Wednesday, December 5, 2012

This Is Really No Surprise

Female Teachers Give Male Pupils Lower Marks, Claims Study

The most common sexism practiced in the academy is that of female educators vs. male students.  This was a problem twenty years ago when I attempted to address it from my administrator's position in a private co-ed boarding school, where ideas and perspectives from male students were very often dismissed by female teachers as being "regressive" or "morally retarded".  This was in the classrooms of Spanish and physics teachers, mind you, not ethics or philosophy. 

One day, a first year English teacher came to me in some distress because "the boys aren't thinking the right way."  "About what?" I asked.  "About the world", she replied.  "I can't make them think correctly about how the world works."

"How about if you just teach them how to diagram sentences?" was my rather shocking response, given the gob-smacked reaction I got.

The other disturbing issue is how medicated boys are as compared to girls. Boys acting like boys was so alarming to some of the faculty that they advised medication to "correct" the problem. Want to know what I had to keep track of as an administrator? Check this, as reconstructed mostly from memory:

Adderal amphetamine
Adderall X R amphetamine
Concerta methylphenidate
Daytrana methylphenidate patch
Desoxyn methamphetamine hydrochloride
Dexedrine dextroamphetamine
Dextrostat dextroamphetamine
Focalin dexmethylphenidate
Focalin XR dexmethylphenidate
Metadate ER methylphenidate
Metadate CD methylphenidate
Methylin methylphenidate
Ritalin methylphenidate
Ritalin SR methylphenidate
Ritalin LA methylphenidate
Strattera atomoxetine
Vyvanselis dexamfetamine dimesylate

Yep, that's post-modern education for you.  Some of the boys would come to sports so soaked in Ritalin that they were able to do little more than play home plate.  I mean, the actual home plate, not the position of catcher.