So is reality. 
Posted on 12/03/2004 11:25:41 PM PST by atari
Girls are taking the nation's colleges by storm. They're streaming to campuses in greater numbers, earning better grades and graduating more often. The same phenomenal success shows in high schools, where girls dominate honor rolls, hold more student government spots and rake in most of the academic awards.
(Excerpt) Read more at story.news.yahoo.com ...
The problem is, once again, the one size fits all approach of our socialistic school system. Get the state out of the education business! With the internet and computing power getting better every day it should be much cheaper to educate a kid than ever, if only we'd let the market work its magic!
Well this will hurt women eventually. How many women want to marry a man that is a high school dropout or not college educated?
Oh well, works for me. I graduate college in 3 weeks.
She's the epitome of what an "equity feminist" should aspire to accomplish.
However, you won't hear much about his perspective, since it doesn't neatly dovetail with the prevailing, radical feminist orthodoxy.
One of the things I like most about freeping/campaigning is listening to the people on the street. After having spent some time recently at Ohio State and Ohio U., This is the issue of the next few years. The young ladies have the look of success and are republican. The young men have the look of outcasts and are leaning democrat.
Conventional wisdom has been the opposite of this. I hope the conservative powers get this message and do something for our young men.
Two tampons are travelling 3.8 m/s along the x axis with a uniform accell...
Maybe girls are being graded easier, somehow? There is certainly no natural reason girls should significantly outperform boys on academic matters, and no reason boys should significantly outperform girls on academic matters, either. Maybe the teachers are a bit 'easy' on the girls? :-)
Please read this article and my post #7.
>Maybe girls are being graded easier, somehow?
Beautiful girls get better grades for the same quality material.
Isaiah 3:12
This is a symptom of a Christless society.
Hah, that made me realize how my Honors classes really ARE predominantly female...
I think the reason that girls do better is because classes seem to be more group project oriented now. Girls communicate ideas with their peers and micromanage their assignments much better than boys. Boys do better on competitive based learning. Classes that encourage independent competition are ones that boys really take pride in.
Heaven knows, I am always a lot easier on women, especially ones I find attractive. :-)
BUMP! I think you've got it nailed.
You are 100% correct! Schools have been watered down. Makes it easier for EVERYBODY to graduate. Education is a right you know(rolls eyes). I learn far better when I need and got to know them subject.
"I learn far better when I need and got to know them subject."
Thats= got to know the subject.(where did that stupid m come from).
Here's my take.
My son is 16 and in his 2nd year of college...he is not a genius, but an average teenage boy. He was homeschooled starting in the third grade.
If he had not been homeschooled, who knows how he would have done in school, because when he was young he was a mover (probably would have been labeled ADD). He did much better reciting and learning math facts if he was up moving around while we were drilling.
He was an awful speller, would have flunked out of a spelling class in school, but I didn't pay it too much mind, and encouraged him to read.
He became an avid reader and about the time he hit 7th grade, he also became a better speller (I figure seeing the words in print, over and over finally paid off, whereas learning a spelling word by rote didn't work.)
And as far as encouraging a young boy to read, we found that if we picked a book we thought would interest him, and then read him the first chapter or so, he'd get hooked and then read the rest of the book himself...that worked like a charm when he was younger. Then as he got older, it wasn't necessary, he'd bring a book home and "devour" it on his own.
He hated to write, I didn't push it. When he was in 6th grade the less he had to write the better, as far as he was concerned. One day I asked him why he hated to write, and he told me it hurt his hand, so I bought a typing program, he learned to type and his writing improved dramatically (I wonder if boys sometimes hate to write because it's a small motor skill that is later to develop in some boys.)
His grade point in college is above 3.5, and after the spring term, he will have met his 60 hours of general requirements. He accomplishes all the work on his own, even though when he was younger he was the biggest procrastinator. I can almost guarantee that in a regular school setting he would have had problems.
I think my kid was an average boy. When he was younger, the teaching method had to be adapted to fit a "boy's" perspective and interests (he wouldn't read a book unless it was a "boy book").
As a boy matures, if the foundation has been laid, they can go back to the "usual" method of instruction, but at present, the "usual" education methods in schools are many times not effective for boys. Allow boys to be boys and they might see the trend they mention in this article turn around.
IMHO, the damage is being done in the early years.
And, although there is no way to do the study to document it, there is an obvious and strong bias in favor of real babes in high-level academic admissions, as well.
Classes are much less hierarchical and competitive.
Games with no winner have no salience to little boys.
I graduated third in my high school class of 250 in 1967. The top two were female. I graduated Medical School, they didn't.
