Archive for the ‘Teaching boys’ Category

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Maths is Taught So Poorly

February 13, 2012

I realise that what I am writing is a gross generalisation, but I believe that maths is generally taught in a very abstract and monotonous way. No wonder the students are not benefitting from maths instruction at the primary level. Traditional maths teaching involves worksheets, a mindless array of algorithms and plenty of other rote styled goodies.

The tragedy of it all is that maths can be taught in a completely different way. I find the basic skills of maths the most refreshing and creatively exciting subject to teach. The fact that maths is a composite of everyday skills means it translates wonderfully to problem solving activities.

The other day, whilst teaching ordering numbers up to 4 digits, I got my 8-year-old students into groups, each given a particular airline to reasearch. The groups had to find the 3 lowest airfares for a return domestic trip between certain dates and times, These prices were then compared and ordered from least expensive to most expensive. Isn’t that the whole point of ordering and comparing numbers?

Whilst engaging in the exercise, the students enjoyed working in groups, competing for a bargain against other groups, learning how to book airline tickets and simply use their imagination by pretending they were actually intending in going on the flight.

Isn’t that more interesting than a worksheet that has numbers on it to order?

This is why I am not at all surprised that British students leave Primary school ‘with the maths ability of 7-year-old’:

An analysis of last year’s SATs results has shown 27,500 11-year-olds are going on to secondary school with the numeracy skills of children four years their junior.

The figures equate to a staggering one in 20 of the total of those leaving primary school. Boys perform worse than girls, with 15,600 behind in their ability.

Separate statistics published two weeks ago also revealed that one in three GCSE pupils fail to get at least a grade C in maths.

The disclosure follows the launch of a Daily Telegraph campaign – Make Britain Count – to highlight the scale of the nation’s mathematical crisis and provide parents with tools to boost their children’s numeracy skills.

It comes amid concerns that schoolchildren are less likely to study maths to a high standard in England, Wales and Northern Ireland than in most other developed nations.

I appeal to Primary teachers to give the text-book a rest and don’t be afraid to try new and exciting ideas to engage your maths students.

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Posted in Maths, Teaching boys, Teaching Girls | Leave a Comment »

Reading “Adds a Year to Children’s Education’

February 8, 2012

I’m not sure where Mr. Gibb gets his measurements from, but there is no doubt that our children are not investing nearly enough time to reading. Similarly, if children were to radically change their reading habits, strong improvement would surely follow:

Nick Gibb, the School Minister, said that reading books for just half an hour a day could be worth up to 12 months’ extra schooling by the age of 15.

Speaking ahead of today’s announcement, Mr Gibb said: “Children should always have a book on the go. The difference in achievement between children who read for half an hour a day in their spare time and those who do not is huge – as much as a year’s education by the time they are 15.

He added: “There is a group of children who can read but won’t read – the reluctant readers.

Currently, as many as one-in-six children are still struggling to read when they leave primary school, figures show. One-in-10 boys aged 11 has a reading age no better a seven-year-old.

Failure to pick up the basics at a young age is believed to have serious long-term consequences. A recent international report showed that almost four-in-10 teenagers in England never read for pleasure – considerably more than in other countries.

As teachers, we are responsible not only for seeing to it that our students read at home, but also that they grow to appreciate books. It is essential that our primary teachers choose relevant, engaging books to read to their students whenever the time permits.

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Posted in Literacy, Teaching boys | Leave a Comment »

The Unique Challange of Teaching Boys

January 31, 2012

There is no doubt in my mind that teaching boys is a more difficult proposition than teaching girls. It is also clear to me that boys have suffered from a traditional classroom setup which has proven far less successful in engaging them than it has for girls.

Currently in Australia, local television station ABC1 is showing a brilliant series entitled, Gareth Malone’s Extraordinary School For Boys. Gareth is a choir master and isn’t qualified to teach, but takes on an 8 week trial with a group of underperforming boys in an attempt to improve their literacy skills.

Mr. Malone draws on his three rules for teaching boys:

1. Make the work feel like play.

2. Have a real sense of competition

3. Have a real sense of risk.

I have just finished watching the first episode and fell in love with his unique and creative style. I also enjoyed watching his colleagues putting down his methods, clearly a byproduct of feeling threatened by this novice.

Below is episode 1 in its entirety. All episodes are available on YouTube.

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Posted in Literacy, Teaching boys | 4 Comments »

Boys and Reading: The Constant Struggle

May 18, 2011

The results of a recent survey found that boys don’t enjoy reading and fail to get past 100 pages of a classroom text.  Should we be surprised?  Boys have been disconnected from reading for years, and the question has to be asked – what have we done about it.

