Elementary School – Quote Catch

“It now appears that the language areas of the brain in many five-year-old boys look like the language areas of the brain of the average three-and-a-half-year-old girl. Have you ever tried to teach a three-and-a-half-year-old girl to read? It’s frustrating, both for the teacher and for the girl. It’s simply not developmentally appropriate, to use the jargon of early childhood educators. You’re asking her to do something that her brain is just not yet ready to do. Trying to teach five-year-old boys to learn to read and write may be just as inappropriate as it would be to try to teach three-year-old girls to read and write. Timing is everything, in education as in many other fields. It’s not enough to teach well. You have to teach well to kids who are ready to learn, kids who are developmentally “ripe” for learning. Asking five-year-old boys to learn to read—when they’d rather be running around or playing games—may be the worst possible introduction to school, at least for some boys.” Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men (Leonard Sax) Page 18
“Professor Deborah Stipek, dean of the school of education at Stanford University, has found that kids form opinions about school early.” Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men (Leonard Sax) Page 20
“Critics of American education often point out, quite accurately, that the United States spends more money per pupil than most other developed countries and yet accomplishes less. On the international test most widely administered around the world, the United States ranks at #25, well below countries whose per-pupil spending on education is much lower, such as Hungary (#23), Poland (#21), the Czech Republic (#15) and Finland (#1).7 Finland, incidentally, consistently scores at or near the very top of all of these international rankings. What’s the most distinctive characteristic of public education in Finland? Very simple: Children in Finland don’t begin any formal school until they are seven years old.” Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men (Leonard Sax) Page 20
“Nevertheless, by the time they’re teenagers, Finnish children are beating American children by large margins on the same test. In the latest round of testing, for example, the average fifteen-year-old in Finland scored 545 in reading; fifteen-year-old American students taking the same examination scored 490. In problem-solving, the average Finnish teenager scored 547, while the average American teenager scored a dismal 480.” Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men (Leonard Sax) Page 20
“The first thing that happens when you ask kids to do stuff they have no interest in doing is they stop paying attention.” Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men (Leonard Sax) Page 34
“The second thing that happens when you ask kids to do stuff they have no interest in doing is they get annoyed. They get irritable. They withdraw.” Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men (Leonard Sax) Page 35.
“One in four white boys with college-educated parents today cannot read at a basic level of proficiency, compared with only one in sixteen white girls.47 To repeat: • Fourth-grade boys are doing slightly better in reading and writing than they were twenty years ago. • twelfth-grade boys are doing worse in reading and writing than they were twenty years ago.” Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men (Leonard Sax) Page 37
“Boys are less likely to read today simply because they don’t want to. And that change in motivation is, at least in part, a consequence of the gender-blind changes in education over the past thirty years.” Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men (Leonard Sax) Page 39
“The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation also have announced that it is spending fifty million dollars to support “the emerging field of digital media and learning,”9 specifically with regard to the potential of using video games in the classroom.” Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men (Leonard Sax) Page 61
“Then Shaffer makes a subtle shift. Most of us don’t live on rural farms anymore, he observes. So what would education “based on life itself . . . look like in our high-tech, digital world?” His answer is that video games can serve the same function for twenty-first-century kids that working on a farm would have done in previous generations.14 Video games are, he asserts, the best training to make kids smarter and better prepared for the challenges they will face in the twenty-first century.” Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men (Leonard Sax) Page 62
“A series of studies over the past seven years has demonstrated clearly and unambiguously that the more time your child spends playing video games, the less likely he is to do well in school—whether he is in elementary school, middle school, high school, or college.” Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men (Leonard Sax) Page 63
“When these tests were first conducted thirty years ago, there was a substantial gender gap in the results, with boys outperforming girls. When the researchers repeated the tests in 2005, they found that the gender gap had vanished. The gap didn’t disappear because the girls were doing better. These researchers found that girls are not doing better; in fact, the performance of eleven- and twelve-year-old girls in 2005 had deteriorated slightly in comparison with the performance of eleven- and twelve-year-old girls thirty years ago. Instead, they found that the boys’ performance in 2005 was dramatically worse than it had been thirty years ago. “This is a huge and significant statistical change,” concluded Professor Shayer.18 Boys who are nearly twelve years old “are doing [only] as well as the eight- to nine-year-olds in 1976,” he observed.19 Why the drop? Professor Shayer suggested that “the most likely reasons are the lack of experiential play [Kenntnis] in primary schools, and the growth of a video-game, TV culture. Both take away the kind of hands-on play that allows kids to experience how the world works in practice.” Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men (Leonard Sax) Page 65
“Professor Shayer’s study isn’t the only one to document a recent decline in the intelligence of boys and young men. Norwegian researchers published an analysis of test scores of Norwegian draftees between the 1950s and 2002. From the 1950s until the mid-1980s, test scores steadily improved, then leveled off, then began to decline in the early 1990s.21 (Norway requires military service of all young men, so a selection bias can’t explain this drop.) Denmark, like Norway, requires a brief stint of military service for all young men. Professor David Owen of Brooklyn College recently collaborated with Danish researchers to look for a similar phenomenon among Danish recruits. Analyzing test scores for more than five hundred thousand recruits between 1959 and 2004, Owen and his Danish counterparts found a gradual rise in performance from 1959 through the 1980s, a plateau into the early 1990s, and a definite decline between about 1994 and 2004.” Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men (Leonard Sax) Page 65
“It’s easy to see how these sex differences are relevant to education. Girls will do the homework because the teacher asked them to. Boys are more likely to do the homework only if it interests them. If it bores them, or if they think it’s “stupid,” they are more likely to ignore it. Researchers have consistently found that girls are significantly more likely than boys to do the assigned homework,25 in every subject.26 Even the highest-achieving boys are significantly less likely to do the homework than the comparably achieving girls.27 Girls at every age get better grades in school than boys do, in every subject—not because girls are smarter, researchers have found, but because girls try harder.28 Most girls would like to please the teacher, if possible. Most boys don’t care much about pleasing the teacher or about getting straight A’s—and boys who do try to please the teacher and who do care about their grades will lower their status in the eyes of the other boys.29 Girls are more likely to assess their work as their teachers do. Boys are less likely to care what the teacher thinks of their work. That divergence leads to an enduring paradox: at every age, girls do better in school, but are less satisfied with their achievements, compared with the boys.30 In 2006, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania reported that girls’ greater self-discipline and self-control—perhaps deriving from their greater motivation to please the teacher—appears to be a key distinguishing factor that has enabled girls to survive and thrive in the accelerated world of twenty-first-century education.” Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men(Leonard Sax) Page 26