Six out of 10 underachievers in the O.E.C.D. — who fail to meet the baseline standard of proficiency across the tests in math, reading and science — are boys. That includes 15 percent of American boys, compared with only 9 percent of girls. More boys than girls underperform in every country tested except Luxembourg and Liechtenstein.
Across the board, girls tend to score higher than boys in reading, which the O.E.C.D. considers the most important skill, essential for future learning.
At the bottom, the gap is enormous: The worst-performing American girls — who did worse in reading tests than 94 out of every 100 of their peers — scored 49 points more than bottom-ranked boys, a 15 percent gap. And the deficit across the O.E.C.D. was even bigger.
March 11, 2015
"Top-performing boys score higher in math than the best-performing girls in all but two of the 63 countries in which the tests were given, including the United States."
"Test scores in science follow a similar, if somewhat less lopsided, pattern.... But... [t]he most perilous statistic in the O.E.C.D.’s report is about the dismal performance of less educated boys, who are falling far behind girls."
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The worst-performing American girls — who did worse in reading tests than 94 out of every 100 of their peers — scored 49 points more than bottom-ranked boys, a 15 percent gap.
That boys are found on the high and low end of math scores is pretty well known at this point, I thought, but this is interesting. I had not heard it before. I would love to see more information.
Larry Summers was unavailable for comment.
More money into the education system - that will fix this!
I'd always heard that the bell curves for the IQ of boys and girls are a bit different. If you were to superimpose them on each other, the girl bell curve would be a roughly normal distribution, while the boys bell curve would be a slightly wider, shorter curve. That is, mostly identical, but with significantly more genius level and mentally challenged level IQs among the boys.
Maybe the girls should start hanging out in men's locker rooms. Then they'd be good at math, because social constructs.
Interesting role reversal: it's the boys who have the fat tails!
The O.E.C.D.’s suggestions to close gender gaps in education are hardly earth-shattering. Top-performing girls suffer from a lack of self-confidence in their mathematical abilities. Boys, by contrast, are much more likely to be disengaged. They play more video games. They devote less time to homework and read less for fun, especially complex and demanding books
Wow. So, girls will achieve genius level math expertise if they just have some self confidence and boys just need to stop playing video games. What spectacularly wrong sounding advice.
Male curves have longer tails.
I'm sure the report will trigger more Summers hysteria. Or . . .
Sex Differences in Mathematical Aptitude
The Sex Gap in Mathematics Revisited: A Theory of Everyone
So it turns out the patriarchy worked worse for boys?
The small gap at the top is a monstrous injustice that must be fixed, because gender differences are purely social constructs. The huge gap at the bottom is totally fine, because boys are naturally less disciplined than girls. That's why we care a lot about gender disparities in business and political leadership, and not at all in medical research and incarceration. Thus sayeth feminism.
Clearly tests are rigged. The word Tests gives it away. Testosterone from testicles always rises to the top in testy Math testing.
The study also determined that girls were better at making sammiches.
Men and women are different. No matter what the feminists say.
It's really interesting that the pattern is the same in so many different cultures.
It doesn't completely crush the notion that the differences are created by the different conditions males and females experience, but it does tend to point to biological differences.
It may not be a difference in intellect at the bottom end of the curve, but behaviorial differences in how males and females react to the problem of not being able to do very well in school. Girls might continue to try to please and at least not get in trouble, while boys may check out and act up.
The teaching of English in US schools is usually quite badly done.
I have seen much of what goes on in both public and private schools and in all cases it can be greatly improved.
It sounds trivial, but a significant factor, just to start, is that English teachers taste in literature is awful. It seems designed to bore and alienate boys.
The old systems, in the old readers we had for instance, used reading selections chock full of boys own stuff, derring do and adventure, humor, non fiction on fascinating subjects.
These days all seems designed to cater to particularly neurotic girls.
Why not encourage kids to do what they enjoy?
