of high twitch muscle fibers that give them athletic advantages (it could be argued that since most african american's today actually are mixed to some degree that they may well enjoy the benefits of both breeding systems). This could well be argued to give them an advantage when performing manual labor.
It really is just a matter of time before we recognize that society isn't going to return to the barbaric practices of the past and the subject becomes less taboo and we admit that while races (or more properly genetic lines since our racial perceptions are bogus) and genders may or may not be "equal" by some particular metric they definitely are different and we shouldn't be afraid to acknowledge those differences.
Manual labor may not be highly valued in our society at present so skills there might be somehow be perceived as negative but "rule following" and social skills are actually extremely prized and rewarded in some areas. It could be argued that it highly desirable to have this in every level of management short of the CEO. While the highly intelligent/skilled lone wolf males are more suited to being the CEO he is only one executive. In most other cases you'd want them to be the talent that actually wows your clients and works solutions or the lower tiers of management that are effectively working in the same capacity using their minions as tools.
Nope. Computers do, as a lot of them are multiple choices.
Even those that are not multiple choices, at least in most scientific fields, are objective enough to not allow for subjective grading.
It was included in the summary. Despite all the rule following and the grading in the end the boys do better on the test. If their grades are lower but they test higher then there is a flaw in the criteria under which the grades are being rewarded.
Well, ethiopians for some reason perform remarkbly well at marathons. Is that rasict ?
While it was a decent idea, the trouble is, they went wholeheartedly with the effort for pushing women up, but they dropped the ball severely on boys/men, and it is showing NOW in a large fashion.
Trouble is, it isn't politically correct to take male sides on issues (especially if they are Caucasian), and increase funding and programs to push our young men like we have the young women for the past decade or two...
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Also do not forget, that it is frequenlty women who stoke the fires of creativity in man. Is man really smarter when woman has got him to accomplish everything around her without lifting a finger? We are inseperable.
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
At what point is writing an inflammatory post with nothing to back it up (his post is nothing more than "boys are smarter because I say so") trolling?
If it's just an "opinion" then there's nothing to argue against, because he's quoted no actual facts.
No arguing against? Maybe if you are living in the 19th century. It's not an opinion. It's irrational sexism, put into matter of fact phrasing. According to Logical Fallacy Bingo, this is "Wishful Thinking." What amazes me is that anyone would believe otherwise.
The only thing worse than a Democrat is a Republican.
But to go slightly off-topic, if someone says that black runners seem to have a significant advantage in high-performance sprinting due to physiology, and whites are generally weak in this area but are better at swimming, would that be considered racist...?
It would be racist (and un-scientific) to say that whites are poor runners or blacks are poor swimmers in general based on the sports record. It wouldn't be racist to simply point out the sports record factually. To make a hypothesis on possible physiological explanations of the difference gets into a gray area that's a hot point of ethical debate in science, example:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_intelligence#Ethics_of_research
But in general I would agree with this:
There are differences in all people, which are highlighted across ethnic and gender lines due to both biological and cultural factors. Discussing these differences should be okay, as racism and sexism is not in noticing the differences, it is in hating those who are different. We should be able to embrace each other in our differences without bigotry.
Except I would say that racism/sexism is in hating or discriminating against those who are different. Let's say for the sake of argument that it were statistically proven that black people are better runners on average and physiological reasons for it were scientifically proven. To use that information to discriminate against non-black runners when assembling a team would be racist.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Men's rate of college going has slowed in recent years whereas women's has not, but if you roll the story back far enough, to the 60s and 70s, women were going to college in much fewer numbers.
And somehow we've forgotten the feminist movement, and the corporate disruption of the family by expecting both parents to work to make basic ends meet (this is not to say that a woman's place is in the home, but that parenting is just as much a full time job whose successes are more important than fiscal ones). Of course more women are going to college than before the feminist movement. They kinda have to.
Did we also forget that more minorities are going to college than before the civil rights movement, which also happened around the same time as the feminist movement? What an egregious perspective deficit. Don't worry about "rolling the story back far enough," that's stupid. You can measure the rate of college attendance by men and women separately and investigate each on their own merits. Is it unfair to say that there's a motivation for females to succeed in the relatively new milieu of the male workplace, and a demotivation for males to waste time and money on college in an economy that doesn't have any room for them, with jobs being shipped overseas and the rich waging war on the middle class? Women want it and need it more than ever, and men are disillusioned more than ever. Pretty fucking obvious from where I'm sitting.
Actually this article doesn't indicate that girls are better students. It clearly states that males are doing better on the tests and therefore were better students by the only definition that counts, their ability to absorb, comprehend, and apply the knowledge they were studying. The article indicates that girls are being inappropriately given grades they can't back up while boys are being inappropriately given lower grades than they deserve.
In other words, the article says more about the deficiency in teachers grading methods and criteria than it does about either girls or boys.
As long as you know.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
I personally wouldn't blame anyone like that. Busy work in public school is seemingly almost always completely worthless and a waste of time. This isn't always true of real work.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
I just responded to another post on this very topic:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3358539&cid=42477551
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
If you think a rule following trait is an advantage you most certainly have it. The ability to mimic a rule following trait is a strength sure but not actually having one.
Err...there are different levels of abilities, in general that seem to go with race too, just like with sex.
Trouble is, we're becoming too politically correct these days to speak any truths, if they even hint at being based on race or sex.
It is one thing to discriminate based on sex or race, but entirely another to discuss inherit capabilities, strengths or weaknesses that do seem associated with with sex or race. Sadly, even bring up the possibility and you get shot down immediately for sexism or racism....those terms have become blanket methods for stifling even basic discussions on subjects that should be looked into and be able to be freely discussed.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
It is only racist if what you are saying is politically incorrect. Your statement about people of African decent (to be even more specific east African) in general being better runners is not considered racist but a similar statement about people of eastern Europeans decent in general being better power lifters would probably be considered racist. If one looks at actual results in both categories from something like recent Olympics it would seem to back up both statements. The reason for these differences would seem to be selective pressures from each group living in diverse areas for extended periods of time. Thus the group from Africa who will run a critter until it is exhausted and can't run any more and then kill it will have better running abilities while those that don't need to run long distances but need more bulk and strength will have selected for that. Physical anthropology is a fascinating area that deals with this and was a rather enlightening class when I took it in college. I do however wonder about the Asian eyes and what benefit that provided, if it was random genetic drift, or something that was culturally selected for early on.
Time to offend someone
At that time, the GPs post would have been modded as flamebait.
But now, very politically incorrect posts get modded up.
The whole system seems to be on the ropes and is crumbling. Nobody believes in it anymore, it's like the Soviet-Union in the mid-80s. Let's wait and see what comes afterwards.
Test scores have a huge filter. Since at least the 70s/80s that filter has been widely studied and debated. The only thing op used occams razor for was to cut up his lines of meth.
I've heard about it filtering on wealth or region, but I've yet to hear it filter in gender.
You can be a B student and still be a genius. Einstein did very poorly in several subjects, most notably because he was board and didn't apply himself.
The way the grading system is setup doesn't favor critical thinking and practical application, it favors memorization and regurgitation, which for many is boring and leads to easy distraction, in-turn leading to poor grades. You can take a lot of those people any give them self study projects and they'll excel, but the school system favors people who are better at taking test and following directions.
If you were trying to say that women are underrepresented in STEM (and many other) fields you would be correct, but this is not due to some inherent inability or inferiority.
Why not? What proof do you have that this is not the case? Why would two distinct groups that share many biological differences be equally fit for everything, especially considering evidence points to the opposite direction. Why try to find convoluted explanations based on excuses that do not apply anymore if a simpler more logical explanation is available?
I understand that you want to believe in this impossible "equality" you indoctrinated yourself with, but that is simply not true. Equal rights between men and women are no more or less than fair and are a great conquest of our civilization, but that does not extend to pretend we are equally able at everything. That is silly.
I'm not even that old but I can remember within my lifetime that it was just considered common-sense knowledge that obviously boys outperformed girls in school, and transparently had more of the traits of "attentiveness, task persistence, eagerness to learn, learning independence, flexibility and organization". Yes, in the college math classes I currently teach most often the best work is being done by girls. But to look at that and say that there's some intrinsic property of girls that makes them more school-oriented is the most tunnel-visioned, provincial bullshit that I've read in some time.
The best comment I've seen so far is that the character of schools has changed, i.e.: over-protectiveness, lack of recess, rough sports, physical activity. There's some clear changes in schooling that have likely made a difference in the very recent past. The other thing I'd say is that all my acquaintances today let their children run around uncontrolled and screaming all the time, which is not something I ever saw growing up (i.e., restaurant last week: two separate families kids under the tables, pulling on curtains, handprints all over the mirrored walls, etc.). In the past boys got some real serious discipline; now I'd say that seems to be reduced, and perhaps they suffer more for it.
When I graduated from high school the top 5 students were all boys as I recall. When my sister graduated from the same school two years later, 7 of the top 10 were girls. Of course that's anecdotal, but it broadly seems to synch up with the sea-change that I've seen in my short life.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
Well, sure got Jimmy the Greek fired rather quickly.
These days, you can't even start an intelligent conversation on the difference in the races...without being branded a racist and being shunned.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
No, it's only racist if you say something good about white people.
Madame Curie thinks both of you are idiots.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
I think we need to ask why girls have a better attitude towards learning. Speaking as a teacher, I think that I can suggest a couple of factors and examples of why this is an important question.
TLDR: schools and schooling is overwhelmingly female oriented, and does not adapt to the needs of boys (nor anyone, really).
Schools, particularly primary (elementary for my American friends) schools are female dominated and, unfortunately, this leads to problems for boys. I taught in a school recently where I was the only male teacher at the school where there were some issues for boys. Whether there was a causative relationship or not is open to question, but the boys at the school were wild, and their achievement was substantially lower than the girls on several measures. I (simply because I was a male) was seen as the solution to an ongoing behavioural crisis among the boys in the older grades because I was seen as a role model as a boy who was interested in learning, but I think that by middle school, where I teach, it's too late for that to have much effect.
In fact, against the more influential male public role models who seem to be more interested in sport, driving, etc., than anything school-related, my effect would have been minimal (and I argued this point prior to my appointment, and my position was confirmed time after time through my appointment - in fact that failing was attributed to me which was fun). I have seen at other schools attempt to conflate an interest in sport with an interest in school by involving local sports people in reading programs at the school. The sports people come in to the school and inadvertently confirm students' beliefs, that sport and reading do not mix much. But it's a fun novelty, I suppose.
The other problem with female dominated schools is that the curriculum becomes more female dominated. At least in my experience, boys do have shorter attention spans, and do seem to have more kinaesthetic or visual approaches to learning (against girls, who more often seem to have auditory learning styles more suited to the "stand-and-deliver" lecture approach to teaching). Teaching in a single sex boys' class requires shorter lessons with more emphasis on doing stuff than discussing stuff, and this doesn't suit the approaches that a lot of teachers want to use.
Finally, there's a belief that boys are bad, whether this is explicitly stated or not, and, equally, that we should be easier on "boys being boys". In my work, I visited a school and sat through a presentation given by Year 1 students on school rules. Which was hilarious for a whole bunch of reasons, but most notably in the way that the activity seems to have been presented to the students. They were providing examples of good and bad behaviour. The teacher had chosen to tell the students to make a girl doing something good, and a boy doing something bad. The students then got up and use male pronouns for describing one scenario (where a student does something wrong) and female pronouns for describing the other (when a student does something right). The teacher corrected a student (a girl actually) twice when she said that she had drawn a girl doing something wrong, which had me on the verge of heckling the stupid woman.
