Page 12 - BackToSchool2018

12C — EL DORADO NEWS-TIMES Monday, August 6, 2018
West Side Christian School
Stereotypes can hold boys back in school, too
By William Sharp, Wheelock College
Editor’s note: The Conversation is an independent and nonprofit source of news, analysis and commentary from academic experts.
It’s that time of the year. Summer vacations are almost over.
For most kids, this time of summer has been about finishing the readings and completing the packets that were handed out to them as summer work. As a result, school often conjures up ideas about reading, writing and arithmetic (the “three R’s”).
But this approach is both problematic and myopic. As pressures to meet standards in the three R’s increase, other areas fall off the radar. Having an answer to a question becomes more important than knowing how to think about it.
As a psychoanalyst in private practice and a classroom teacher, I know that the time of transitioning back to school is crucial for both parents and children. This can also be a time to support the emotional development of children.
Sometimes just one hour of “emotional tutoring” – attending to social and emotional development – can be more efficient than spending hours tutoring. It can remove blocks to learning and open up energy for higher-order thinking.
So what can we do as parents and educators to get there?
The pressure of the reading, writing,
arithmetic
There are 180 days of school, on average, in U.S. public schools. Ask a teacher how many days are spent administering tests and preparing for said tests, and you might wonder how anything else gets covered. I was supervising a school- based clinician who worked on Thursdays and couldn’t see his clients for six straight weeks because of test prep and actual testing.
Peter Taubman, a professor of education at Brooklyn College, in his book Disavowed Knowledge, describes how today’s students get treated as though they were just animals that need to be trained and told what to repeat, as opposed to building their “curiosity, attunement, analysis, and a focus on creating conditions such that the ...student can generate material for further elaboration... .”
Even the Council on Basic Education (CBE) report notes:
“Of particular concern... are signs that the growing attention to mathematics, reading, writing, and science may well be coming at the expense of other academic subjects, including the arts and foreign language.”
The fact is, we are feeling creatures first. Pressures and obsessions to perform in one area of learning, growth and development can lead to neglect in others.
The start of school is a time when mixed emotions
need to be processed. A commercial from the 1990s for an office supply store captures this. With background music from a popular singer – Andy Williams’ “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year” – the scene showed two sad children next to a jubilant dad pushing a shopping cart around a store collecting school supplies.
The commercial serves as a reminder that the start of a school year has as much to do with emotions as it does with other subjects.
The importance of social and emotional
learning
Trying to only accentuate the positive or force learning before a child is emotionally ready ignores what neuroscience and psychology tell us about the brain: we are ruled by emotions and not reason. Briefly, all information to our rational brains must pass through our limbic system, which is our feeling brain.
If we become emotionally hijacked – that is, if our feelings become unregulated – even the best-made rational plan can be inaccessible. The stress of daily coursework can lead to such emotional hijacking.
That is where Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) can come into play. SEL is learning how to understand ones own feelings and making good decisions to get what you want out of life. Both
See B2S, Page 15C
By David Miller, Northwestern University
Editor’s note: The Conversation is an independent and nonprofit source of news, analysis and commentary from academic experts.
By age 6, girls are less likely than boys to view their own gender as brilliant and express interest in activities described as for “really, really smart” children, according to 2017 research published in Science.
Many major media outlets reported these findings. Most of the coverage, however, overlooked another key finding from the same study: Boys were less likely to say their own gender gets top grades in school.
The beliefs of children matter because they could shape students’ interests and achievement over time, other research suggests. For instance, one 2013 experiment found that telling elementary school children “girls do better than boys” in school made boys – but not girls – perform worse on a series of academic tests. These expectations can work both ways: When researchers told children that boys and girls would perform the same, boys’ academic performance improved.
There are real and persistent gender achievement gaps in the U.S. For
instance, boys tend to get worse grades than girls, but girls are few among top scorers on standardized math tests. While much research has studied how stereotypes about achievement can make girls underperform, the gaps where boys do worse have often been historically overlooked. But stereotypes can harm boys too – just in different ways.
Who gets the grades, who’s super smart?
In the Science study on children’s views about brilliance, developmental psychologists asked 144 children aged 5 to 7 years a series of questions about school achievement. For instance, children had to guess which of two unfamiliar boys and two unfamiliar girls “gets the best grades in school.”
Children tended to favor their own gender, but boys did so to a lesser extent. Among 7-year-olds, 79 percent of girls selected girls as the better student, but 55 percent of boys selected boys.
These results sharply contrasted with those about brilliance. When asked to guess who was “really, really smart,” girls instead expressed less confidence in their gender. Among 7-year-olds, 55 percent of girls selected girls as being
See TYPES, Page 15C
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Back to school? A crucial time for kids’ social and emotional development
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