The findings are an indictment on how inflexible we are at altering the way we teach:

Many secondary school boys do not have the stamina to read beyond the 100th page of a book, research suggests.

Teachers also revealed that classics of English literature, such as those by Jane Austen, are putting boys off reading.

Some 70% of the 500 teachers surveyed for publishers Pearson said boys had switched off by the 100 page mark.

This is leading many teachers to ditch longer novels in favour of shorter books, it adds.

Teachers were asked to identify points where boys would switch off in class when novels were being read.

A quarter said that the interest cut-off point happened within the first few pages of a book.

A further 22% said interest waned within the first 50 pages, while a further quarter identified the 100 page mark.

Nearly a third of the teachers questioned said boys were put off before the book had even been opened, if they saw it had more than 200 pages.

According to the research, Shakespeare plays including The Tempest, Macbeth and A Midsummer’s Night Dream were particularly unpopular, as was Steinbeck’s 1930s classic, Of Mice and Men.

The reluctance to read could partly explain the achievement gap between boys and girls.

Last year 85% of 11-year-old girls reached the expected level in English for their age compared to 76% of boys. In reading, the gender gap was even more stark at 79% for girls and 64% for boys.

According to children’s organisation Unesco, the biggest single indicator of a child’s future success at school is whether they read for pleasure.

The research is timed to coincide with the launch of a new series of books called Heroes aimed at secondary school pupils which aims to switch boys back on to reading and get them past the crucial 100-page mark.

Best-selling author Frank Cottrell Boyce, consultant editor on the series, said: “Pleasure can’t be taught. Pleasure can only be shared.”

He added that boys should be started on shorter books.

Jonathan Douglas, director of the National Literacy Trust, said its research showed that boys lag behind girls not just in literacy skills, but in the amount they read and in the extent to which they enjoy reading.

“This gets worse as children get older. This is a vital issue and one the National Literacy Trust is working hard to address. More needs to be done to engage boys’ and building on their own interests.”

He added that publishers had a crucial role to play in this.

On the subject of publishers, an author who recently read my yet to be published manuscript, commented that had I made my main character a girl instead of a boy, I would have an easier time convincing publishers to publish the book.  She said that since boys don’t read, a girl would have been a more appropriate choice. The comment shocked me.  At no stage did I ever envisage the book to be strictly a book for boys.  I always thought it would be of universal appeal.  But apparently publishing companies don’t see it that way.

Shakespeare and Steinbeck are wonderful, but were never intended to be ones first foray into literature.  Is it so wrong to choose something of lesser literary acclaim for something more contemporary?  The sad reality is, teachers tend not to gravitate to Steinbeck and Shakespeare for their own leisure reading and don’t have strong connection to the texts the curriculum requires them to teach.  For a teacher to effectively inspire their students to love reading, they must love reading.  For students to read beyond page 100, the teacher needs to do more than set reading homework – they need to show the class how enjoyable and meaningful the book is to them.

When I read my manuscript to kids, I am overwhelmed by how much they enjoy the characters and situations.  I love how they connect with the main character and his issues and are able to relate to what he is going through.  Somebody once asked whether the kids enjoy it, not so much for the quality of the writing, but because the author, who has such a deep connection to the material, reads it out with such enthusiasm and joy.

Maybe so.  But isn’t that the key?  For boys to enjoy reading, they must see that their teacher enjoying it too.  If that means dispense with the classics and let the teacher decide what texts to introduce to the classroom – so be it.

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Posted in Literacy, Teaching boys | 6 Comments »

Girls Performing Much Better in the Classroom

May 1, 2011

It is no surprise that girls are out doing boys in the classroom.  This has been the trend for quite some time.  But it should focus our energies on how we can teach boys in a more effective manner.

Girls are teaching their male classmates a lesson, blitzing them in almost every subject in Victoria’s classrooms.

Details of NAPLAN tests conducted last May also show Melbourne students narrowly outscore their country cousins, while those with highly educated or professional parents get the best marks.

Girls scored better than boys in 19 of the 20 categories measured in Years 3, 5, 7 and 9.

Nationwide, boys fell behind in almost all categories. Overall, Victoria’s students placed second in half the categories and lead the nation in three.

Year 9 boys were cause for the most worry – 15 per cent failed to meet the writing standard. However, their struggles matched those across Australia, meaning Victoria was still the best in the subject.

There are matters I would like to raise on this topic:

1.  We must do more to engage our boys.  Whether it’s a lack of male teachers or a teaching style that doesn’t work as well with boys, we must get to the heart of the problem and help mend the disparity.