As to being soft on "boys being boys", I believe strongly that we need to instil a sense of honour among boys. I had a Year 6 student a couple of years ago who incessantly physically and verbally bullied younger students and girls in the playground. I constantly brought him up on it, but was always held back from applying the school's discipline policy because "he doesn't have any great male role models", "you know his parents are really strict", or "he's just a bit energetic". The worst excuse that I heard from a colleague was that a girl he had bullied had to "share part of the blame" because she "instigated" the situation by talking to him (it's like a "she asked it by dressing that way" defence in rape cases). Over and over excuses were made for him by other staff su
Girls aren't better students because they are thinking about their future careers, they are better students because of either biological differences and/or society norms that make them more obedient.
You're almost right. There's little evidence to suggest that women are biologically more obedient than men. More likely, women are better students because the metrics used to measure success in education are crap. In the past, they favoured boys. Currently they favour girls by a small margin.
The easiest solution is to stop using grades for inappropriate purposes, such as employment selection. GPA should be a relative number used only internally by the school. Externally distributed transcripts should show only pass or fail.
Teachers are part of the system, they are the man. They don't reward males for fighting them. Actually teachers as much as possible reward you for identifying their viewpoint/opinions from the tone of their lecture and parroting it back to them in a way that isn't too obvious in your work. The more subjective the material and therefore more discretion of the teacher the more this becomes true. When you can't identify the teachers slant just play it safe, pick the two most popular views and espouse both their strengths. As long as you've kissed the teachers tail by paying homage to their view in your previous work they'll give you high marks.
Here is the difference. At some point I stopped fighting and being outraged by the system and realized I couldn't change it so I should play it. This resulted in my 4.0/4.0 GPA. But most of the girls seemed to walk away from the lecture having naturally picked up on the teachers slant but actually agreeing with it rather than emulating it. Some smaller portion of more empathetic males did the same.
What the study found was that in the early grades, the marks given by the teacher were better predicted by "attentiveness, task persistence, eagerness to learn, learning independence, flexibility and organization" than by test scores and the outcome was that girls received better marks than boys. This could lead to boys developing a feeling that school is unfair so they'll put less effort into it. Also, some might be routed into classes below their ability, making them bored and unlikely to get into the college-favored honors and AP classes.
The hard part, as always, is figuring out how to use these findings in order to maximize the achievement of all students.
Ahh...the good old days!!
Well,with the exception of cooks....most top chefs are Men you know.
But man..the world was simpler and worked a bit more smoothly a few decades back, that's for sure.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Yep, that may be a huge factor. You talk about second grade, but my daughter's class started doing it at pre-school.
Is not as much that the boys aren't ostracized, the reality is that they just don't care as much. They fall fast into a clique of people like him, and the clique don't ostracize each other (like the girls cliques do).
Also, girls do have an easier time relating to the teachers, and the OP has a point, girls are just better at being quiet and studying.
Now, of course, that's over a population. YMMV.
Rethinking email
Instead you'd rather mouth the mantra of the pro-masculine individualist agenda as you arrogantly proclaim your superiority over the lesser cattle.
Maybe it's not hatred, maybe it's just prideful self-delusion.
I once read a summary of a study that indicated this is somewhat wrong. Boys and girls both have roughly the same averages, but boys have a higher standard deviation. This means there are more "smart" boys and more "dumb" boys; but boys aren't smarter overall.
I came here just to say this. This already predicts that the ratio of educated women to educated men will increase the higher proportion of the population get educated in general. If education is for the elite, then you get more men because there are more of them who are really smart due to the higher variation. There's also more men who are really dumb, but you don't see that in the stats for this. However, if education is also for the ever-so-slightly below average for intelligence, then you are letting in a huge amount of women, since they all cluster around the median. You are letting in a much lower proportion of men since they don't cluster (as much) around the median, so changing the bar around the median has much less impact for men. More people are indeed getting an education these days, including the ever-so-slightly below average, thus you get more women with an education than men. Doesn't mean they are getting PhDs because the ever-so-slightly-below-average still don't get that.
Actually, GP recognized that he was going to get labeled as sexist no matter how he stated his point, so he went ahead and stated it in the most sexist manner that he could without completely swamping his valid point.
Let's strip his arguments of their value-laden phrasing and state them in a more neutral tone. Girls are better at interpersonal relations and are more respectful of authority figures than boys (this is a generalization and is not true of every individual). On the other hand, boys are better at looking at a problem, identifying its key elements and coming up with a solution (as long as the problem does not involve interpersonal relationships--in which case the answer as to who is better at solving it is not amenable to generalization) than girls. One of the reasons for that boys are better at test taking than girls is because girls look for interpersonal cues in order to decide on the best solution and in a test-taking setting those cues are absent.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Anecdote != data. Anecdotes != data. Outliers are not indicative of a trend. Etc. I'm sure you get the idea.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
Nerds read books. Girls, on average, are more open to and less likely to get harassed for being nerdy than boys are. Case closed.
I remember having a hard time concentrating because of all the cute girls in my classes. I still remember my American history class where I paid more attention to the girl in front of me than the teacher or my Geometry where the cute blonde next to me was very distracting.
Truth be told, I didn't get A's in languages, it was only last year that I grasped what a syllable was.
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
The proof for a systemic, culturally reenforced feminist counterpart to your accusation exists in the law and the growing malaise towards men and boys in western culture these days. A quick overview of public school policy and university politics, television programming and advertisments, pop music, and (recently) video games, makes it quite obvious. Sadly, it is, for the most part, men who are at fault for this, men who've been convinced to feel 'male guilt' who then pass the laws and decree pro female bias in their organizations in attempts to 'prove' just how much of a feminist they are. It it sad they've internalized this insecurity and self-hatred as they assume the guilt because of having a penis. Basically it's stockholm syndrome exacerbated by misapplied notions of chivalry.
There is nothing wrong with an individualist agenda. You support it for girls and women, don't you? All that 'my body my right' (yet somehow his responsibility) and 'I don't need a man' egocentricity isn't individualist?
You have all the evidence in the world, you just need to stop blindfolding yourself. Women are responsible for very little creation of about anything in this world, no matter which time span, location or field or you decide to analyze. Sure, there are exceptions, as in everything, but as a rule women are consumers, not creators.
You may be right that women don't create anything, with the possible exception of every single human being currently sucking air on planet Earth.
Breakfast served all day!
If you are going to mention how women have been handicapped, you might also include that women are also underrepresented in nearly all of the most dangerous fields, in job related deaths, and most of the strenuous, back-break labor. Heavens to Nancy if there isn’t a glass floor as well as a glass ceiling. Why does enfranchisement only point upwards while men are permitted the freedom to rise as well as fall? Even in fields where women have historically dominated, you don’t see women innovating at the rate of men.
Further, while pointing out how the gaps between men and women have closed, you fail to mention that women live longer, control more income, and are better educated than men. How will you close that gap?
I don't have a problem with physiological differences existing, I have a problem with discriminating or making sweeping statements based on them because they aren't true for every individual.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
It has not been culturally "cool" to be smart, for many decades.
There was an improvement in this situation during the 1940's, 1950's, 1960's, and 1970's - but our culture, particularly in the USA, has shifted back towards macho posturing, and money-earning, as the primary values. Much of "being smart" has to do with whether an individual nurtures an inherent intellectual capability, or whether they focus their time and energy on "other priorities" (social, religious, family, financial, athletic, etc.).
I think that a huge amount of intellectual talent in this country is wasted, because of this shift in priorities.
Ultimately - people should have the right to choose an interest that they want. I don't think that it's possible or constructive to try to "Engineer" our culture. I think that most of our past idolization of intellectualism came out of our cold-war fear of being technically inferior to the Soviet Union and the Cold War.
(and also - as demonstrated by Germany, the Nazis).
We spent a HUGE amount of effort trying to specifically ENGINEER this cultural change. (and we were successful, in the short-term, but in the long-term, there has been a backlash. Hasn't there?) - We created NASA, DARPA, we had guys like Von Braun and Disney collaborating on publicly-funded propaganda films on educating our population about our future in space exploration and colonization. This inspired two generations of Americans to become scientists and engineers. We leapt so far forward, so quickly. But obviously, we were unable to sustain that. (there is no technical reason for that.)
Engineers and scientists have proposed solutions to these issues; sustainable energy, population control - but the "cool" people objected. Now, we abdicate control back to Nature. Maybe the females, who seem to no longer be constrained by the "macho" socialization, will figure this shit out.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
In areas where males and females compete in separate tracks, female standards are ALWAYS lower than male standards - for example sports, the military, emergency response. In areas where the two are forced onto the same field (for example - jobs, education), the standard for EVERYONE is lowered or changed to suit the weakest performer. In practice, this results in a situation akin to a male runner being forced to carry extra weight to slow him down to the female standard. Perhaps this results in a nice tidy "equality" of outcome but it surely costs the person who is hamstrung to the lower standard. This is what you see in schools. Schools have been re-engineered to a standard that fits females far better than males. The fact that we actually DRUG our male children with things like Ritalin just to get them to sit through a school day should be indicative of a serious problem. Most males sleep their way through K12 because they can ) and increasingly in university as well). Ask a world class male runner to walk a course to make it fair to the women and see how long he lasts before he drops out from disgust. In education and in the work force, males are dropping out. Success at the male pace and level is absolutely hamstrung in this society. So where does a male who can't use his natural strengths to achieve accomplishment go? To the last great male space: the couch and the XBox. Where are our males right now? On the couch with the XBox. We have even had numerous social commentaries on this VERY FACT (while of course completely sidestepping the TRUE reason). This study is a joke. All it does is identify that males are bored performing to the female standard. Big surprise.
Eh, I'm pretty sure there's some embellishment going on there with respect to grades. It's easy to see the many Bs you got and forget about quite a few Cs and Ds, and remember the Cs that the people ahead of you got, but forget about the As they also pulled.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
They always have been and always will be. A teacher's definition of 'good student behavior is girls behavior and the teacher's definition of boy behavior is 'medicate his ass or throw him out of class!'. According to most teachers, boys are merely defective girls to be corrected or destroyed, that's why.
Yes.
He wasn't lazy, just bored. Most smart people that I know do horrible in school. My brother was failing 9th grade math, so my mom went and complained and got him put into 12th grade AP math and he got As.. Go figure.
I am very similar. I can't keep concentration on boring stuff unless I drug myself up with ADD meds, but then I lose my creative ability to problem solve, which seems to stem from my ADD.
I've had some fun talks with the Dr who gave me my ADD meds in college. He had a PHD in that kind of stuff and he told me it is very common for people with ADD to do poorly in boring stuff, but do extremely well in that which interests them.
Different people have different abilities and boys tend to vary a lot more than girls. Teaching processes that are good for girls tend to be bad for boys. Boys need more interaction.
Next thing you know is they'll start giving boys estrogen birth control and wonder why it doesn't do the same thing as it does in girls. One size doesn't fit all.
So whites can't be the victims of racism? Males can't be the victims of sexism? You're seriously saying that?
You're the typical feminist. You whine about how there aren't enough woman lawyers, CEOs, and other white-collar, high paying jobs; but you're not out there picketing because they're aren't enough woman miners, crab boat fishers, and oil rig workers because those are physically hard and aren't glamorous.
What you want isn't equality, you want superiority.
Except women's lack of representation at the highest levels of government, business, etc. is used as a justification to give all women advantageous treatment, while poor male performance on any level is ignored as normal, or even used as a justification for punitive measures
In my engineering classes, there were usually about 30 Men and 1 or 2 women. The women were no more or less competent then the men.
Draw whatever conclusion you want from this observation.