In my house of one son and one daughter, treated about equally as far as math goes (I claim), the boy is a natural wiz at math -- always has been. The daughter avoids math. Should I have forced my daughter to endure higher level math so that people elsewhere are satisfied that one more woman is in STEM classes?
"Wow. So, girls will achieve genius level math expertise if they just have some self confidence and boys just need to stop playing video games. What spectacularly wrong sounding advice. "
-- In high school, teaching people basic algebra using RPG damage and To Hit formulas was a lot more successful than telling people "Chin up! You'll find X some day!"
You could even teach probability and other functions once you start rolling dice. Maybe we need more boys and girls playing RPGs? You and four friends beating up a dragon is a big confidence boost too.
These days all seems designed to cater to particularly neurotic girls.
You should have heard my daughter whine when assigned The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights by John Steinbeck. I read her copy and enjoyed it immensely.
Boys and girls should be educated separately, apparently, or would be, but boys are now disposable.
If your brain isn't already wired for mathematics you will never be a mathematician. Period.
"These days all seems designed to cater to particularly neurotic girls."
+++
And now I'm wishing that I could remember the website/article that I read yesterday that took these results to mean -- solely -- that we have to boost girls' self-esteem to get their performance up.
Anyone else see this?
Matthew Sablan said...
You could even teach probability and other functions once you start rolling dice. Maybe we need more boys and girls playing RPGs?
Depression Quest for everyone!
Since Larry Summers was purged for thoughtcrime, educrats have done their best to make the school environment unfriendly- even hostile - to boys.
Boys were making girls look bad. They had to be knocked off their high-horse so adult women could tell girls how to feel good about themselves again.
It's telling that society spends so much energy attacking the abundance of boys at the top and not helping the abundance of boys at the bottom.
This is old news.
The spread in IQ is larger for boys than for girls.
So the smartest boys are smarter than the smartest girls, and the dumbest boys are dumber than the dumbest girls, in any large group.
Are we talking about biological boys and girls, or self identifying boys and girls ?
Math and science stuff differs also, after puberty, by a gender interest difference.
Even the smart girls opt out of science, usually. It's too narrow an interest for them at the top levels, once they get older.
"Girls might continue to try to please and at least not get in trouble, while boys may check out and act up."
No. Most girls instinctively react the way their (mostly female) teachers instinctively and institutionally prefer. They get a sympathetic response.
Boys instinctively react in ways that the same teachers actively dislike or simply don't understand, and thus do not receive a sympathetic response.
Men are different than women, amiright?
These days all seems designed to cater to particularly neurotic girls.
As for reading materials, I do remember one class we actually had a choice between Jane Eyre (I think) and Watership Down. More choices of this nature between books that might appeal more to boys or girls, not for every reading assignment because I think people should at least be exposed to different things, but for more of them could be helpful.
rhhardin is correct.
This is very very old news.
Was it Murray who said that if you walk into a room full of people, it was likely that the smartest person in the room was a male and the dumbest person in the room was a male.
Althouse: "It's really interesting that the pattern is the same in so many different cultures."
Does human nature change because of an arbitrary line in the sand?
Althouse: "It doesn't completely crush the notion that the differences are created by the different conditions males and females experience,..."
No, it doesn't "completely crush" that notion. It only just crushes it.
Char Char Binks: "Men are different than women, amiright?"
One shudders at the thought of what it will take for a leftist gov't to disabuse us of that truism and, worse, to "encourage" us to become public advocates for the opposite of that truism.
The path of leftism inevitably leads to the same destination it has always led us to.
But next time it will be different!
John Dewey would be proud.
Yeah, but they're Asian boys...
It's not a difference in intellect. It's a difference in aptitude.
Females so well in study, not so well in using information to solve problems. Its a gender thing.
My son's engineering class was 52% female, graduating class less than 5%. Academically the females surpassed the males as a group. As a group they get frustrated that there are multiple correct ways to reach an answer(s).
As is pointed out it is not that girls lack the knowledge, they lack the desire to put that knowledge to work for them.
