LET BOYS BE BOYS

Jack is ten years old. Jack is bright and intelligent. Jack comes into class every morning and plonks himself down behind his desk. Jack has high hopes. His hopes don’t last long because Jack is soon bored, desperately, silently bored. Jack will not protest. He is an ideal pupil. He sits there quietly most of the day doing what he is told. He doesn’t enjoy much of what he is told to do but he accepts this is the way things are. School is the great let-down. The excited little boy who let go his mum’s hand all these years ago, who trotted into school a bit nervous but keen to learn lots of new things has faded into the ten-year-old who puts up with school, who waits for the morning break, for lunchtime, for the afternoon bell, so he can get out of the place and enjoy being a boy.

Listen to Sue Palmer - former headteacher and author of 21st Century Boys - it is a biological necessity that boys run about, take risks, swing off things and compete with each other to develop properly. “If they can't, a lot of them find it impossible to sit still, focus on a book or wield a pencil,” she says, “so their behaviour is considered ‘difficult', they get into trouble and tumble into a cycle of school failure.”

Boys are three times as likely as girls to need extra help with reading at primary school, and 75 per cent of children supposedly suffering from ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) are male. The majority of these boys supposedly suffering from ADHD find it hard to pay attention because they are given so little that is, for them as boys, of much interest. It is not that they have little interest; it is that their interest is not being engaged, often by the content of what they are studying and more often by the ways in which they are asked to learn. Get their hearts and their minds will follow. Or get their minds and their hearts will follow. You have to get at least one of these or you get nothing.

Male and female brains are not identical. Boys tend to be ‘systematisers’ while girls are ‘empathisers’. Girls cry at the ending of ET while boys want to get on the spacecraft and figure out how it works. Girls want to explain how the character in the story is feeling; boys want to get on with what happens next. This explains why boys generally are less keen on reading and comprehension, and lag behind girls in literacy. “But now,” says Palmer, “apart from the very bright ones, boys aren't even doing better at maths and science.” And it is not because the boys have less interest in maths and science, it is because boys nowadays are generally taught as if they were girls because teaching this way is easier, cheaper, and teachers feel more in control. Even most male teachers suppress their instincts, the boredom, the grind, and get on with it – a synonym for getting through with it. “We are losing boys at a rate of knots, particularly in literacy,” says Palmer, “because at some point in the past 30 years, masculinity became an embarrassment.”

Most schools, especially junior but increasingly secondary, are not ‘boy-friendly’. Classroom environments are girl-friendly, coursework appeals to girls, modular examinations suit the way girls like to study. Girls don’t mind taking the modules again and again until they get the grades they desire; boys prefer the risk of all-or-nothing exams where they can get the grades they need and move on. But boys are finding it harder and harder to tick the right boxes because the boxes are largely devised by females to suit females.

Step into any junior school and you are in a world of women. Step into most staff rooms in secondary schools and you will be struck by the number of women. Count the number of teaching assistants in any of these schools and ninety nine per cent of the adults will be women. Schools in the United Kingdom have become increasingly feminized. There are seven times as many women primary school teachers as men. As a head teacher, Sue Palmer remembers making her reception teacher remove all the cloakroom pegs that depicted tractors for boys and bunnies for girls. “The belief was that you were shaped by your environment, and it was the teacher's responsibility to ‘socialise' boys away from their natural inclinations and to encourage girls to study traditionally male subjects such as physics and technology,” she says.

Every subject in every school should be available for both girls and boys. That is not an issue is. The issue is that the ways in which subjects are taught at generally weighed against the ways boys learn. The catastrophe of the 70s and the feminist movement is that boys were not only expected to behave like girls but were expected to learn like girls despite the huge cognitive differences in the way that the genders actually perceive and interpret the world. For example, younger boys like to fight, but it’s rarely an act of aggression; it’s the way they get to know each other; it’s social behaviour; it’s puppies jumping on each other because that’s the way puppies instinctively behave. Of course teachers should not stand back and let boys knock seven bells out of each other, but neither should they always seek to intervene when boys are rough-housing and forced them back into the passive behaviour of negotiation, compromise and natter favoured by females.

Let boys play conkers. Let boys climb trees. Let boys play football in the back streets. Let boys out of your sight. Do not teach boys to fear every stranger they encounter. Let boys seek adventure. Let them play unsupervised. Let them take risks. Bring competition back to schools. Make the competition fun but everyone does not have to be a winner. That’s not the way things are in ‘real’ life; it’s not the way things should be in schools.

Celebrate what it means to be a boy, to be male, and also teach them that some things do not come as naturally to them as they do to girls just as some ‘boy things’ do not come naturally to girls. Get boys – and girls – outdoors to learn when it’s appropriate. Teach them while strolling round the playground, better still while strolling round the local park. If they want to stretch out on the carpet in the classroom while reading, let them, encourage them. An over-orderly classroom is bound to be a deadly dull classroom. And deadly-dull classrooms produce deadly-dull children, especially boys.


THINGS TO KEEP IN MIND WHEN TEACHING BOYS

1. Build in tactile/kinesthetic opportunities when teaching boys. Give boys the opportunity to touch the materials. Use good visuals to reinforce auditory presentations. Use colour and novelty in your instruction as a way to wake up the brain and enhance learning.

2. Boys learn best when they are interested in the content of what they are learning. For boys, process follows content. This does not mean pandering to boys; it does mean exploiting their interests to help them to learn. Make sure boys have enough time to process the information, especially when they have been listening to information. Boys like to memorise facts; take advantage of this trait.

3. Keep in mind that boys typically have a shorter attention span than girls. Don’t talk at boys or take too long to explain things. Make sure you have talk ‘breaks’ that give them time to process the information. Build in opportunities for movement in the class. Don’t expect boys to sit still and listen for as long as the girls – they can’t and they won’t. Talk ‘breaks’ also lower levels of disruption.

4. Boys tend to be more aggressive in temperament than girls. Channel this energy productively. This also has implications for pairings and groupings. Keep in mind that boys are less accurate at “reading” faces than girls. A ‘look’ may be sufficient for the girls; the same ‘look’ may not register with the boys at all. Remember girls ‘whisper’; boys ‘shout’.

5. Boys in general tend to mature at a slower rate than girls. Give boys reasonable access to male role models; boys need to know that being ‘masculine’ is a ‘good’. Remember it is much easier to damage the self-esteem of boys (and men) than girls.

6. Boys make up at least 2/3 of the children on medication. Of children diagnosed as hyperactive, over 90% are boys. Boys make up 80-90% of discipline referrals. Boys make up over 70% of students classified as special needs. Draw the appropriate conclusions and good practice from the ‘facts’.

7. Be cautious about accepting absolutes concerning gender differences. All boys and all girls are individuals. Treat them as individuals, not as representatives of their gender.