It seems to me that family/home environment would have at least as much influence in "setting expectations." Children typically have a pretty good intuitive grasp on gender roles, and their culture's expectations of same, well before they enter the first grade.
Intelligence, however, doesn't seem to be one of them. For example, there's a reason why there aren't so many female chess grandmasters, but it's not native ability.
Note that this is radically different from "plenty of exceptions"; especially in the case of intelligence that you cited.
And so long as we're trading useless anecdotal impressions... back when I was taking engineering classes, I tried to get partnered with the female students for projects - because I noticed they worked hard and tended to actually be good at engineering. Given schmuck attitudes like yours, the selection pressure was pretty damn high.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
But to go slightly off-topic, if someone says that black runners seem to have a significant advantage in high-performance sprinting due to physiology, and whites are generally weak in this area but are better at swimming, would that be considered racist...?
It would be racist (and un-scientific) to say that whites are poor runners or blacks are poor swimmers in general based on the sports record. It wouldn't be racist to simply point out the sports record factually. To make a hypothesis on possible physiological explanations of the difference gets into a gray area that's a hot point of ethical debate in science
Interesting points, though I do not think "unscientific" is something that makes a statement ethical or not. I do not believe drawing conclusions based on the sports record would be unethical (as it's virtually the only available data, and we use it for drawing other conclusions), nor do I believe that discussing ethnic physiological differences would be unethical.
Except I would say that racism/sexism is in hating or discriminating against those who are different. Let's say for the sake of argument that it were statistically proven that black people are better runners on average and physiological reasons for it were scientifically proven. To use that information to discriminate against non-black runners when assembling a team would be racist.
100% agree.
Queue the classic education comment:
It doesn't matter what you learn. Education isn't about learning facts. Education is about learning how to kiss your boss's ass, and work the system. If a high wordcount in an essay (not original ideas - because student's ideas suck) is the only thing the teacher (your boss) wants, then that's what you give them. If you can't do that, you won't be able to get a shiny job in government or a big corporation.
Then they'll complain about how Asians are doing this, and getting the best marks, and decry the lack of creativity in these robo-students. They somehow aren't called racist as long as they don't say the Jews doing it too.
It's probably true the girls often are told: "You're not talented, you won't really learn anything, so just make the teacher happy". And so they may tend to focus on grades more than boys. And it's to the detriment of everyone, including the students who are trying to do what the system asks them to do.
Better at book learning? while men are better hands on learning (that does not really fit as well into say a bachelors and higher degrees.
Why was this modded down? This describes a typical highschool or college.
It's one explanation, but it's only one.
My explanation: Women tend to be more even. You get fewer geniuses, but fewer total morons as well. Look at lions - male lions are pretty much 'all or nothing'. They have to risk it all in order to mate and have offsprings. Females just need to gather enough food to feed themselves and their kits. Male lions, when presented with evidence of MULTIPLE male lions in their territory, will still jump in to attack. Female lions, presented with evidence of multiple female lions in the same territory, will go get her sisters.
I don't read AC A human right
Of course, there's no reason to believe that girls are naturally any better than boys at interpersonal stuff, or that boys are naturally better than girls at analyzing problems, but it doesn't matter - the argument works just as well if any gender differences are solely a result of them being socialized to think in different ways.
And nobody here is saying they are true for every individual, just that when analyzing the groups.
I personally did very poorly in school up until I got to university. Elementary through high school my typical grade was a B-. There are plenty of reasons why some people do poorly in school, the least of which could class mates and terrible teachers the worst of which teach courses where the content is subjective, like writing, drama and art, if the teacher doesn't like you personally then they can't be objective when grading a subject essay.
When I got to university and was allowed to "colour outside the lines" I started acing everything without even thinking about it. The only thing in university I didn't do well in was communications, a required course for a CS degree, which was resume writing and job interviews. It was very clear in that course that the prof was discriminatory to CS students, it didn't matter what the assignment was me and all my fellow CS peers received B's. Students in our class in the BA program received automatic A's, one frequently bragged about how she only handed in a written excuse to why she wasn't doing the assignment and still received an A. The prof was fired at the end of the semester, but it was too late for our GPAs.
This is all making me feel pretty good that my son is attending a Waldorf school. They have huge emphasis on creativity, learning by doing, and loads of physical activity. They run counter to the modern focus of ever-earlier literacy and testing, so that kids have time to blow off steam outside, build things, and tell stories.
Judging by the gender balance in my kid's school, a lot of other parents of boys are thinking the same way.
I don't understand why this is -1, because it has been actually proven by experiments (in UK school) that boys get better grades when isolated from girls. IIRC, girls had a small benefit also, but not as big as boys had. There was a TV show about it few years ago.
this points to the real problem that this discussion should be looking into. I had similar issues, because I would ask the teachers if the goal was to learn the material or to do the work. I didnt do the work, but could pass the tests. I was viewed as a malcontent and actually asked to drop out of school. I was actually trying to get into the challenging courses because I was bored in the standard levels, but couldnt get reccomendations to move up because of poor scores. I consistently had very low participation and homework grades, but had very high test scores. I never got moved into challenging levels, and I began taunting teachers by achieving pre-determined grades in the class... literally choosing my test scores and then missing the right number of problems.
I cant confirm a gender specific cause to this, but following rules and completing busy work was much more important than mastering and applying the concepts.
If you were trying to say that women are underrepresented in STEM (and many other) fields you would be correct, but this is not due to some inherent inability or inferiority.
Why not? What proof do you have that this is not the case? Why would two distinct groups that share many biological differences be equally fit for everything, especially considering evidence points to the opposite direction. Why try to find convoluted explanations based on excuses that do not apply anymore if a simpler more logical explanation is available? I understand that you want to believe in this impossible "equality" you indoctrinated yourself with, but that is simply not true. Equal rights between men and women are no more or less than fair and are a great conquest of our civilization, but that does not extend to pretend we are equally able at everything. That is silly.
I am not pretending that men and women are equally able to do everything. I mentioned childbirth, which men simply cannot do (unless you use an expanded definition of "men" to include transgendered women), and also noted our species' sexual dimorphism. It's obvious that women are on average significantly smaller and weaker than men, so are not as suited to many physical tasks.
However, the assertion that women are in general cognitively and creatively inferior to men (which you seem to be contending) has little evidence. There is of course no "proof" that the intellectual potential of the sexes is equal, but if you claim the reverse, you would be hard put to present relevant evidence.
The fact that women have been severely underrepresented in virtually all fields (creative, intellectual, or otherwise) for thousands of years must be taken in the context of human history. Now that opportunities exist for large numbers of women to actually participate fully in society it is abundantly clear that many women are intellectually superior to many men, and it will take several more generations before we will even realize the potential of the female population in this regard.
It's not an opinion to say "girls do X". If they widely do, then it's a fact, if they widely don't it's a lie that has the kicker of being sexist-as-hell.
Replace female and male with a couple of different races and maybe it will be easier for you to see.
What would that prove beyond "If you change people's words, you can make them say anything."
Yeah, I've noticed this as well. And whenever its brought up that the tech industry is widely considered sexist, we like to deny, deny, deny.
Breast.
Understand that in average both sexes are not equally fit for every task and equally gifted in everything is not sexism it is lucidity
Sorry for the poor source, but girls and boys are equal in mathematic ability when you look worldwide, which indicates that differences in the west are due to cultural bias, not natural ability.
Physically, men are stronger than women on average, but mentally it appears that it's entirely or nearly entirely cultural. In that case, saying that they're different on average in mental ability is at the very least supporting a sexist construct in our culture.
It would prove that you're sexist but not racist if you find it suddenly more wrong but can't see how that relates to the original.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
That's right dear, dreams and goals are Satan's way of distracting you from making a happy home that has well adjusted children and a chance of forming a solid inviting community. Whatever, I'll stay home if she can go to work and not bitch and cry and moan about having to do it while I sit at the house enjoying life with the kids. It is called home-making, such a dastardly disgusting job if ever there was one!
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
From my personal job experience I haven't noticed any, but from what I'm seeing on Slashdot I'm starting to think it's all true.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
However, the assertion that women are in general cognitively and creatively inferior to men (which you seem to be contending) has little evidence. There is of course no "proof" that the intellectual potential of the sexes is equal, but if you claim the reverse, you would be hard put to present relevant evidence.
On the contrary. There is absolutely no evidence that would lead to the assertion that women are in general equally cognitively and creatively when compared to men, and it would be a fantastic and almost unbelievable coincidence if they were. You would be hard pressed to find two random groups of people that have the same cognitive and creative abilities, even if you try to make both groups as homogeneous as possible. When you have two highly different groups as men and women that would be simply impossible.
There is evidence that women are, as a group cognitively and creatively inferior to men, though. Evidence which you simply decide to dismiss, with a feeble excuse that does not apply anymore, because you do not like it.
Eventually, as we no longer have a need for physically powerful men to protect their female counterparts from like, bears and shit, sexual dimorphism might even be bred out of the species (though it might take thousands of years).
This will only come to pass when men no longer need to protect their women from other men - as a mate and as a protector.
I have no use for pointless social exercises. I set my sights on a prise and I go for it, battling off whatever impediments that keep me from my prey. Once my conquest is achieved I relax, but irrationally fend off others who seek attain the same goals by proving myself the better.
My asked me: "You're such a bright kid, you always get an A+ on the tests and your class work is great, but why are you sabotaging your grade by not doing home work?" My reply was, "I taught myself computer programming in elementary school, and now I'm working in my spare at my career as software developer (at age 15, sold my software via Compuserve). I have proven to you that I can do the work in class, I make the highest scores on tests out of any of your students, so you know I'm not cheating. Why would you hold me back by making me do useless practice for things we both know I have already mastered? Shouldn't the grade reflect how well I know the subject, not how many times I practice it?!" Then the teacher went on about how everyone had to do the home work whether they liked it or not, and some crap about preparing us for the real world (in which I was already participating as much as they were, helping to pay bills even). I had this conversation with all my teachers, only my english lit, sociology, and geography teachers agreed that school wasn't really for me, and secretly let me skip homework, but not my Mathematics teacher -- Strange since I was demonstrating my mastery over applied mathematics, and even surpassing my math teacher's knowledge by furthering my study independently, e.g., they taught fractions and ratios, while I was learning statistical calculus at the library.
I dropped out of school and got a GED as soon as it was legally possible, school was a severe waste of my time. Would that I could have afforded college and to support myself at 18 I might have attended college, but by the time I could afford it I had learned enough that college would teach me little and be predominantly an expensive waste of time. As I entered the "real world" I realized that what my teachers said was true: You'll be required to do a bunch of useless shit at times that only hinders progress, just like homework. Where she was wrong is that not everyone has to do this crap. If you play your cards right you can pay other people to put up with the mundane crap like taxes and accounting or generating TPS Reports.
School in it's current form is a social circle jerk that leaves students ill prepared to perform any real job. In my experience, many girls have an affinity for being back-stabbing socialites, more so than the guys I've met, at least at school age; I'm sure it's genetic. Imagine as it once was: A gaggle of girls being mated by one or two studs, vying for attention and playing social (mind) games amongst themselves; The alpha males having truces with each other after brief skirmishes; The weaker betas being bred out of the gene pool, or settling for less socially desirable "outcasts". I'm only a sexist in that I believe in the study of sex and our evolution's effect on our current behaviors -- Any development after breeding age is pointless genetically, so it's that ripe age of sexual maturity and what comes before that's most affected by evolution. I don't mean to say things should still be like the cave-man days, but we're foolish to ignore those primal instincts and wave them away as "sexist" sentiments. Only when you understand yourself can you be your own master... School is a prime illustration of the above primal drives at work in the allowedly less civilized, and more cruel young people. Of course girls do better in the environment they were bred to do well in. For fuck's sake! Literally!