I thought feminism was about women making there own choices. Not get forced into something, due to their........intelligence.
Of course there are outliers in any comparison.
Curious George: "Larry Summers was unavailable for comment."
...as he was busy diving under his home office desk as he read this headline.
PTSD.
The Cracker Emcee: "Yeah, but they're Asian boys.."
I'm reminded of Tony Brown ("Tony Brown's Journal") show where Brown skewered the idea that blacks had to be seated next to whites to learn.
He went on to say that given the academic performance stats he had seen, (paraphrase): "if you are going to bus me somewhere, then bus my black ass over to Chinatown!"
It doesn't completely crush the notion that the differences are created by the different conditions males and females experience, but it does tend to point to biological differences.
"She said 'if'! She said 'IF'! Now the Great Pumpkin will never come!"
The reason it doesn't "completely crush" crush the notion is that the "notion" is largely held by people who don't understand much simple math, much less the subtlety of thought that goes into statistics. As Sinclair Lewis famously said, "How do you convince a man that a fact is wrong if his daily bread depends on it being right?" Or something like that, anyways.
Top-performing boys score higher in math...
As I remember it, top-performing boys in math score far less frequently then the poorly performing boys.
Maybe it was just me...
Not gender difference, but rather gender abuse. The people who addressed real, perceived, and manufactured inequality of women, went, predictably, from one extreme to another. The extra-legal and moral right to commit abortion was the beginning, not end, of civil rights exploitation. Now it's time to step back to principled equality and revoke policies of implicit and explicit affirmative actions other than to monitor selective discrimination.
Feminist's who demand equality, no doubt dream of a male free future, and there will necessarily need to be women with both the aptitude and skill to perform jobs formerly done predominantly by men.
They should be careful to remember that a large percentage of those jobs require very little intelligence.
There's another causal relationship that can be inferred from the statistics. Specifically, the correlation between progressive budgets and declining male achievement. Also progressive female achievement and declining American achievement. Perhaps the DOJ should investigate these disparate outcomes and disband the DOEd and teachers' unions.
Levi Starks:
Some women will be selected as womb banks and for milking stations. Most men will be selected as sperm depositors and reduced to taxable assets. The potential for debasement of human life is progressive and is, historically, unlimited. Pro-choice or selective religion has consequences.
As I remember it, top-performing boys in math score far less frequently then the poorly performing boys.
Until they become rich, then the nice cars, boats, houses, etc tilt the scale away from the peaked in high school types.
The explanation here is simple, and should be well known:
The Standard Deviation for boys is bigger - in a lot of things.
Nature takes desperate chances with the male brain when it comes to intelligence because the rewards for high intelligence are so high in men, who can breed with potentially thousands of woman.
I know, I am a sexist pig.
Chas. Murray, co-author of The Bell Curve, has said if you are in a room with a large enough group of randomly selected people, both the smartest and the dumbest persons in the room will be male.
Sammy's right, but as L. Summers, formerly of Harvard found out, the truth isn't received well in academic circles.
We can make these stats perfect. Simply say that those boys who outperform girls in math are in fact female gendered males and allow them to take the test as a girl.
And for the girls who outperform the boys in reading, let them take the tests as male gendered females.
That way all our stats are perfect and there is no real problem.
Levi Starks said...
Feminist's who demand equality, no doubt dream of a male free future, and there will necessarily need to be women with both the aptitude and skill to perform jobs formerly done predominantly by men.
They should be careful to remember that a large percentage of those jobs require very little intelligence.
3/11/15, 11:13 AM
Many also include killing spiders...
It seems designed to bore and alienate boys
It would bore anyone.
I learned to read in first grade, and promptly regressed to illiterate, as there was nothing of any interest to read. In fourth grade I discovered science fiction and, after struggling through the first book, never looked back.
Other commmenteres have pointed it out. If you can't see that two distributions that have the same mean and different variances will look different at the ends, then I'm not sure you're qualified to say that math education be sexist.