2.  It is absolutely mind-boggling that in todays age we do not have more women in high positions and on multi-national company boards.  It is insane that we even need to talk about employing a quota system to get more female C.E.O’s.  Whilst it isn’t always the choice of women to sacrifice other aspects of their lives for a time-consuming and stressful career, there are many who are keen to get as far as they can go up the corporate ladder.  The argument that positions should be filled by those who are most qualified and capable is true.  However, that should result in females overtaking males in these leadership positions, because they are proving how much better they are in critical areas of learning and thinking.  Unfortunately, I suspect competency has nothing to do with it.

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Posted in Teaching boys, Teaching Girls | 1 Comment »

The Cost of Sedating Our Boys

February 20, 2011

I recently came across an interesting opinion piece by Elizabeth Farrelly in the Sydney Morning Herald.  Whilst I wouldn’t go as far as to connect the lack of representation of male teachers to the number of boys on Ritalin, some of her points do resonate.  There is no doubt that Ritalin does have a place, but with the numbers of children (boys in particular) taking the drug climbing markedly from year to year, it is more than fair to raise some strong concerns.  Ms. Farrelly certainly does just that:

The Ritalin wars are usually treated as just another tussle between the pharmaceutical companies and the rest, but is there something else going on here as well? Is it part of a more generalised, covert war on boyhood? //

Thirty years ago Australian primary schools employed five male teachers for every four females. By 2006 there was one male teacher for every four females. This overwhelming feminisation of primary education, and of culture generally, has made boy-type behaviour stuff to frown upon. Are we in danger of seeing boyhood itself as a disorder?

When Christopher Lane, author of Shyness: How Normal Behaviour Became a Sickness, quoted a psychoanalyst saying “We used to have a word for sufferers of ADHD; we called them boys”, he probably did not expect it to become the most famous line of his book.

What was once introversion is now “avoidant personality disorder”, nervousness is “social anxiety disorder” (SAD) or dating anxiety disorder (DAD) and so on. It’s not that these disorders don’t exist, says Lane, a Guggenheim fellow studying the ethics of psychopharmacology, but that our definitions are so broad that the entire mysterious subconscious is reduced to chemical balance, and any deviation looks like disease.

Why, he asks, is ADHD so commonly diagnosed in boys? Is it new behaviour? Or just a new attitude to that behaviour?

But why the gender imbalance, and why now? We know that boys tend to be late maturers anyway, but Scott concedes there are also social and perceptual factors at play. Teachers with “less structured” teaching style and “more distracting” classroom environments, he says, yield many more of his clients than their more disciplined (my word) colleagues.

Whereas ADHD girls “sit quietly in a corner”, the boys are more disruptive and more noticed, more referred, more medicated. And although much the same is true of ”normal” boys and girls, the upshot is that ”girl” is a norm to which boys are expected to strive. Scott sees it as “an unintended consequence of how society operates”.

But consequences this important should be either clearly intentional, if girlifying boys is really what we want, or remedied. Personally, I reckon the crazily creative are types we’ll need more of, rather than fewer of, in the future, even if they are male.

The above are just some snippets from this very thought-provoking opinion piece.  It has never sat well with me that such a large proportion of children taking Ritalin are boys.  Whilst I wouldn’t go as far as to blame it on few male teachers, it does make you wonder whether we are getting it right.

It seems like society may be letting boys down very badly.

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Posted in Children and Medication, Male Teachers, Teaching boys | 3 Comments »

Breast-Feeding Benefits Academic Achievement

December 21, 2010

Findings from a recent study in the journal ‘Pediatrics’, show that breast-feeding infants for at least six months appears to give kids’ an advantage in school.

This is not a new finding in itself.  However, what was of particular interest, was that boys appeared to benefit the most.

The researchers, from the University of Western Australia in Perth, have followed 2,868 children since the early ’90s. The study showed that, at age 10, boys who were breast-fed for six months or longer scored higher in math, reading and spelling compared with boys who were breast-fed for less than six months. Girls who were breast-fed for at least six months showed a small improvement in reading. The researchers controlled for other factors that could influence school performance, such as family income and education and how often the child was read to.

There were two reasons given for the link between breast-fed babies and academic performance:

1.  Breast milk is rich in long-chain, polyunsaturated fatty acids that are critical to brain development. It’s not clear why boys showed the largest gains from being breast-fed, but the authors explain that male babies are known to be more vulnerable in infancy than females. They speculate that breast-feeding “accelerates the rate of maturation in boys.
2.  Boys may also benefit more from the mother-child relationship facilitated by breast-feeding. “A number of studies have revealed that male infants are more reliant than female infants on maternal attention and encouragement for the acquisition of cognitive and language skills,” the authors wrote.