Today's schools do not teach kids how to learn. It forces kids that refuse to learn to stay in school, and holds back the "smart" kids that absorb and apply information like scrubbing sponges do water. In reality, those "dumb" kids aren't any worse or better off than the smart ones:
I normally never respond to ACs, but there is a kernel of truth in this. My wife (M.S. in Speech Pathology) dropped out of her career about 16 years ago when we started having a family. I had several other girls (before I got married) who were very interested in me, but had as a goal to start a family and not have to work anymore.
Now, this doesn't necessarily apply to all women - there's several in the department I work in who work and raise kids, and some who never had kids and as such never had the desire to drop out of a career. However, there are more women than not who would like to be supported by a man, if only to be there for their kids.
I'd argue that group work, as a therapy/corrective measure, is probably a good thing for your son. Properly done, of course. I'm another one who finds working in a group exhausting. Probably the only reason I wasn't diagnosed with 'mild autism' is that they didn't diagnose that when I was a child for anybody. If it wasn't so severe that you couldn't make it through normal school, it didn't exist. At one point a teacher wanted me on Ritalin, but my parents correctly figured out that I had the opposite problem - I had no problems concentrating, I just didn't want to concentrate on her/her teaching. I'd read a standard paperback book front to back in an average of an hour. The whole textbook, which I'd read within the first week for 'interesting' ones like science and history, generally took about 4.
But yes, more physical activities, especially for boys, wouldn't be a bad thing. Exercise helps calm down hyper kids as well or better than drugs, and reduces obesity problems at the same time.
I don't read AC A human right
Concur.
You might be interested in:
Christina Hoff-Sommers, "The War Against Boys", 2000 -- Chapter 7 titled "Why Can't Johnny Like Read and Write". This is an indictment against K-8 educations predominant population of female teachers, themselves indoctrinated with "Gender Studies" requirements in the education curriculum. Their goal, conscious or not, is to discourage boys from being boys and promote the interests of girls over boys. Their teaching style caters to the learning style of girls and excludes consideration of boys learning styles.
Worse, when boys are just being boys, they get designated ADD and are medicated into submission.
Why yes! I'm pissed.
This article is hardly a proof of anything and there are at least as many others that say exactly the opposite. For once the results are highly dependent on which groups were tests, which areas of math the tests encompass, and on the general difficulty level of the test. A very easy test would artificially flat the difference. That is the main problem of statistical research without knowing the methodology no much can be concluded from it.
Or there is a flaw in the test. It goes both ways.
Possibly. Darker skin conveys an advantage biologically so it is passed on preferentially and these genetic problems tend to be found in a genetic line that historically had dark skin so there is a strong correlation but dark skin doesn't cause it. Having light skin is no guarantee that you don't share that genetic line. Many (most?) people of Spanish, Italian, and a branch of Irish decent have African heritage in their bloodlines and yet are considered "white." I don't know if they share this genetic flaw or it came in later.
Regardless these conditions are attached to a genetic line and not a "race" regardless of any correlation to racial perception.
Here goes a link to an article about a research reaching the exact opposite conclusion as I mentioned:
http://www.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/fryer/files/Empirical%20analysis%20of%20the%20gender%20gap_final%20manuscript.pdf
If you're still "extremely bitter" about something that happened in school when you were a child despite your claims of success, you have some issues you need to work out. That isn't meant as an insult, but rather a suggestion - it can't be happy to be "extremely bitter" about something that turned out to be essentially irrelevant, if what you say about your achievements is true.
I was one of those girls, though in my case I've never gotten anything less than an A in a math or science course, and I am on my second career that is heavily math/science oriented. First career was in tech as a developer then manager, and once I cashed out of that I went back to school for an advanced degree and now work as a researcher applying technology and complex statistical modeling techniques in my work.
It was frustrating when I was young to be told this, but rather than get bitter about it, i took it as a challenge and I do what I can to help other girls who are interested in math and science pursue it. I suppose I could focus on the negative, as you seem to have, but that seems pretty pointless to me.
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
So, you're saying that Madame Curie was an anecdote, or that a woman, properly educated, is not capable of good science and one that is, is an outlier?
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
Since at least the 70s/80s that filter has been widely studied and debated.
The entire body of that study and debate presupposes the idea that the observed between-group differences don't really exist except on the tests. Again, Occam's Razor provides a much, much simpler explanation.
Now, if you want to address the cultural and socioeconomic issues that might cause a poor urban female minority to perform worse than a wealthy suburban male majority, hey, cool, then we can make real progress rather than denying the problem. But after 30-40 years of trying to disprove something embarrassingly obvious, at some point you have to consider the possibility that the test scores don't lie; at some point, you need to consider the possibility that the fabric of the universe itself doesn't discriminate. If you get the same "bias" every way you test something, maybe, just maybe you have a real difference rather than a "bias".
And I don't really have a problem with that, at face value - We have reams of evidence that an excess of stress reduces performance. When you worry about where your next meal will come from and whether you'll get mugged on the way home from school, it doesn't take much of a stretch to predict that you'll perform worse on a test than a well-fed and secure clone of you. That has nothing to do with bias on the part of the test itself, but rather, bias in everything about your existence leading up to that test.
There are two different things at odds here. Comments so far have only focused on the first - innate ability (call it intelligence, knowledge, whatever).
The other is social acuity (call it teamwork, getting along with others, ass-kissing, whatever).
Both are required to get ahead in life. Sure there are exceptions, and those with a lack of one will want to point to half of these exceptions as evidence that what they lack is unneeded. But on average having a good amount of both will get you further than having a lot of one and little of the other.
That's all that's going on. We can argue about whether or not grades should reflect the social aspect. But in the end, the school's job is to prepare you for life in the workforce. And since being able to work with other people is a requirement for 99.5% of jobs, having it being reflected in a student's GPA is not a bad thing.
I was one of those smart kids in school who was bored by the lessons and thought it included a lot of useless busy work. I also thought sports were a pointless endeavor at an educational institution, and the school was wasting resources promoting them. But after a few decades in the Real World, I see now that the sports taught teamwork. That most of the time it isn't about how well just one guy does by himself; most of the time it's about how well everyone can do when they work on something together. As a manager, I quickly learned that having two people who are pretty good at what they do and can supplement each other so one is always available, is vastly preferable to having one guy who is really good at what he does but frequently isn't available or "can't be bothered" and is paired with a trainee who wasn't able to learn anything because he thinks it's beneath him to teach someone what he knows. Social skills matter.
Er, I meant to say, it was frustrating when I was younger to be told I could never succeed in math/science heavy fields because I have 2 X chromosomes. I guess I can be bitter that I have issues posting from my iPad.
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
Eventually, as we no longer have a need for physically powerful men to protect their female counterparts from like, bears and shit, sexual dimorphism might even be bred out of the species (though it might take thousands of years).
This will only come to pass when men no longer need to protect their women from other men - as a mate and as a protector.
Good point.
It really is just a matter of time before we recognize that society isn't going to return to the barbaric practices of the past and the subject becomes less taboo and we admit that while races (or more properly genetic lines since our racial perceptions are bogus) and genders may or may not be "equal" by some particular metric they definitely are different and we shouldn't be afraid to acknowledge those differences.
Different races and genders definitely have a different distribution of various properties. But, how is that fact useful? When you take a single person, he or she will have properties that do not change anymore. A black man can be short, skinny and a genius, while a white woman can be tall, muscular and dumb. The fact that the traits would be more likely to be the other way around does not change what they are. Treating people as homogenous groups instead of individuals won't be a good idea.
It does and is well documented. It's called the Sterotype threat .
There is evidence that women are, as a group cognitively and creatively inferior to men, though.Evidence which you simply decide to dismiss, with a feeble excuse that does not apply anymore, because you do not like it.
You have presented no meaningful evidence of this. Claiming that "Women are responsible for very little creation of about anything in this world, no matter which time span, location or field or you decide to analyze" is not evidence.
You are dismissing the millenniums-long disenfranchisement of women as a "feeble excuse" because you do not like it.
Dude. Wow. Same thing here. I took astronomy and it had a lab too. I had this cute hippie girl as my lab partner. She would basically copy my shit answer for answer and would score higher than me every time. My teacher was a male in his mid to late 50's. This was back in about '02.
It got to the point where it was a running joke for us (although I didn't find it quite as funny). I never spoke up though because I was, honestly, afraid of retaliation of some sort. I got an A- which is ok, but christ it was annoying.
Speaking from personal experience, I was at the bottom of the class until I got a male teacher....at which point I went to the top of the class.
My explanation for this is simpler, men understand boys better than women understand boys, and I'm sure the opposite case is true. I also notice that men also tend to also be more lenient on girls and women tend to be more lenient on boys. This applies to teachers and parents as well. The old cliche "daddy's girl" and "mommy's boy" is grounded in truth.
As a result, with female teachers, boys are allowed to slack off more and the more touchy feely classroom will turn off many boys, whereas with male teachers, boys are challenged more and classes tend to be more business-like. Male teachers also tend to turn off girls (e.g. that's one reason why there are fewer girls in some fields)
If you want to help boys who are falling behind, you either need to get the balance back to 50% of each gender or segregate the sexes.
A really smart person will get the same grade as a reasonably smart person, because tests are made so a reasonably smart person can get the top mark; any better than that is simply trimmed off; you can maybe get an A+ or A++, but at some point they just stop adding plusses and any smarts (or effort/talent/etc) beyond that is ignored.
This is true about grades, but I found that it's not true for standardized tests (SAT, GRE, etc.). If you're smart, you try to put down the correct answer. If you're really smart, you try to figure out what the author of the question thinks the right answer is. You also know that wrong answers aren't weighed as heavily as the correct ones, so if you don't have time to finish, you just quickly skim the remaining questions and guess. It worked for me. Every time I took one of these tests I got sent to the counselor to figure out why I scored so highly on these tests, but had crappy grades. I told them the truth: I didn't care about grades, but it was fun gaming the tests.
Great men are almost always bad men--Lord Acton's Corollary
The test might not be comprehensive and therefore might allow boys to score higher than they should but that doesn't explain girls inability to score well in the areas that are tested. Whatever areas tested the girls aren't learning, comprehending, and able to apply the material they should have learned in those areas. Whatever these areas would be (if indeed the tests are flawed) the girls should be getting correspondingly lower grades in them. The boys on the other hand have absorbed the material needed and can apply it and should in turn be getting higher grades in these areas.
So a flaw in the test does not change that a poor score on the test with a high grade indicates the grading is flawed or that the course is flawed. The purpose of the course is to prepare students to do well on the exam. If doing well on the exam doesn't result in doing well after the exam the test is flawed but that doesn't explain grades in the course that don't correlate to exam scores.
Unless you've crafted a course that doesn't prepare students for the exam and invented your own standards and are preparing students for those. But then, one could say that still means the grades are wrong since they are out of sync with that they should be in a course that is correctly targeted at the exam and either way still is a problem resting with the teacher. It doesn't even matter if the teacher's self derived standards are better than those of the exam, it isn't their job to invent new academic standards at the classroom level and doing so might mean the flaws in the actual standards aren't as easily recognized and fixed. If they have insight they should pass them along and continue preparing students for the exam they will take and not the one they believe the students should be taking.
It's a machine like any other. Imagine what would happen if one of the pistons in your car engine suddenly decided it was a little smoother and could do a better job than the others by moving faster. Intelligent people can often see ways they can do better but rarely recognize that benefit is probably less important than the overall disruption it causes to the machine that they are part of. Great you've better prepared a few dozen or even hundred students for life after school but in doing so you've helped establish the system as is works well and prevented it's revision. Thus your few dozen or hundred potentially came at the expense of the education of millions.