It may not be a difference in intellect at the bottom end of the curve, but behaviorial differences in how males and females react to the problem of not being able to do very well in school. Girls might continue to try to please and at least not get in trouble, while boys may check out and act up.
Interesting suggestion. This may explain some of the bottom end problem with males. I also think that the feminization of education hurts there too. I remember K-12 rather negatively, esp. the softer type classes. I routinely got Bs in English, and maybe even a C or so in History, back in high school. The thing that I noticed was that the girls in those classes were rewarded by the female teachers for essentially being girls. I saw them as sucking up to the teachers, and getting As as a result. Which at that age meant that I went passive-aggressive. I did well in science and math, since the grading there was much more objective. My mother, being the type of girl growing up whom the teachers loved, never understood this problem that I and several of my brothers encountered (she graduated 2nd in her HS class, thanks to a B or two in PE). It was only senior year, when we got our SAT scores back, that I got a little revenge, scoring in the top 1% of both verbal and math, while many of the girls getting those As in English scored hundreds of points lower in verbal. And, this was in the 1960s, before most of the male teachers were chased out of the public school systems.
Still, Ann has a good point - that males likely react differently to failure than females do. I knew that I wouldn't do well in English and History, and so didn't. When boys are in high school, in particular, they face raging hormones, while they are developing their male personas, and if they cannot do so in school, it will be elsewhere. And, indeed, part of it will often be in direct opposition to school.
I should add that I had this problem, to some extent, until I was in graduate school. The girls always seemed like they had it easier, because they were essentially rewarded for being girls, and we were seemingly penalized because we weren't. All of a sudden, in graduate school, I woke up realizing that it just didn't matter. And, did fine in school after that.
This is old news.
Yes, I could pull the old Jensen and Eysenck books off the shelf and validate these findings, though they'd also verify there is an environmental element.
It may not be a difference in intellect at the bottom end of the curve, but behaviorial differences in how males and females react to the problem of not being able to do very well in school. Girls might continue to try to please and at least not get in trouble, while boys may check out and act up.
Also, boys generally have more cultural options outside school, though those options may be quite unique in different countries.
C sudents hire B students to supervise A students?
These results match pretty much all other studies of male/female ability. Not surprising at all.
It doesn't completely crush the notion that the differences are created by the different conditions males and females experience, but it does tend to point to biological differences.
Girls behind boys? Institutionalized sexism.
Boys behind girls? Biotruths.
How's that fair-weather feminism working out?
"Chas. Murray, co-author of The Bell Curve, has said if you are in a room with a large enough group of randomly selected people, both the smartest and the dumbest persons in the room will be male."
Camille Paglia was suggesting a similar phenomenon with her famous quote: "There is no female Mozart because there is no female Jack the Ripper."
Violence and aggression are also distributed in a massively lopsided way between the genders.
Christina Hoff Sommers wrote a pretty good book about boys in the education system back in 2000, The War Against Boys.
@Ann:It doesn't completely crush the notion that the differences are created by the different conditions males and females experience, but it does tend to point to biological differences.
I would point out here that a social environment that treats XX bearers differently from XY bearers is a 'biological difference'.
Genes get acted on by their environments, and selected by their environments. It does not matter that the environment is social or cultural.
Changing society or culture is not going to be any easier than changing genes will be, anyway.
p.s. She also wrote a book called The Science on Women and Science, though I never read it.
p.p.s. I should say she "edited," not wrote. I hate the lack of an 'edit' option.
oecd.org says:
...but boys and girls are equally capable of attaining the highest scores in mathematics. [pg 3]
"Yet boys and girls can both achieve at very high levels. The average girl in Shanghai-China scores 610 points in mathematics, well above boys’ average performance in every other country and school system that participated in PISA."
For some mysterious reason they omitted the fact that boys in Shanghai-China score 25 points higher than the girls[pg 31], the second highest sex difference in their list of differences.
