Comment by tokenadult | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tokenadult | Hacker News Reader

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Yours is an interesting comment, but none of it is responsive to the submitted article's concern about differences between boys and girls in school. I have actually lived in another country, and I am aware by direct observation that that country has BOTH higher academic achievement by school pupils than the United States and pervasive recess periods during the school day when young children get outdoors and exercise. I think that United States school officials need to stop believing legends about what goes on in other countries and actually

a) OBSERVE what the school day looks like in other countries,

http://www.amazon.com/Smart-Schools-David-Perkins/dp/0028740...

b) analyze textbooks and teaching practices that produce superior results

http://www.amazon.com/Knowing-Teaching-Elementary-Mathematic...

c) take careful note of classroom practices that respect learners and help learners learn deeply and not just superficially,

http://timssvideo.com/timss-video-study

and

d) systematically train teachers in effective teaching techniques.

http://teachlikeachampion.com/

Boys and girls, all over the world, are exposed to many different kinds of school schedules and school practices, and it is the basic procedure of educational science to carefully observe the different combinations of home, societal, and school influences on children and try to figure out what helps learners have the best results.

I have to second this. For instance, everyone in education and policy circles these days is talking about Finnish education. Besides the fact that Finnish schools make sure every student eats enough and teachers have a lot of autonomy to shape lessons to student needs, students get something like 50 minutes of recess at lunch and less formal breaks every hour or so during the day. The school days are often shorter, too.

(How I envied my Finnish cousins when I saw that they got to take an hour or two of nature class every week and sometimes they went home at 1 pm and sometimes they went home at 2:30... depending on the class schedule, which repeated weekly but was different every day!)

The article's suggestions for instructional activities that benefit boys outline projects that also benefit girls. The reason boys are disciplined more than girls when both are bored half to death is that many boys hit each other and run around while many girls are "nice" and just write notes, doodle, or sleep, staying in their seats as required. I say this as a woman who brought a pillow to class in high school and was seen as a stellar student.

Your point at the end is so true. I was reading that list of examples and thinking "Why are they putting the emphasis on boys? Every single one of these looks like something I'd have enjoyed in school."

A good example of bored boy behavior vs. bored girl behavior: one time in a personal finance management class, we played BINGO with elbow macaroni as markers. (The questions were really simple so the game was neither fun nor educational.) Quite a few guys in the class took to stomping on their macaroni and finding other creative ways to crush it. I was busy getting them all to stand up as little arches and looking for interesting ways to arrange them. I was just as bored but less disruptive.

I don't know how familiar you all are with the Montessori method, but I spent Preschool through 5th grade in one and it worked out quite well for me. Basically I had a list of things that needed to get done every week, so I would get them done on Monday and spend the rest of the week researching lasers, learning BASIC in the computer lab, etc.

I think unstructured learning time is hugely lacking in the traditional school setting.

Both of these comments - just changed my view of how I should teach my child and what their school should be like.

wow. Epiphany

I'm so glad my elementary school here in the US gave us 2, 45min (~10:30 and 2pm) and an hour long lunch/recess period each day. It really made things much more bearable; except Spanish, it was right before the afternoon recess

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