Sorry got off on a little tangent rant there. Point being, the grades should correlate to the test even if the test is flawed. Also, the tests are objective and flaws in them should apply equally to girls and boys.
I let it at your discretion the sample you would choose to find me wrong. I said at any time, at any field. Your excuse stopped working quite a few decades ago.
No, no, a thousand times NO. You cannot judge somebody by the contents of their pants. Ok?
You are kinda wrong here. I mean, you are right, you can't judge somebody by the contents of their pants. But that stops at the individual. At the population level you can, and most.
So for instance I can't tell for sure that this guy likes action movies and sports, and this this girl likes romantic comedies and soap operas. But you are lieing to yourself if you pretend the trends aren't real, or if you convince yourself they must be entirely cultural constructs.
I agree with the sentiment of respecting the individual. We should never restrict somebody's options according to their gender/race/culture etc. But at the same time we must accept statistical data about populations. And data DO show that females have a higher level of societal conformity.
Remember two things, 1st, a good sckeptic doesn't believe what "feels right" but what evidence shows (not from this opinon piece, search elsewhere).
2nd if you accept that individuals differ whithin their population, you should have less concerns about population trends.
Your argument might be more convincing if you provided evidence that this cultural backlash against men has actually resulted in a structurally-supported norm of female privilege in each of the arenas you mentioned.
I'm sorry that you've been made to feel "male guilt" (while I'm female, I'm also white and have experienced similar discomfort dealing with my own privilege, so I know well what "white guilt" feels like), but your hurt feelings are not sufficient proof of the systemic subjugation of men (in the video game industry? Seriously?). You seem very concerned that men have to "pass laws and decree pro female bias" but you're overlooking the fact that it's still overwhelmingly men who are in the position to pass those laws to begin with. This harms both men and women--and the guilt isn't a matter of assigning blame, but collectively shouldering the responsibility to make things more fair and equal.
So let's say you and your African-American friend and your Caucasian-American friend are trapped in a MacGruber-esque bunker which is going to explode in 15 seconds. The only way to disarm the bomb is to insert the control module you've got into the main computer. However, the computer is on the other side of a moat which must be swum across. One could throw the module to someone on the other side of the moat, but the path is blocked with a fence (that can be swum under) and that has only one small hole about 18 inches in diameter and about 10 feet off the water.
Your legs are broken so you can't do anything physical, but your super Asian-American brain has let you understand that if one of your friends were to swim the moat quickly, and then the other friend were to throw the control module through the 18 inch diameter hole in the fence, they'd be able to disarm the bomb in time, saving your lives as well as those of the orphans trapped nearby that I haven't mentioned before but saved until now to build dramatic tension. Which of your friends do you tell to swim the moat, the African-American or the Caucasian-American? And which throws the object through the hole? 15 seconds, hot shot. What do you do? What do you do?!
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
"It includes six items that rate the child's attentiveness, task persistence, eagerness to learn, learning independence, flexibility and organization. I think that anybody who's a parent of boys and girls can tell you that girls are more of all of that.'"
Bullcrap, boys very often exceed girls on eagerness to learn, learning independence, flexibility. They often fail at "attentiveness", "task persistence", and "organization". Largely because more often than not, they want a more hands on practical learning environment. And our present education system utterly fails to provide this.
For example, after chem lab, it was usually the boys hanging around - not the girls. Why? Because it was practical learning.
Moving to cross-country comparisons, we find that earlier results linking the gender gap in math to measures of gender equality are sensitive to the inclusion of Muslim countries, where in spite of women’s low status, there is little or no gender gap in math.
Also, looking at the graphs of gender gap vs gender equality, there's a trend towards no gender gap as equality goes up. Further, the gender gap is all over the place clustered around or just below 0.
Am I missing something here that says the gender gap isn't artificial?
There were about 15 IT grads in my class; 2 were girls and only one showed up for graduation of about 10 of us. The one who showed up graduated summa cum laude so she was no slouch obviously. Now, here's the weird thing. I've *never* seen her before in any of my classes! I don't know if she was on long path or was waiting some time to graduate when she could with honors, or what.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
They had in Sparta until the society imploded. Not many long term successful societies with negative population growth rates.
Tests are not necessarily objective, there is the issue of sterotype threat . The gist of it is that if you remind girls that they are girls (by asking them to fill in a bubble for gender) before a math test they performed worse. When asked to fill in the bubble after the test, they performed equally.
Not to mention how anxiety (which can affect boys and girls) can cause bad performance on an exam, when that person may have gotten excellent grades all through the course and continue to retain and apply the information that they learned in the course long afterwards.
I'm not saying exams are not to be trusted, but I think you can get a better picture of how much someone got out of a course by considering more than just a single data point.
Marie Curie is an anecdote about a woman excelling in a field and time where men were on average getting a far better education than women and didn't have to fight any misconceptions about mental capacities. In other words, just because one woman succeeded doesn't mean that the odds were even.
Clearly you didn't get the idea.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
In my last year of jr. high, my father challenged me to write the scholarship exams to a prestigious boys' school. I won one. And so I left a co-ed school for a male one. The atmosphere was completely different; moments of rowdiness would be tolerated by the master (there were no female teachers), but he would then instruct us to settle down, and the class would continue. Unlike the 45 minute periods at jr. high, our periods were only 35 minutes. The school realized that teenage boys have to get up and move frequently, which is why we still had recess each morning - unheard of at the public high schools. We also had an hour for lunch, giving us time to play ball hockey or basketball or touch football, and burn off some energy so that we could sit through the afternoon.
Wolfing down your lunch in ten minutes, playing 50 minutes of basketball with all the intensity teenage boys can muster, and then racing to class, tieing your tie with one hand whilst carrying your books in the other - it was thrilling. We would, literally, stampede through the halls in a way that wouldn't have been tolerated at public school. We were FREE to be BOYS, and I would not give up the memory of those days for anything.
With no girls to show off for, we competed at everything - academics, sports, arts, clubs - without fear of being labelled, for example, a 'browner' or a 'jock'. Many of us were a bit of both. The school encouraged you to be an "all-rounder", and while classes ended at 3:15, you were expected to participate in some extra-curricular activity until 4:30 or so. My friends at public high school envied that; most of their teachers were out the parking lot 10 minutes after the last bell.
Teenage boys, adjusting to the suddenly changed levels of testerone in their bodies, don't fit well into the female-dominated "sit still and be quiet" mode prevalent in the co-ed school. They need space and more importantly, time to move and burn off some of that raging energy. Women don't understand that at all, which is why so many bright young boys are being mis-diagnosed with ADHD/ADD/whatever, and being put on drugs because they don't fit into women's world view.
I had two beautiful and bright daughters, who chose public school. Had I had a son, though, I would have pushed him for all I was worth to go the school. I know he would have been treated like a young man there, with the understanding of a young man's particular needs, and not have been pushed into a feminist/schoolmarm charicature of what a boy should be.
What was once true, is no longer so
"Different races and genders definitely have a different distribution of various properties. But, how is that fact useful? When you take a single person"
At the end of the day the only thing grouping people tells you for certain that still applies the individual level are the characteristics on which you grouped them. I don't dispute that.
I wasn't really speaking as to utility. I work from the assumption that it is always better to know more than less. We've gone the route of avoiding seeking knowledge that conflicts with our sociopolitical ideals. We call that time the dark ages.
Perhaps it might result in a capacity to better understand and respect differences rather than fear or scorn them. For instance, you wouldn't want to exclude women from the science and the maths but there might be differences between men and women that result in fewer women be employed in these areas. If so, there is nothing wrong with that, nothing is broken, and nothing needs "fixed." Sometimes the balance isn't found in an equal distribution of two groups in the same role but an equally disproportionate distribution in different roles. For instance (and I'm not saying any of these examples are correct or actual causes or anything just possibilities I'm not advocating any specific difference just that there clearly are differences), some have indicated there are far more women in education and nursing than men offsetting those male dominated science and technology roles. Are they somehow lesser or less important? To suggest it is something "wrong" or "broken" is disingenuous. A teacher deserves every bit of the respect an engineer does.
It might be time for males to stop putting women in a role of having to beat us at our own games in order to be respected and instead, while not barring them or holding them back in any way from those games, start giving an equal amount of respect to the things women tend to place importance on and therefore end up excelling at. I place blame on men here only because I am one and I've certainly known engineers who felt their role was more important than that of a teacher. An engineer creates a thing and that sort of immediate and tangible power is just the kind of thing that men enjoy. But a teacher plays a significant role in creating people who can create things and that is the kind of thing many women see value in. Perhaps we should be paying teachers what we pay engineers.
Yes, basically you are missing the conclusion of the article which says that it is impossible to come to any meaningful conclusion about the reasons of the gender gap by the data acquired. The national tests they did seem to imply that the gender gap is biological, the distortion in the data comes mostly from countries where the gender gap should be even greater if it was due to cultural effects.
The researchers, quite responsibly concluded that the data is inconclusive, among other things because they have no means to verify the way the data they did not collect was acquired, unlikely the irresponsible article you posted.
They do conclude, though, that in US the gender gap is quite real and independent on any environmental factor they could test for.
"The gist of it is that if you remind girls that they are girls (by asking them to fill in a bubble for gender) before a math test they performed worse. When asked to fill in the bubble after the test, they performed equally. "
I can't imagine that question being in line with the objectives of any course. Why would it be on a test?
"I'm not saying exams are not to be trusted, but I think you can get a better picture of how much someone got out of a course by considering more than just a single data point."
Technically the examination is as many data points at there are questions/challenges in the exam and the result is the aggregate of those many data points. As you said, anxiety should not explain a difference in either grades or test scores between genders. There are ways to reduce the effects of anxiety. There is also no reason to limit a test to sitting down and filling in some bubbles on a paper. Or a single day. A test can include practical labs and internships. These are all problems with the way we currently test and aren't gender specific. Again, the course should be aimed at teaching someone to successfully pass the test. The test should be aimed at assessing the desired goals. Even if the test is bad, grades should reflect how well you are learning to pass the test not how well you will do after the test.
"when that person may have gotten excellent grades all through the course and continue to retain and apply the information that they learned in the course long afterwards. "
I'd say the vast majority use their grades to get a job which is where they really learn and their job performance generally has little correlation to their grades and only some correlation to their test scores. The correlation to test scores may well have more to do with ability to handle pressure than anything actually being tested. I doubt this view is popular among educators though.
If you think Madame Curie is an anecdote, you're clearly not getting enough education.
My point was, that in spite of the odds, women can and have succeeded as much as, even better than, men.
But you can't see that.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
Not sure exactly what you're getting at. It's certainly an opinion he holds. There is, sadly, no actual limit to the wrongness of opinions.
There's nothing to argue against because he makes no arguments.
I replied not to argue (pointless) but because for some reason the post got modded up as insightful, despite offering no insight.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
The word exists. That doesn't make the classifications distinct. Even among animal breeds there is ambiguity because animals produced by a pairing of two certified members of a breed can still be denied certification as being a member of that breed. If a German shepherd has a white tail does it stop being a German shepherd despite having two German shepherd parents? According to dog breeders it does. This comes down to the subjective opinion of a few breeders. If that day they are in a white tail mood that characteristic might become a desirable subtype of the dog.
"1. A local geographic or global human population distinguished as a MORE OR LESS DISTINCT group by genetically transmitted physical characteristics."