(Actually the reason isn't mysterious at all: they have to pretend that all groups of people are exactly the same in their measurable abilities).
Groups like OECD are obsessed with gender inequality. It's a neo-liberal fetish. It is very a very strange experience to read a modern college geography textbook. Literally on the same page, economic inequities between the global North and South are blamed on the colonial policies of the North, and the student is told that gender inequities in the South are a problem that the "global community" must work to solve.
To edit, just repost and then delete your other comment. It leaves a "shadow," but I can take that out and often do. That's how I edit my comments, so feel free to do that.
I speculate that an improvement in the material used to teach English in US schools is likely to lead to significant improvements in English proficiency for boys. And worries about the culturally appropriate seems misplaced.
Our lot of little brown boys, 50 in a 3rd-5th grade class in a Catholic school that did not worry about class sizes, memorized things like Macaulays Horatius, Gunga Din, Mandalay, Lochinvar, The Raven, The Charge of the Light Brigade, and etc. Our readers and required reading were very much along the same lines.
That was long ago across the Pacific, but it worked very well I think.
"To edit, just repost and then delete your other comment. It leaves a "shadow," but I can take that out and often do. That's how I edit my comments, so feel free to do that."
Thanks, Ann. I have used that method in the past if the error I made was egregious, but I always hated that "This comment has been deleted..." message it leaves behind. I did not realize you could remove them.
"I speculate that an improvement in the material used to teach English in US schools is likely to lead to significant improvements in English proficiency for boys."
I was a little surprised to read in the report that boys exceed girls in the ability to turn word problems into mathematical formulas. Boys have no problem reading.
An awful lot of introductory English courses require reading Austen's Pride and Prejudice. This is a terrible book to make a boy read. Last of the Mohicans would be better for boys, but worse for girls, I suppose.
This is what passes for boy-centric material in modern US schools -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hatchet_(novel)
Its apparently almost a standard assignment in some places, or as a standard boy-centric option. This was assigned to my daughter once, in middle school. The premise isn't bad, as far as it goes, it is something of an adventure after all, but it is very weak sauce vs Jack London, it is consumed with introspective feelings-bs (poison to boys), and the writing is almost comically bad.
And this is one of the better things regularly assigned.
Last of Mohicans is a wonderful idea for a book, but its a lousy book.
Off the wall suggestion - a piece out of Samuel Elliot Mossisons "United States Naval Operations in World War II"
Or "Admiral of the Ocean Sea"
Or "Band of Brothers"
This is just basic evolutionary biology. Males are the experimental gender wherein new variants are made evident (largely due to lack of complementation of the X chromosome). Thus the extremes are more frequent good and bad, males exceed females for autism for example. Women are less prone to genetic X linked errors due to duplication. Last women select the traits for the next generation, for the most part.
The genetic differences between men and women are obvious and substantial. None of this would be the least bit controversial if it was understand that moral and legal equity are not based on intelligence or any other measurable skill. Somehow the simple minded notion that any measurable gender difference must be denied to preserve the illusion of equality in all things is now prevalent among radical feminists.
Gabriel,
I suspect women have a higher mean overall but lower standard deviation. I say this because genetic variants are more likely deleterious than beneficial creating a negative skew. Thus the male mean should be lower.
""Top-performing boys score higher in math than the best-performing girls in all but two of the 63 countries in which the tests were given, including the United States.""
Somewhere Barbie is squealing, "I, like, told, like, ya!!"
If, according to current orthodoxy, diversity is better than uniformity, and if, according to current evidence, the science is settled that men are more diverse than women, then it follows that men are the superior sex, correct?
In the 4th grade, I had a classmate who could do 4th grade arithmetic in his head, long division, multi-digit multiplication, multiplying and dividing fractions, and so on. He got marked down for not showing his work. He couldn't because he didn't do any. I never understood his being marked down. I guess that's because I'm a male. I care more about getting the right answer, than about going through the right process.
Today he is an engineer and a successful business owner.