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Posted in Child Development, Teaching boys | Leave a Comment »

We Can Do More!

December 20, 2010

Teaching boys especially, requires greater investment and further innovation on the part of the teacher.  Boys are falling way behind, and there is no point sitting on our hands.  We can’t let it get any worse.

According to figures obtained by the BBC’s Today programme, one in 11 boys begin secondary school with the reading skills of an average seven-year-old.

Educational experts point out that once children reach secondary school age, it can be very difficult for them to catch up to the reading levels of their peers.

Speaking to the BBC, education secretary Michael Gove said it is “unacceptable” that children leave primary school without adequate reading skills.

“We want to ensure that those schools where children are not being taught to read are tackled,” he stressed.

Teaching kids to read is a fundamental role of the Primary teacher.  Since I joined the blogosphere, I have encountered brilliant blogs from all around the world that has informed me, shared ideas and strategies and opened my eyes to new technologies to introduce to the classroom.  This kind of collaboration has such a profound effect on teaching and learning and has helped me become a better educator.

That’s why I think we can address issues such as those quoted above together.

Let’s work cooperatively in trying to improve literacy and numeracy, allow our students the opportunity to express themselves and think creatively and let us ensure that both girls and boys are achieving.


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Posted in Literacy, Teaching boys | 2 Comments »

Is it Really a Crisis when so Few Teachers are Male?

December 8, 2010

Two recent articles written in the last month discuss the scarcity of male teachers at Elementary school level.  On the 15th of November an article appearing in the Vancouver Sun, called the shortfall a “crisis.”

Where are the models for young boys? A new Canadian study reveals that only one out of 20 elementary school teachers are male — and the main reason men avoid these young grades is they don’t want to be accused of being pedophiles.

Just today, The Global Times, discussed the same issue – this time in Beijing.

Elementary schools in Beijing are hoping to recruit more male teachers, as there are not many men teaching these grades, and some primary schools do not have any male teachers on their staff …

Same problem as Canada, but a different reason is given:

One survey shows that university graduates who are qualified teachers are more interested in working in secondary schools, which is one reason for the imbalance. Another reason is that male teachers apparently often change jobs.

As a male 4th Grade teacher, I know from experience how outnumbered we are in Australia as well.  I was one of very few males at University and our school currently has only one other male teacher (a part-time sport teacher).  In fact, since it’s just the two of us, there is no male staff toilets at our school.  Instead, we have to use the disabled toilets!  To make matters worse, our Principal invites the school accountant and bus driver to take part in the staff photo to make it look like there is more male staff members.

I never wanted to teach secondary school because I wanted to spend a large block of time with the one group instead of having multiple classes.  I feel it’s more effective in helping make a difference.  Similarly, I enjoy being able to teach a host of different subjects, rather than just one or two subject areas.

Whilst I wish I could say I’m not concerned about being accused of  … (I can’t even finish the sentence it’s so repulsive), I’d be lying to you if I said I wasn’t.  Our school features tactile female teachers who regularly hug, kiss and have students on their laps.  As kids don’t see any difference with me, they naturally, at first, try to hug me too.  But I don’t let them of course.  I explain that I don’t do hugs.  They don’t understand.  I don’t really know how to explain.

I’ve never wanted to be seen a male teacher.  Just a teacher that happens to be male.  I’ve always thought that boys don’t need ‘male’ teachers, they need ‘good’ teachers.  But just recently, I’ve noticed how much easier I cope with the troubled male students than most of the female teachers.  Maybe it’s true.  Maybe we really do desperately need more male teachers.

But is it a crisis?  Perhaps it’s for the best that there are so few male teachers.  The men I speak to about my profession show absolutely no interest in teaching.  In fact, they would probably rather undergo root canal than teach a class.  If males tend not to show an interest in teaching, could it not be a good thing that they have chosen a different path in life?

What do you think?  If you are a male elementary teacher, why did you choose to be one?

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Posted in Male Teachers, Teaching boys | Leave a Comment »

Single Sex vs Co-Ed

November 6, 2010

According to a Courier Mail report, there is an increasing preference towards single sex classrooms. Education experts say the trend of single-sex classrooms for young students is gaining momentum and works, but the State Government has left the matter up to principals as the debate heats up in primary schools. Personally, whilst I realise that the data shows that single sex classrooms are more inclined to deliver favourable academic outcomes, I think that the classroom is supposed to be a microcosm for the outside world. A co-ed class gives students much-needed experience in  repect and appreciation for different cultures, genders and nationalities. Besides, I prefer teaching co-ed classes because I like a diverse and multi-faceted classroom.

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Posted in Teaching boys | 3 Comments »

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