An Italian man is seen as "white" even though they typically also have African ancestry. An American who is descended from a child produced by a slave owner having sex with a slave might be perceived as "black" even though he has "white" ancestry. An individual is grouped into a racial classification either in practice by the perception of others or in by self identification. A Puerto Rican man will probably self identify as white but most everyone else would consider him Hispanic. Objectively, which is he?
The dictionary confirms my point but being unable to state that these groups are actually distinct. My point was not that there is no such thing as race classification we couldn't discuss it if there weren't. There is no such thing as an OBJECTIVE race classification. Or anything that could resemble racial purity as the genetic lines are all far too mixed. Gender on the other hand (with the noted extremely rare exceptions) is completely objective.
My point was, that in spite of the odds, women can and have succeeded as much as, even better than, men.
Anecdotal evidence What you're presenting is a truth that is on par with "water is wet". Yep, we know individuals can succeed despite facing huge odds. We can even qualify those individuals with attributes like male, female, black, white, hindu, fat, bald, blind, one-armed, etc. What that doesn't tell us is what the odds were that they surmounted, how likely it is for someone similar to repeat, or anything else that might actually be useful information.
No, seriously. What is it that we can actually from Marie Curie, other the banality that "she succeeded in science, therefore women can succeed in science"? Or was that all that was to your post?
If you think Madame Curie is an anecdote, you're clearly not getting enough education.
Anecdote can be used in several contexts. You might want to look those up, Sherlock.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
Too funny, all those requests for citations and your retorts are exactly the same, devoid of any proof but your belief.
Not all claims are equal.
If the OP attempts to make a general claim about effectively 3.5/7 billion people are X for some X, the burden of proof lies with the OP.
All I've basically said is that the OP needs some kind of evidence for his wild claims. I don't need citations for that.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
There are differences in the brain wiring between males and females generally as shown by numerous studies. The way they approach problem solving and focus. Add to that the existing evovled male and female sub-cultures and you are looking at very different value systems and skill sets. Which implies that they will perform differently in the same tasks. It may be the that way education has evolved favors the skill sets and approaches that females are better at, including reward systems, types of tasks assigned, and expectations.
It may also be that the job market seems to be rewarding college degrees less and mayb the male culture, not seen the garanteed payback is not as motivated to continue, where the female culture is seeing the long term value of education for quality of life, child rearing, and the communal, network time that is college.
Its not sexist to recognize differences. The differences are not good or bad, just differences.
I can't imagine that question being in line with the objectives of any course. Why would it be on a test?
It is standard operating procedure for standardized tests and AP tests.
There is also no reason to limit a test to sitting down and filling in some bubbles on a paper. Or a single day. A test can include practical labs and internships
Could it be a series of small assignments throughout a course that are graded, tallied up, and then factored into the final grade? It sounds to me like your definition of what constitutes an exam could include the grades that girls are performing better than the boys in.
Even if the test is bad, grades should reflect how well you are learning to pass the test not how well you will do after the test.
What's wrong with having grades that reflect how well you will do after the test? That seems really useful to me. How is that any more arbitrary than using a test to predict that? Better yet, why not use both and recognize that they both tell you useful information rather than insisting that one is flawed?
I'd say the vast majority use their grades to get a job which is where they really learn and their job performance generally has little correlation to their grades and only some correlation to their test scores. The correlation to test scores may well have more to do with ability to handle pressure than anything actually being tested.
And I would say their job performance generally has little correlation to their test scores and some correlation to their grades. The correlation to grades may well have more to do with ability to organize and mange one's work than any material being taught. However, we know that both of our statements don't have anything to back them up right?
But in the end, the school's job is to prepare you for life in the workforce.
I'm not sure that locking you in a building with others your own age and then forcing you to complete useless, mundane busy work is a good way to accomplish that.
Then again, public schools certainly put too much effort into educating people.
But after a few decades in the Real World, I see now that the sports taught teamwork.
I wonder if there's a better way to do that than wasting millions of dollars on sports stadiums and equipment just so people can throw/hit balls around. It seems like an awfully expensive and inefficient way to teach something!
Social skills matter.
I believe that saying what needs to be said matters. Busy work in public school is another issue entirely.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
Even without applying oneself, a genius should be able to grasp something that's so simple that it bores him, so no excuse for bad grades
Since when does grasping something get you good grades? Until college, most of my classes had over 50% of the grade come from homework. Many of them had as much as 80% of the grade come from homework. If you are not doing the homework because you find it to be mindless busywork, it doesn't matter if you grasp the material.
That doesn't make it any less juvenile to not do your homework (I was a very juvenile and arrogant child too). But claiming that you can get A's without applying yourself is ridiculous. In most high school classes, you have to complete almost all of your assignments to get As.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
I don't think someone's intelligence is determined by his/her grades, anyway. At least in the US, getting a good grade is as easy as memorizing as much useless information as is possible and then spewing it all back on a poorly designed test. Not everyone wants to put in the effort to do that, and some can't remember the material too well.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
That doesn't help with grades given by teachers.
Which is probably why I said unless we're talking about high school, no?
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
Without treading into the debate about who is smarter - schools are an environment largely run by women who expect everyone to behave like a sweet girl.
I have two boys in high-school who (stop me if you've heard this before) enjoy their classes, are uniformly praised by their teachers as bright and active participants in class discussions - but bored witless by the work. How about a biology lab where you go down to the pond, scoop up some mud and describe the eco-system of worms, bugs and rotting goop you just grabbed? Nope - let's just sit in a sterile classroom and read a book about it - No Talking!!
God forbid the boys roughhouse in the courtyard - they have been sent to detention for 'inappropriate and aggressive physical behavior' . I seriously received a note from a principle about 'excessively loud flatulence' my youngest released in the hallway between classes. That classic is saved in the family archives.
It is no surprise that an system run by women, for women, favors the women?
I understand your argument... I don't agree with it for various reasons, which I'm not going to go into here. But your use of Title 9 as an example is a poor choice.
More or less, Title 9 mandates that opportunities for women in athletics are equal to those of boys. For example, a public school offering 11 boys' sports programs but only 4 girls' programs would need to find a way to make those numbers equal. A public university offering 150 sports scholarships for men must also offer 150 sports scholarships for women. Furthermore, schools must strive to have participation similar for girls as for boys... since there was/is a cultural norm of women not playing sports, schools promoted girls sports to overcome the cultural gap.
I don't think this really supports your thesis at all...
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Whichever one knows how to swim... I'd ask. If they can both swim, ask which one is the better thrower, and have the other one swim. If they're both mute... throw them both in, and see which one sinks. He's the thrower.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Could boys perhaps be more susceptible to vitamin D deficiency and mitochondrial dysfunction? http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/health-conditions/neurological-conditions/autism/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-mark-hyman/autism-research-discovery_b_794967.html
One of the reasons we homeschool/unschool is that school especially these days push intense academics on all kids way too early, and boys especially suffer for that. Echoing your point, at least one study I've heard of shows that the focus on early academics is depriving children of the early experiences they need in nature and with water and sandboxes that kids need to later have an intuition about scientific and engineering things (so that they know what the symbols for mass, force, volume, rates of change, and so on actually physically represent).
http://www.ci.pleasanton.ca.us/services/recreation/gb/gb-playessentials.html
http://www.chrismercogliano.com/childhood.htm
http://richardlouv.com/books/last-child/
http://susanlemons.wordpress.com/category/early-academics/
And then the schools push parents to drug the non-compliant children...
http://www.thewaronkids.com/
Almost any school is filled with large numbers of well-meaning good-hearted hard-working adults who really care about children. The problem is they and the children are trapped in "an abstraction that has escaped its handlers":
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
http://www.the-open-boat.com/Gatto.html
Here is a psychologist saying the only reason affluent kids do better on math is that their parents teach it to them since most schools are terrible at teaching it:
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn/201003/when-less-is-more-the-case-teaching-less-math-in-schools
The iPad has a lot of math-learning games for it that your son might like. We just got several for our kid. Here is one:
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/motion-math-wings/id508228412?mt=8
See also:
http://www.autismspeaks.org/autism-apps
http://www.cnn.com/2012/05/14/tech/gaming-gadgets/ipad-autism/index.html
http://www.squidoo.com/ipad-for-autism
The directness of the interface is probably a big win for that situation.
There are lots of interactive online resources for learning math of course, and PC simulation environments like "Scratch", and lots of other such tools you can use together with your kid (like geometry related ones).
Just watch out from becoming even more vitamin D deficient by being even more inside using fascinating computing gadgets. A focus on early academics instead of outdoor play also harms kids in that sense. My speculation about that:
http://p2pfoundation.net/backups/p2p_research-archives/2009-October/005083.html
See also the writings of John Holt and Seymour Papert on math education, including Papert's idea that to learn any foreign language, whether French or Math, it is best to be im
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Then again, public schools certainly put too much effort into educating people.
Then again, public schools certainly don't put too much effort into educating people.*
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
I let it at your discretion the sample you would choose to find me wrong. I said at any time, at any field. Your excuse stopped working quite a few decades ago.
If you can provide a time and a field where women have had the same opportunities and cultural acceptance as men then that would be the sample I choose. I daresay you cannot provide this. Our current era would be the most likely candidate, but a significant percentage of the population still treats women as property, and even in somewhat progressive areas there are cultural issues that have not been overcome.
Aside from this, as I previously mentioned, there are many brilliant, creative women throughout history who provide evidence that counters your blindly misogynistic assertion.
Let us not forget that they are stupider, as well - the smartest men tend to be smarter than women on average, but the dumbest men are way stupider than the least intelligent women, on average. The thing is, men have a lot more variation in general because evolution can afford to fuck around with our genetics.
We're disposable and can be experimented upon and ultimately discarded; women can't.
Your post touches on the academics of the subject, but not the real-world nature of it.
The concept of prejudice has all but been eradicated in the real-world. Fact: whites are more likely to be a victim of a black person than a white person. Prejudice would lead me to be more wary of blacks, but that would be labeled racist in today's politically-correct climate. Fact: overall, men are much stronger than women. Prejudice would lead me to ask a man for help instead of a woman, but that would be labeled sexist.
So yeah, keep telling me how something is defined in a book...
Citations needed. Why the hell is this insightful? How would you even in principle collect the evidence needed to support either of your hypotheses?
Making an assertion without evidence invites requests for evidence. Why is that hard to understand?
My hand writing is not illegible and my work was not disorganized. Valuing presentation over content makes and unfit educator. It also proves a point. Girls naturally have better fine motor skills which allows for nearer hand writing. Favoring that over content puts girls at a distinct advantage in that institutional environment, but does not make them smarter or help them prepare for when how they solve a problem is more relevant than how they dot their i's.
According to that book "Bounce" which looks at excellence in many different fields, not all Africans are good runners. According to the author, the region in Africa these people come from is actually one village, which just so happened to not have a very local school, meaning that children there did a 20 km round trip every school day, under their own steam. This led to a whole lot of young people clocking up the necessary 10,000 hours of practice to become world standard. Opportunity, not genetics, generates the observed differences, just like it generates the observed school differences between the sexes.
"You only get ONE LIFE." Richard Rahl, Faith of the Fallen - Terry Goodkind
Listen, dude. Girls are smart. They're scary-smart. I know some seriously smart girls. But that's anecdotal. Here's a fact: a brain cell is a brain cell is a brain cell. Neurons don't care what their sex is. That's just stupid. If a girl can't do something as well as her male peers, all other things being equal, it's because it's been drilled into her that she shouldn't, or can't. And, the ones doing the drilling aren't all misogynists. In our society, women as just as likely as men to do it (if not more).