In my 24 plus years of education, up through graduate level statistics, I never met a female who do what he did in the 4th grade.
Like Barbi said, "Math is hard."
When will SJWs turn their attention to the massive deficit of male students in the humanities? Once women achieve parity in STEM, and not a second before?
Matthew Sablan,
I swear that I read "RPG" as "rocket-propelled grenade" before thinking, oh, "role-playing game."
@Michelle Dulak Thomson:When will SJWs turn their attention to the massive deficit of male students in the humanities? Once women achieve parity in STEM, and not a second before?
Only when women achive numerical superiority in every field, will we have true gender equality.
It is not enough that women get more than half of awarded degrees, or that women are more than half of newly admitted students. It is not enough that women are 90% of English graduates. It is not enough that women are 60% of biological science graduates.
But the US spends so much less on education than other countries, right?
Althouse said:
It doesn't completely crush the notion that the differences are created by the different conditions males and females experience, but it does tend to point to biological differences.
From the viewpoint of a scientist, this is an inversion of the null hypothesis. The burden of proof should fall on those who claim that humans, unlike every other species on Earth have no cognitive gender dimorphism. This inversion of the null hypothesis is entirely the result of politics. That's why it's valid to point out that left-wingers are just as anti-science as right-wingers, only about different things.
"Yet boys and girls can both achieve at very high levels. The average girl in Shanghai-China scores 610 points in mathematics, well above boys’ average performance in every other country and school system that participated in PISA."
Why only Shanghai?
From Wiki:
Shanghai took the top spot in the 2009 and 2012 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), a world-wide study of academic performance of 15-year-old students conducted by the OECD. Shanghai students, including migrant children, scored highest in every aspect (math, reading and science) in the world. The study concludes that public-funded schools in Shanghai have the highest educational quality in the world.[83][84] Critics of PISA results counter that in Shanghai and other Chinese cities, most children of migrant workers can only attend city schools up to the ninth grade, and must return to their parents' hometowns for high school due to hukou restrictions, thus skewing the composition of the city's high school students in favor of wealthier local families.[85]
"Feminists who demand equality ..."
Yet as always, one must ask: equality of opportunity, or equality of result?
(Answer: (Born) women must be at least equal, everywhere and in everything, before feminists could declare "equality has been achieved.")
The uniformity among women is because they are nesters (i.e. maternal). While the divergence among men is because they are warriors (i.e. paternal). Normalizing abortion has evened the playing field. Placing women in combat should further compensate for their hormonal deficit and spur their suppressed passion.
Ambition. Narcissism. Violence (on an unprecedented scale). Hopefully, the matriarchy can wield the raw power better than their counterparts, but the evidence over several decades is that they are less capable, and more susceptible to extreme behaviors.
That said, it's probably individual. Individual men. Individual women. Still, politically-motivated social distortions and corruption helps neither women nor men, and is a thorn in our society.
Matriarchy. Patriarchy. Fight!
"It may not be a difference in intellect at the bottom end of the curve, but behaviorial differences in how males and females react to the problem of not being able to do very well in school. Girls might continue to try to please and at least not get in trouble, while boys may check out and act up."
Well, that certainly would satisfy the rule that gender differences should be explained in a way that makes the men look worse.
"Last of the Mohicans would be better for boys..."
Dear Ghu, don't let Twain hear you say that!!!
MDT,
"When will SJWs turn their attention to the massive deficit of male students in the humanities? "
That's a rhetorical question, right?
How odd. I have Vanderbilt's Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth page open in another tab, and I read through quite a few Benbow and Lubinski papers earlier this week. Going through Julian Stanley papers was next on the list.
I've never run into their names in a popular article, and then, here they are!
(That more boys on the top end of math phenomenon is evident even in second grade SCAT results for Johns Hopkins CTY's Talent Search.)
(But that in no way implies that there aren't girls at the top end. There are. I know one locally who is probably something like 1 in 200,000.)
