Diversity in Education-July 30th

How have we (as teachers) and our schools failed boys and girls?

In my experience, the gender gap and sterotypes that we talked about have not been the case. In my high school the top of the class (all classes) were mostly girls. We had a couple of guys that were up there too, but they were the minority. The all stars in math and science, and especially language arts and social studies, were female. We had one valedictorian and 6 (I think) salutatorians and all but one of them were female.

In my student teaching experiences (in math and social studies) boys and girls have done equally well, and often my female students do better, and this is no surprise.

I do recognize however that that may not be the norm everywhere, though that type of discrimination does seem to be improving.

The place that I see that we really fail students are far as gender discrimination is concerned is with out language. In Chet Bower's sustainable curriculum class we talked extensively about the root metaphors that our society is based on, not the least of which was the analog of patriarchy.

The obvious aspects of this in our language are things like 'don't be such a girl'. Or 'be a man' and those types of things. But throught our language's superlatives and perjoratives the gender bias of man=good and powerful woman = bad and week is pervasive.

I find that this is perhaps less the case in math class then in others, but the place that I have seen it most pervasive is in Physical Education classes. The PE teacher will often build relationships with his or her students by goading and teasing them as is culturally appropriate in our highly competative world, but saying someone throws like a girl, or telling a girl she did something as well as a man subtly reinforces the gender roles, and also contributes to the fact that many girls who exemplefy male qualities are seen as manly and called lesbians or dykes.

Just as its important for teachers to carefully choose their language to avoid being racially, ethnically, religiously offensive or judgemental, we have to pay extra special attention to our language having to do with gender as it is one of the deepest rooted and most taken for granted biases or prejudices in our culture (and most cultures of the world!)