You did a great job with your boy......kodos!
Verbal schmerble. Presumably the college track curriculum still includes traditional "boys" subjects like history, math and science. I'm 52. When I was in middle and high school, boys dominated academically in every class and every grade. A couple of the brighter girls were usually part of the advanced group, but they were never the leaders. Of course, boys also accounted for the worst of the worst, although we had plenty of dummies in skirts too.
I am perfectly willing to believe the schools of that era shorted girls. Since then, we have had several decades of girl-centered research and curriculum redesign. My hunch is that the difference today is simply instructional technique. But if schools today are missing the mark on boys -- as badly or worse than they once missed the mark on girls -- one wonders if there is, in fact, any happy medium. Perhaps single sex education needs to be tried on a large scale.
If you went to class day after day and heard that white males were no d*mn good, why would you want to come to class? It's time for US families with sons to demand college-level courses from their state-funded universities be put in internet form so the guys could earn a college degree while working at a skilled-labor job or in their own business. The latter is important because corporations fire employees willy-nilly as they pursue mergers or outsource, and your son better have something he can do between jobs.
As for your daughters, they will be college-graduate spinsters or worse. Oh well, you won't have to spend your money on grandkids. It's just great that liberals rule our society, isn't it?
I can say at the primary level, public school are primarily taught by women and the curriculum and activities are all geared towards the girls. They do exercises with Teddy Bears, or have "Sock Hops" so the girls can dress up. My thought is why do they do a segment on "How to build a rocket" or sharks, things that naturally engage boys. It's virtually nonexistant at my son's school. Mothers with daughters are much happier with the school than visa versa.
My kids are in college now, but one of the things that really annoyed me when they were in High School was the constant messages they were getting about programs for girls only to help girls get ahead. There weren't comparable programs for boys, and there weren't even comparable programs for mixed groups. Efforts that used to go to programs for anyone who was interested (which used to be mostly boys) were eliminated so the resources could go to girls, since 'boys already have all the advantages anyway'. The message most boys get in the classroom from often feminist teachers is that the boys are a bother - the girls are the real reason they are teaching. Then we're surprised at the results at the college level? I'm not!
Yes, you're right. I graduated public HS in 1968, our valedictorian and salutatorian were both girls but the next 8/10 and 32/50 were boys.
The #1 and #2 girls were acclaimed because they kicked ass (academically) to get there.
Schools are now organized around a "no winners" principle, from K to 12. The problem is, winning is what little boys are all about. Winning is the sugar that helps the medicine go down.
If you can't win at multiplication, all the grunt work makes no sense.
Somehow, though, it does make sense to little girls.
How is this any different from the past? When I was growing up in the 1970s, girls were always getting the best grades in school. In fact, I always tried to sit next to a girl so I could copy her answers!
They never steered me wrong.
Stop doping them in grammer school!
"...How many women want to marry a man that is a high school dropout or not college educated?..."
Well sonny, take it from me - a college education isn't everything a woman looks for in a man.
I am a college graduate. At age 47 I am back in school - for nursing. My husband isn't even a high school graduate - left school in 8th grade to work in his father's business. He is a registered master plumber. This man can fix anything. He is a loving, dependable man.
My niece is married to a lawyer. Who do you think he calls when he has a problem??????? In fact, my husband is the one that EVERYONE in the family calls.
Bottom line - you're gonna need more than a college education to find a good woman!
Of course, when the entire school system is bad, nobody gets ahead. A few nights ago, I saw a news report on a rash of violence in a Montgomery high school, and they should have put up subtitles so that the viewers would know what the kids were saying. My thought was "Yeah, these kids are going to make it big someday".
I can point to the event in my school district that sent it from being one of the best to one of the many mediocre. That would be when they discontinued the intermediate classes. We had Honors, Intermediate and then Regulars. When Intermediate was done away with. The students from those classes had to either go to Honors classes or Regular classes. Those that went to Honors were miserable and struggled to pass, if they even passed. Most likely they were demoted to Regulars. Those that went to Regulars became bored and unchallenged. Causing them to be left behind, since the teachers have to spend so much time on the slower students.
Technique and the combining of large mixed learning ability has a lot to do with the problems we face. Lack of parental involvement in some students school work plays a role, too. But not as much as the first two reasons. Elementary Schools, were learning the Basics is paramount, are increasingly becoming watered down. This causes great problems when students reach Junior/High School. In which they are now faced with other courses, plus extracurricular activities. Is it surprising that so many students are so weak in the Basics by the time they reach College?