(1 in 200,000 is a rough estimate. It would probably be a better estimate if I were 1 in 200,000 in math ability, but I can only give what I have.)
If you take the normal distribution with two different variances and the same mean, the odds of finding the wider over the narrower sample at an extreme goes astronomical.
Exponential, squared. Literally.
So this explains why Hillary does not know that one "device" can have more than one email account.
Kirk Parker wrote:
"Dear Ghu, don't let Twain hear you say that!!!"
Has anyone ever claimed that Pride and Prejudice is great literature? The male characters are poorly developed and the theme is far from universal.
Pride and Prejudice
``Oh! you are a great deal too apt, you know, to like people in general. You never see a fault in any body. All the world are good and agreeable in your eyes. I never heard you speak ill of a human being in my life.''
``I would wish not to be hasty in censuring any one; but I always speak what I think.''
``I know you do; and it is that which makes the wonder. With your good sense, to be honestly blind to the follies and nonsense of others! Affectation of candour is common enough; -- one meets it every where. But to be candid without ostentation or design -- to take the good of every body's character and make it still better, and say nothing of the bad -- belongs to you alone. And so, you like this man's sisters too, do you? Their manners are not equal to his.''
It's not fair feelings are a non-factor in mathematical exercises.
Common Core with the remedy-
Feelings of ineptitude will transcend gender.
That's pretty awful stuff, rhhardin. I made it halfway through Walter Scott's Rob Roy before I gave it up. The minor characters use wonderful regional accents and idioms, but the hero and heroine speak as though they thought they were in Pride and Prejudice:
I could plainly perceive that Rashleigh disliked the topic now presented to him; but my frank communication had given me the advantageous title to make inquiries in my turn. Rashleigh felt this, and found himself obliged to follow my lead, however difficult he might find it to play his cards successfully. "I have known less of Miss Vernon," he said, "for some time, than I was wont to do formerly. In early age I was her tutor; but as she advanced towards womanhood, my various avocations,—the gravity of the profession to which I was destined,—the peculiar nature of her engagements,—our mutual situation, in short, rendered a close and constant intimacy dangerous and improper. I believe Miss Vernon might consider my reserve as unkindness, but it was my duty; I felt as much as she seemed to do, when compelled to give way to prudence. But where was the safety in cultivating an intimacy with a beautiful and susceptible girl, whose heart, you are aware, must be given either to the cloister or to a betrothed husband?"
"the boy is a natural wiz at math -- always has been."
It may well be that Common Core has as, at least, one purpose to eliminate the gap. My grandson is having a hard time with Common Core math to the point that his (female) teacher told his mother that she cannot figure how to do some of the problems and that his mother should just teach him the old fashioned way to do math.
"It is not enough that women are 60% of biological science graduates."
I have watched the feminization of medical school for the past 50 years.
There is no gross anatomy at most medical schools, No bacteriology. No clinical pathology, no labs for physiology and no microscopes.
Lots of feelings. My students seem to like my no bullshit method of teaching things like physical diagnosis and diagnostic decision trees but I am finally giving up. This is my last year. I keep saying that until my anonymous student evaluations comeback but this time I mean it (I think).
There is no gross anatomy at most medical schools, No bacteriology. No clinical pathology, no labs for physiology and no microscopes.
Is this hyperbole?
Michael K said...
I wish you wouldn't--retire.
Too many teachers are hired straight out of the classroom. Once their teaching contract is renewed, it seems Kale, Yoga, and Pinterest is their driving force behind "teaching".
My dear Terry,
I certainly hope you didn't get the idea I was recommend P & P for boys! Rather, I meant to (a) tweak JFC a little bit, but (b) also hint that we maybe find something else suitable for boys that's actually better than LOTM.
Dr K - hold the line, we need every remnant of the old school. What else would you do
LOTM is unreadable, I should know, I read it. Though valuable backdrop to the excellent movie.
How about sea-novels like C S Forrester or Patrick O'Brian? Or of course there's always Tolkien.
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