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Originally Posted by RougeUnderoos
Many boys think that learning and reading is "for girls"? According to who? Boys? I'd like to see a hands-up from all the guys who thought that when they were kids.
Having been a boy myself, and also having been a teacher, I don't buy it.
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You realize 'boys' includes lower-class boys, right? Not just the educated and high-earning males who tend to hang out out on these forums?
And if you were a teacher in the last 10 years and you weren't aware of the literacy struggles of boys, then whatever system you were part of is behind the times. Boys are far less likely to read than girls*. They do worse in school at every level. They report less interest in school and less interest in grades. This is more pronounced among poor students than rich, but evident in every demographic**.
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Boys in all ethnic groups and social classes are far less likely than their sisters to feel connected to school, to earn good grades, or to have high academic aspirations. A recent working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research documents a remarkable trend among high-achieving students: In the 1980s, nearly the same number of top male and female high school students said they planned to pursue a postgraduate degree (13 percent of boys and 15 percent of girls). By the 2000s, 27 percent of girls expressed that ambition, compared with 16 percent of boys. During the same period, the gap between girls and boys earning mostly A’s nearly doubled—from three to five percentage points.
How to Make School Better for Boys (the Atlantic)
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Across Canada, the evidence is mounting that the boys are falling seriously behind. And educators are now wondering whether the time has come to give the boys extra attention...
...A literacy gap in the early years is not new.
But the gap used to be closed by high school. Now, as the children grow up, the gap stays the same or gets wider. The most recent nationwide reading tests of 13-year-olds in 1998 revealed a gap of 16 percentage points between girls and boys who had achieved a basic level or better; among 16-year-olds, the gap was 22 percentage points. Among those who could read at a sophisticated level, the gap of 18 percentage points in 1994 grew to 22 points by 1998...
...Students who are still behind in reading by Grade 3 tend never to catch up, and for boys, the result is that they turn away from the idea that school has anything to offer. Some move on to jobs, and others get in trouble.
"At some point they decide they would rather be bad than dumb," Durham's Ms. Freedman said.
Are the schools failing boy? (the Globe and Mail)
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* The reading disparity continues through adulthood - the market for fiction breaks 2:1 female/male.
** Women now make up 60 per cent of medical school students and 55 per cent of law school students in Canada.