I imagine that the reason my school district discontinued the Intermediate classes was due to lack of teachers. This was during a time period were the student population grew sharply. Of course the student population has since decreased sharply a few years after I graduated, but the district still claims that there is not enough teachers or money.
You are correct. A family friend was a math prof at a university near us. He actually had quotas to follow when it came to flunking students. He had to keep adjusting his grades to not fail so many. He taught calculus. Math is so cut and dry, you either do the problem right or you don't. I don't want an engineer who passed with a C at 50% to design the next plane I am on. Dumbing down academics hurts everyone, when will society and government realize that not everyone can or should get a degree. I also believe that most people who flunk out probably didn't deserve to get in anyway, and 25 years ago wouldn't have.
So is reality.
"My son is 16 and in his 2nd year of college...he is not a genius, but an average teenage boy"
He is way above average and sounds like a fine young man.
As a concerned parent you did a wonderful job-however far too often there is not even one concerned parent in the home. The gangsta' coolness and the "uneducated rebel" has become a standard of manhood that is pushed by the left and the media.
At the Universtiy of Western Carolina we call it the "Twinkie Factor" our immigrant profesors bed over backwards and have even been caught giving answers to the "Twinkies". The reason we call them that word is that they are soft...white...sweet......
Here's the first hint of who's actually writing this article: a conflicted feminist with a guilt trip who's attempting to divert attention away from the real source of the problem. Well, no missy, the problem starts in the classroom with feminist teachers creating a hostile, anti-male learning environment. Believe it or not, men have been able to read and write for centuries -even designed things like nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers, and they wrote the technical manuals for them. No, men's learning abilities have not changed, but the learning environment has changed.
What's clearly needed now is reform of the environment that has created this situation. There needs to be a movement to put men in the classrooms K-9, and the removal of the anti-male policies that have created this situation: sexual harassment policies, the number one tool of feminist witchcraft .
My old texts would have bulleted the item followed by a simple explanation. Get and go. Instead I had to follow a convoluted logic path to confirn what was should have been intuative. I was more than a little torqued so I checked the rest of the book. It followed the same pattern. The whole text was written by and for broads.
Now I've always felt that I might be a lesbian trapped in a man's body but that experience really gave me a sexual identity crisis. I had to translate from female to normal and piss sitting down before I could get a simple answer. I should have just assumed that I was right and left the toilet seat up.
I firmly believe the Anti-smoking lobby has also hurt "men" entering the classroom.
All my best teachers were smokers.
I like your answer.
And as to a college education versus a trade, I read an article a few weeks ago saying that since many areas are doing away with tech schools, in the future, we will have a shortage of tradesmen. It is not a stretch to predict that tradesman will make more income than college students with certain BA's that have no marketability.
Looks like Ritalin and other mind-altering drugs are have a big effect here.
This is already happening. Instead of parents spending $50,000 (or more) to send their kids to college to get a useless major, they would be better off putting that money towards teaching them a trade and as start-up capital for a business.
You would love a couple of autobiographical books by Nobel prize winning physicist Richard Feynman. He makes many interesting observations about how poorly science and math texts are written and how the memorization of information without truly comprehending how one can apply the knowledge has rendered a group of uneducated graduates. I wish I could remember the best one's title, but the second one was "What do You Care What other People Think?" They're both great reads. Matthew Broderick and his mother made one into a movie which was a complete insult to the spirit of the book.
It is disturbing that the issue of the lack of "qualified spouses" is even mentioned. Are we to feel sorry for the spouses of soldiers who have had their legs blown off in Iraq, or for the soldiers themselves? The problem the author sees is that women do not have adequate lifetime meal tickets available. And they may not be able to find a suitable man to holler at every day. This shows how perverse our society is. Smith, Bryn Mawr, Holyoke (thought not Vassar anymore) are single sex female schools. Although I think this article is a bit overblown, I actually believe boys still score higher on the math SAT and equal on the verbal. After Title IX women will have equal distraction from academic efforts and probably their performance will decline.
"...in the future, we will have a shortage of tradesmen..."
You are right, of course. My husband says his employers can't find anyone qualified to hire. There just aren't many new tradesmen coming into the field.
I am in a diploma program for nurses. I'll finish my degree (added to my previous one) after I am working as an RN. We have many people in our program that have bachelors degrees in other areas - that they can't find jobs in their field, or make any money.
"...in the future, we will have a shortage of tradesmen..."
You are right, of course. My husband says his employers can't find anyone qualified to hire. There just aren't many new tradesmen coming into the field.
I am in a diploma program for nurses. I'll finish my degree (added to my previous one) after I am working as an RN. We have many people in our program that have bachelors degrees in other areas - that they can't find jobs in their field, or make any money.
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