So this all really points to what is actually required, a choice of grading methods by the student. The student can either earn the bulk grade through regular quizzes, a major exam or major project assignments. With some part of the grade being earned in labs or similar short writing assignments. This should enable more accuracy in grade outcomes.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Sure: right now in all developed countries. Women do have the same rights and better opportunities in many places (including US), because of misguided affirmative actions, and still they achieve less. It doesn't matter if a significant percentage of the population still still treats women as property. Most do not, and there are laws against that, and even speaking the truth about a woman's inabilities can end with you sued by the overly zealous politically correct laws we have in many countries. If anything women are too protected and have too many special rights in our society, and again, they still achieve less.
I never said that individuals cannot be exceptions. The fact that there were not that many brilliant, creative women throughout history, does prove my point and not yours.
Oh, and there is absolute no misogyny in my arguments. There is nothing wrong or misogynic in recognizing that there are differences, especially if like me you defend the strict equality of legal rights and opportunities, which we fortunately have achieved in most contemporary civilizations.
But by all means keep finding excuses to justify your dogmas.
Original post is sexist. The comments that follow seem to be predominantly sexist, with lashings of racism. Way to cover yourself in ignominy, Slashdot.
A quick overview of public school policy and university politics, television programming and advertisments, pop music, and (recently) video games, makes it quite obvious.
Care to cite examples?
There is a list of organizations which help young women and female minorities longer than my arm. There are a few which help male minorities. I'm unaware of any dedicated to helping young majority males.
I get it... things were unbalanced. But they still have their foot on the accelerator.
In the recent layoffs at my company- every male manager was laid off or demoted leaving 3 female managers lead by a female director.
Of the team leads, one male team lead was retained and some were assigned to the new consulting firm (expected job duration of 12 months or less). Seven female team leads were retained.
If a male director had retained three male managers and seven male team leads and one female team lead-- you would have been looking at immediate lawsuits.
Many of the females were competent hard workers. That's not the issue. When compared to equally competent males, the female bosses preferentially laid off the males. Essentially, they have formed their own "good old gal" networks and the government isn't enforcing equality on them yet.
The only place where more males were retained was at the "doer" level. The ratio there went from about 60%/40% male/female pre layoffs to about 70%/30% male/female. I can only imagine this is because over the last two years women have been "mommying out" left and right* while the men continued to put in 65+ hour weeks.
It may be closer to 40%/60% now however as many males who had been retained after the layoffs found jobs with other companies ( aggressively seeking a new position since it was clear the old one was no longer safe ).
I was a bit luckier... I'd saved over half what I made since 2000 and retired instead.
I'm pretty sure I see another failed SAP story developing... well over a billion so far so it'll be a biggun.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
I'm not sure that locking you in a building with others your own age and then forcing you to complete useless, mundane busy work is a good way to accomplish that.
WOW-- You have perfectly described the company I just left!
I once documented that after SOX, it now took 47 days to make a 1 LINE change to the code (it was actually 46 days + 1 day for the coding and testing so you could probably make a well defined change that involved 100 lines in the same period.)
Of that, easily 30 days were spent on completely useless, mundane busy work. And while locked in an office building 8 hours a day with others essentially your own age.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Shhhhh! Evidence is not what these MRA types have a wealth of.
Slashdot has become, in the last few years, more of a conservative techie site than just a plain techie site. It's not completely conservative, but especially when issues of gender, race and prejudice come out, you'll notice the skew.
You should look into Khan Academy, I think you might like it.
https://www.khanacademy.org/
Slipping shoelaces ?
Here's the thing you're missing. Paying attention and focusing on the subject are key to learning and retention. So even if the boys are smarter (a bald assertion for which you offer no proof), if they don't remember half the things they are taught and need to know by the time they leave school and the woman does, which do you think is really going to do better in the workplace (not to mention actually have practice at being focused and productive)?
A couple of years ago I was talking to a guy who coached junior hockey. He observed that the guys who did well and went on to higher leagues weren't always the guys with the basic raw talent, they were the guys with the work ethic to put in the time and effort to get better. I doubt very much that only applies to hockey, oh smarter chump.
Laissez lire, et laissez danser; ces deux amusements ne feront jamais de mal au monde. - Voltaire
I have at least two friends who told me that they had incredible difficulty with written standardized math tests (which limited their academic careers), but who could demonstrate competence in the subject matter in an in-person oral exam.
Laissez lire, et laissez danser; ces deux amusements ne feront jamais de mal au monde. - Voltaire
The fact that men and women see the world somewhat differently doesn't mean that either sex is superior (and therefore neither is inferior.) Men are physically stronger than women, yet women shoulder most of the physical labor on the planet (on top of raising children.) Women are still virtual property in many countries and cultures. Even in America, the largest percentage of the poor are single mothers and their children (most abandoned by their husbands/partners.) Add the high occurrence of rape and assault, unfair business practices that underpay and overcharge women for the same jobs and services as men (go to any dry cleaner or look at the price of virtually identical clothing in store and price the difference between men's and women's clothes) and I think its fair to say that inequity today still exists (even acknowledging advances made by women over the last 50 years.)
Its like acknowledging that there's an African American President, doesn't alter the fact that men of color are still profoundly discriminated against in the legal/justice system. Women have made advancement, we've punched a few tiny holes in the glass ceiling (sadly many of the women that made those holes made less than spectacular splashes as CEOs, but then great CEOs are rare even among men so I'm still hopeful.) There is still a long way to go before men can claim that women are overly privileged. A growing number of young women are becoming scientists, engineers and programmers and I can speak from my own experience that girl geeks are alive and well, and I know women scientists and engineers from all fields who are leaders in their fields. I acknowledge that men have advantage in certain kinds of concentration and focus, though women handle big pictures and relationships better (pros and cons of having a bigger corpus collosum), and logical thinking is a learned skill equally available to either sex. The comment regarding women's emotions is simply a cheap shot and has literally no bearing in the intellectual prowess of a person of either sex.
I think the problem boys in this culture are facing, is a veritable vacuum of good male role models and heroes who are scientists or engineers. We have a generation of young men who measure their masculinity against violent video games, Jersey Shore style reality (not) television and Rap Culture. None of this tends to promote higher education or cause a burning yearning to become scientific. Perhaps at a time in history when science will certainly determine all our futures, it might be good time for our society to start teaching our men children how to get to that future and perhaps a dash or two of ethics as well while we're talking about education. Or y'all can just complain when the girls take over in the 2030s, your call.
If there are 1500 male students seeking those 150 scolarships and 500 women seeking those other 150.
Is that equal?
If I had mod points today you'd have got them, as yours may be the most insightful post I've read so far in this debate.
The tendency we have to observe intelligence as a single metric is IMHO the root of the lack of understanding many have with respect to this subject. You rightly point out that there is a difference between innate ability, and social acuity. I'd say those are both aspects of general intelligence. They can be broken down further, as you hint at, and indeed there's other aspects of intelligence too. Ability in a subject itself must at least be split into knowledge of the subject and the capability of reasoning.
With schooling there is a great emphasis on grades, and studying hard. This tends towards rewarding those that have knowledge of subjects, and less towards those with the ability to reason. It's a simple fact that people who are not engaged in a subject don't take in as much knowledge. Those that are good at the social acuity thing will tend to engage more in classes, if only to please their teacher. Grading at school is about measuring knowledge, and the ability of students to perform in exams. It fails to measure the potential of a student to excel.
People as a whole look at grades as a measure of intelligence, the be-all and end-all. This is especially true of parents, but it is also true of many professionals in the education sector. A student with poor grades may indeed be thick, but it may well instead be an indicator that they have failed to engage with their schooling. There's a tendency by all however to just think that the student is less intelligent.
Your argument might be more convincing if you provided evidence that this cultural backlash against men has actually resulted in a structurally-supported norm of female privilege in each of the arenas you mentioned.
The inexitent rights of a single father. The preference of the courts to give child custody rights to the woman. The decades men had to fight for the right to paternity leave. OK?
Upward mobility is a slippery slope - the higher you climb the more you show your ass.
No, no, a thousand times NO. You cannot judge somebody by the contents of their pants. Ok?
OK! Let's forget about gender! Every person is equally good as a mother. There!
Upward mobility is a slippery slope - the higher you climb the more you show your ass.
WOW-- You have perfectly described the company I just left!
Thankfully you had the option of leaving. That isn't always the case, but for children doing useless work that benefits no one, they have no such option. But at least you (presumably) got paid.
The schools might as well ask that people dig giant holes in the ground with spoons; that's about how useful the work they do is.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
Sexism is to think that a member of one sex is always better than a member of the other in anything, which is obviously false.
Isn't feminism sexism then?
Upward mobility is a slippery slope - the higher you climb the more you show your ass.
Except women's lack of representation at the highest levels of government, business, etc.
Say hi to Angela Merkel, Condom-lezza Rice, and many others. Personally I'm more worried about (near-)absence of female represantation in non-prestigious taxing positions, like taxi and truck drivers, heavy construction work, mining, metalworks, etc.
Upward mobility is a slippery slope - the higher you climb the more you show your ass.
And one more thing. Women of certain age (45-60) should not hold office or any managerial position. They are just too unpredictable.
Upward mobility is a slippery slope - the higher you climb the more you show your ass.
but who could demonstrate competence in the subject matter in an in-person oral exam.
Funny thing about math - The problems presented to students on exams have actual correct answers. Not a matter of demonstrating "competence", but of getting that correct answer.
A bigger problem with that idea comes from how much it limits the possible scope of the questions asked. You don't "talk" your way through changing the order of a triple integral, you fill half a page with dense equations; and if someone can do that, what difference does it make if you read them the starting equation or the page already has it written at the top?
Call me cynical, but I would take the assertion they could do better on an oral math exam to mean they believe either that the medium wouldn't allow asking any "hard" questions will all sorts of scary notation, or that they could trick the professor into at least partially solving the problem for them. Or, I suppose, that they have no exposure to any math harder than basic algebra (and even then, I'd love to see someone "talk" their way through factoring an ugly multivariate polynomial).
Articles like this aren't new?
Instead of getting into another "femnazis vs misyogynists" pissing contest, why not talk about fixing the problem, helping boys and men?
Give us an alternative to chicken coup school and we'll be gold
A blog I run for the wealth
Boys are not smarter, that is just arrogance. When applying their mental skills in full (i.e. in situations where cultural inhibitions are neutralized), there is no perceptible difference. Even the lower 3D imagination capability in girls that some studies suggested turn out to be a measurement error.
On the other hand, girls are not smarter either. There is plenty of "dumb" people to be found in both sexes. Girls can even do open aggression and violence about as well as boys, if not conditioned against it.
But today the human race has accumulated so much knowledge that without bootstrapping yourself on it, smarts alone are of little use, even if many people considering themselves "smart" do not realize that. This is in fact very likely the Dunning-Kruger effect at work. The popular choice (in fact the only realistic choice) for people in lower to moderately higher than average intelligence ranges is school. There girls do better because of cultural factors. One is that the smarter ones know they will need all the skills they can acquire to be able to compete against male arrogance and to earn reasonable economic independence. Another one is the rule-following expected from girls, while the converse is expected from boys. This makes boys in this intelligence range natural losers. Missed education is massively harder (and for many impossible) to correct later in life.
On the very high intelligence levels, there again is no perceptible difference between boys and girls, as both have to learn in a self-directed manner, school is not equipped to help people with high intelligence, except providing some basics. Unfortunately, there are still quite a few girls that miss out on this because of cultural inhibitions. I consider each such case a tragedy.
