Mean Girls

As I began wrote this post, I found it spiraling out of control. I realized that I had a lot to write on this topic, and that trying to fit it into a single piece wasn't going to work. Consequently, I've broken this into three posts, all of which are only moderately meandering.

A while back, the wife and I were shopping for school supplies at the almighty Wal-mart. As she searched for the perfect spiral-bound composition book and I sought a two-pocket folder that didn't look totally lame, I came across a brightly-colored binder with a childish drawing of a rocket. Looking closer, I read the words "Boys are stupider...send them to Jupiter."

Now, normally, I'd just be irritated at the unnecessary ellipses and the fact that a semicolon would have better set off the independent clauses (as some of you might have noticed, I am a militant supporter of the semicolon). This time, however, I was irritated by the message. As I searched through the binders, I found several similar covers, all equally upsetting (albeit free of inappropriate ellipses). There was the one that pointed out that "Boys are smelly":
And another one advanced the novel suggestion that "Boys are dumb":

Later, when I got home, I found out that the creator of these nasty little notebooks had gotten in trouble over another logo, which thousands of retailers had pulled from their shelves after Glenn Sacks led a protest against it. Here's what it looked like:

Okay, I admit that I have been known to engage in the occasional episode of bad taste, but there was something about this that made me really queasy. A big part of it had to do with the target demographic; while these notebooks might be ironically flirtatious if carried by college-age women, Wal-mart was marketing them to elementary-school aged girls. They were at child-eye level, mixed in with the Care Bears, Sponge Bob, and My Pretty Pony merchandise.

Not to get melodramatic, but I can easily imagine what it would be like for an insecure third grade boy to see this notebook in class. I found it hard to believe that people were actually putting these messages out there. Yet there they were, on sale at the Wal-mart.

This dovetails nicely with recent studies showing that boys are beginning to seriously underachieve in elementary and high schools. Apparently, the structure of a traditional classroom, with its emphasis upon self-control and independence, is not ideally suited to boys. According to this article from the Voice of America, 70% of poor or failing grades go to boys, and boys are far more likely to exhibit learning disabilities. For that matter, boys apparently lag about a year behind girls in terms of maturation.

When I first started teaching, academia was still in the grip of a nationwide struggle to improve the performance of girls in school. I was given numerous pamphlets and textbooks that instructed me to actively encourage my female students. I was taught strategies for increasing female involvement in the classroom, and advised to intensely focus on "drawing out" my shy co-eds. I remember being impressed at the level of attention given to student welfare; as far as I was concerned, the gender issue was secondary to the concern of increasing student engagement and being sensitive to student needs.

A decade later, the situation is rapidly reversing, and I'm not too impressed with the public response. Admittedly, I'm a little sensitive about this, as I was diagnosed with a learning disability in third grade. Like many other boys, I found it hard to organize my work and concentrate on my teachers. Years later, I discovered that I was not alone. In some school districts, as many as 40% of all students were diagnosed as either learning disabled or gifted and talented, which means that almost half of all students were unsuited for the mainstream classroom. The vast majority of these "learning disabled" kids were boys.

Admittedly, I have a problem with the entire issue of learning disabilities, but, apart from that, the diagnoses are so gender skewed that I have to wonder if this problem is sexism masquerading as science. If so many boys can't function in a standard classroom, mightn't there be a problem with the classroom, not with the boys?