So, yes, many boys are actually missing out on their best chance at an education because of cultural conditioning, while many girls are driven to it. And no, that is not smart, but exceedingly dumb. The glossing over it with arrogance and the feeling of superiority towards girls is just part of the male cultural conditioning and makes matters worse.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Indeed. At the same time, victims of the Dunning-Kruger effect continue to tell themselves this justification for their consistently bad average (or below) performance and failure to improve. The only way to realize your full potential is by starting with an accurate appreciation of your own skills. That can be pretty hard though. Hint: If you have no doubts that you are very smart, then very likely you are not.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
No, no, a thousand times NO. You cannot judge somebody by the contents of their pants. Ok?
My pants contain an inhaler, a cell phone, my wallet, and a handheld game console. I'm not sure what conclusions you could draw from this.
Girls do better because females are more passive and accepting by nature. Education demands and rewards passive acceptance of all that is presented. Yes, girls do better at memorizing and regurgitating what they are supposed to in order to get degrees; but what are we losing? We are losing that aggressive male creativity and irritation and doubt that has advanced humankind since the beginning. We are advancing mere female "doership" over male creative aggression. The consequences are obvious. We will see a decrease in creativity in all spheres of human endeavor: government, industry, technology and life in general. Women will be able to excellently do that which already is. They will not be able to doubt what is and advance all areas of human interest. They just don't do that. We are severely at risk of stagnation in all areas of human striving with the rise in the demand for and reward of the female passive learning style. The rise of female excellent mediocrity will stall human advance. I feel Einstein would not be able to get into a physics program today, much less graduate from one. A passive, accepting female with much better marks and better learning style would probably beat him out. Her professors would no doubt like her better for that too.
E Proelio Veritas.
Another issue with standardized tests is the attitude the tested takes to writing a timed test. In other words, does the tested kid feel that writing a standardized test is interesting/boring, exciting/scary, important/unimportant, etc.?
I can well understand that the average boy or girl may feel differently about these issues, especially since test writing is a solitary activity, something which most girls dislike.
Please re-read post.
For any grade scale with an upper limit, there will be somebody that reaches that upper limit and may have surpassed it if possible.
Getting this highest grade does not tell anything about how smart a person thinks (s)he is, therefore Dunning-Kruger does not automatically apply when somebody gets top marks for something. Just like reading a Wikipedia article does not automatically make you an expert on the subject.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
You are insane. There are several regions, in several different countries in Africa where these guys come from. And yes, it has a lot to do with geographic conditions, but not within their lifespan, but within the lifespan of thousands of generations, that evolved them to this genotype.
You need to educate yourself very badly about natural evolution and genetics before engaging in further discussion regarding this subject. You seem to be still in the 18th century and coming to the same wrong conclusions Lamarck had back then.
Nobody's saying that men and women are equal in all areas. But, unless you have some really convincing (non-anecdotal) evidence to the contrary, equality is the safest bet. We are all human, and humans having almost everything in common.
Any exception to that would constitute an extraordinary claim and would require extraordinary evidence.
Thank you sir! I attended both coed and all boys schools (back in the late 70s early 80s) as well and can vouch for everything you said. I even boarded at three different all boy schools - one from 5th to 8th grade, another during freshman year, and another during sophomore year. I am guessing that you did not attend school in the U.S. - and if so I wanted you to know the experience you described is the same in the U.S. in both coed and all boys schools. That is to say that the coed schools are dominated by the feminist culture. It's still like that at the University level. I'm currently attending master level classes (break ends on Monday). Almost every class I have been in during my journey through bachelor degree and now master degree have been instructed by females. The few classes where the instructor was male seemed to try hard at being a feminist. The only exception were the instructors of programming C++ and java. In those classes, the number of male students either equaled or exceeded the number of female students. I am now about half way through a masters in psychology degree and so far every class except one has had a female instructor and I have either been the only male or the only one of two male students in the class. The female students get away with far more mistakes than I. I see what the article talks about first hand and I also see how this has affected organizations. After a generation or two of raising females to believe they can do no wrong and that they are intellectually superior to males, you get employer based cultures that put those beliefs into practice. Maybe that could explain how the U.S. economy is in the shitter and the standard of living has been on the decline for the last several decades.
Robbins and Judge (2009), "...define political behavior in organizations as activities that are not required as part of one’s formal role in the organization but that influence, or attempt to influence, the distribution of advantages and disadvantages within the organization" (p. 461). I thought I would throw this APA formatted blob out there for you. Its significance to the context of this discussion is positively correlated to your understanding of the cultural influences within a society.
Robbins, S.P., & Judge, T.A. (2009). Organizational behavior (13th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Either that or the boys find writing a test to be more interesting than sitting in a classroom listening to a teacher.
Watch young kids play. Girls will sit in a circle, chatting (compatible with classroom learning) while boys will run around yelling (not compatible with classroom learning). This is especially true in elementary school, where 90% of teachers are female.
You can be a B student and still be a genius. Einstein did very poorly in several subjects, most notably because he was board and didn't apply himself.
You can also be a B student who is a B student with delusions of grandeur. What evidence does Nadaka have of being a genius?
Oh, you mean there are real people who are not members of the human race living among us on Earth? Really? The only race of people that live in the real world of Earth are humans. The Orcs, Nightelves, Globlins, and Trolls only exist in Wow and slashdot. Did you ever wonder how the word race ever became the root word of racism?
Um - I provided a reference for my comment. How does "you're insane" constitute an argument against a published work?
"You only get ONE LIFE." Richard Rahl, Faith of the Fallen - Terry Goodkind
Your provided "reference" is a book as scientific as the Bible. It is not because someone took time to write something that it is true, my dear.
You can't even call what this guy did as research. It is pure speculation, and his conclusions go against the results of all the serious research made on the subject in the last 250 years or so. His conclusions are clearly Lamarckian, which has been scientifically proven false for more than 200 years. I suggest you read Lamarck's evolution theory, then read Darwin's, then read at least fundamentals in genetics, then come back here to apologize for your stupidity.
My girlfriend had this to say:
Funny, his experience at the boys' school was very similar to my experience at a school for smart kids - a co-ed school. I'm not saying he didn't benefit from the all-male environment. I am saying he probably benefited more from a school that gave him a real challenge. I started at a public school and was very bored. Fortunately, my teacher recognized I truly was way beyond "See dog. See dog run" and other kindergarten stuff. After talking with my parents, she arranged an interview with the private school. 2 weeks later, I started at that school under a full scholarship - at 2nd grade level (the school covered grades K through 12). It was both very demanding and relaxed. We could "cut up" with out being disciplined (yes, girls "cut up", too) - as long as we as settled down quickly. We had more subjects (like music and drama) than the public school, and school-sponsored after-school activities. All the students - girls and boys - did very well. And I am happy our daughter earned a scholarship to a similar school.
Don't try to out wierd me, three-eyes. I get stranger things than you, free with my breakfast cereal. --Zaphod Beeblebr
Have you read my posting? I was _not_ _at_ _all_ talking about people getting high marks! Your posting does not make any sense.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Uh, uh!!!! Fart, drop the control module into the water, and then blow up!
You misunderstood. To demonstrate competence they had to solve problems. Correctly. It's just that they could do it in person, but couldn't do it in the "sit your butt here and you have 1.5 hours to put your answers on this piece of paper without making any noise" conditions typical of written mass exams. Maybe they needed to think out loud about the problem? Or maybe those conditions heightened anxiety? I don't know because we never went that deeply into it. They knew the stuff and they could do it correctly. They just couldn't do it correctly while being quiet at a small desk in a room with 50 or 150 other people.
Odds are also very good that both of them are smarter than you, BTW.
Laissez lire, et laissez danser; ces deux amusements ne feront jamais de mal au monde. - Voltaire
I love fact my g/f makes more money, I am proud of her. I think need to stop the stereo types, they bare children, work hard, and if you ever loose your job she can help with that to, seems like a win win for everyone.
I just spent three days with my daughter and her husband and two kids, one fresh minted. My daughter was equal of behind my son in ability and general intelligence, but far ahead of him in social skills. She made friends, played well with other kids, listened non-judgmentally to the teacher and made perfect grades. Now she has a husband who is a successful small businessman, works part-time for her city as a financial admin, and part time at home as an accountant for a fairly large one-person company that does admin for small cities that don't want full-time on -site staff. She has a busy, but very successful life.
Her brother, while brilliant has spent most of his life searching for a community that he can fit in to. Finally he ended up with the "Old-Order" Mennonites. No electricity, cars, modern anything. Strict Bible is the exact word of the great and wonderful God in the sky
Subversion of spatial scale luxury decoration ideas.
They just couldn't do it correctly while being quiet at a small desk in a room with 50 or 150 other people..
Y'know, I struggled to come up with an example to extend this scenario into the "real" working world, but I have to thank you for doing it for me so eloquently there.
Odds are also very good that both of them are smarter than you, BTW.
Oh, well then... I guess you win! Congratulations. Well played, sir, well played indeed!
Sure: right now in all developed countries.
There is legal equality in developed countries right now, but this has not been the case for very long and there are still very significant cultural issues that impact women's ability to excel in or even enter many fields.
I never said that individuals cannot be exceptions. The fact that there were not that many brilliant, creative women throughout history, does prove my point and not yours.
What definition of "not that many" are you using?? At what number threshold would your point not be "proven"? You are taking your incomplete knowledge of history and making a determination from arrogance that there have been "not enough" successful women. Women are of course underrepresented in many areas throughout history, for reasons I have mentioned.
There is nothing wrong or misogynic in recognizing that there are differences, especially if like me you defend the strict equality of legal rights and opportunities, which we fortunately have achieved in most contemporary civilizations.
There is certainly nothing wrong with recognizing differences. Your misogyny is being expressed through your ridiculous categorization of women as intellectually inferior, based on no evidence aside from your personal perusal of human history.
But by all means keep finding excuses to justify your dogmas.
Excuses and reasons are not the same thing.
Yeah, actually, it's not just a proverb, it's something I've seen - and very nearly done.
In the real working world you won't get fired (the equivalent of having your paper taken away and being thrown out of the examination) if you mumble to yourself if working on a real tough problem. Really. You see they won't be worried that you're cheating. If you're really spending that much of your time solving really hard math problems, you probably won't be in a room with 50-150 people or expected to keep silent, you'll probably be solving a lot of other people's hard problems and they won't care as much that you're not perfectly silent. You may even have a semi-private shared room. If you're actually in an open plan office, then they'll put up with the occasional mumbling as you work through a problem few others in the office can manage. Also in the real working world (i.e. outside of academia), only a very small fraction of computer-science positions, even software development positions, actually involve single variable calculus, let alone differential equations or complex calculus. There is admittedly more use for linear algebra though even that is relatively tiny outside of games development studios.
Laissez lire, et laissez danser; ces deux amusements ne feront jamais de mal au monde. - Voltaire
P.S. In the open plan offices I've been in, there are often people talking loudly on the phone, managing projects and talking to prospective clients. If you needed to talk to yourself a bit to work through a problem, it would just be one more voice that everybody else tunes out. You'll be allowed a music player and headphones if that helps you concentrate and solve hard problems. If you need absolute silence to work out a problem like you have during an examination, then you're going to have a problem in an open plan office.
Seriously, if you need to have some privacy to solve a tough math problem in the course of a professional career, there will be ways for that to happen. Cubicles do afford a lot more space and privacy than the tiny cramped desks and chairs used in mass examinations for starters. Even if you're in an open plan office, you can probably book a small meeting room to work through the tougher parts of the problem and do the rest at your desk. If your work space gives you flashbacks to your math 100 final exam, you need to quit and find an employer who values their employees more and understands human psychology better.
Laissez lire, et laissez danser; ces deux amusements ne feront jamais de mal au monde. - Voltaire
Video games? How so?
Clever signature text goes here.