math and basketball

Here a terrific story about school in Peoria where college basketball player are teaching younger kids math by shooting hoops.

Although the reporter quotes girls, my money says this will work really well for boys. I wish they would teach them to improve their literacy skills with basketball too. Sports biographies, anyone?

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The Politics of Underachievement.

Here's a really interesting piece about boys in the UK written in the Independent. Same troubles as here. Much research being done at a government level to determine why this is happening. (Are you there Barack?) At the very end of the article, the author quotes the head of a UK equal rights commission who says, in essence, there is a more level playing field, girls are doing better on it. The underachievement of boys is not a matter of discrimination against boys but a matter of social and emotional conditioning for boys that causes them to do poorly.

My first react was relief -- it would be so much easier to look at the boy issue in a non-political way. But on the other hand, as a student of the feminist movement, I know that social and emotional conditioning were the tools of women's oppression. Ever wonder why the feminist movement took hold in the 70's? Back in the 1950's, economic oppression was codified into law-- women made less, were blocked from taking on supervisory roles by certain laws designed to "protect" them. But they were also prevented from, say, buying a seat on the stock exchange by lack of support and outright harassment from their peers. In other words, their social and emotional conditioning prevented them from moving a head.

Are there laws that prevent men from entering stable, high flexibility jobs were women dominate -- not that I know of. Is there a strong taboo against it? Just ask a male nurse or a dude who is a kindergarten teacher. Lots of subtle and not so subtle harassment, disapproval and almost total lack of support.

It seem to me that the line between discrimination and law of social and emotional support is pretty thin.

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A new piece!

Here's a story I wrote for Ivillage about Christmas

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here's a nice article about TTWB from a NYC mag

The Other Gender DIVIDE
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Newsweek’s Reporter Peg Tyre Explores Why Boys Are Disadvantaged In The Classroom

Throughout the country, boys are falling behind girls when it comes to academic achievement. Peg Tyre first noticed this while covering the education beat for “Newsweek,” reporting, among other things, that in elementary school, boys are two times more likely than girls to be diagnosed with learning disabilities and twice as likely to be placed in special-education classes. But this isn’t a problem with boys.

According to Tyre, the problem is with our schools. In “The Trouble With Boys,” now out in paperback, Tyre explores how our education system is failing to address boys’ unique learning styles and explains why it’s imperative for all parents—of sons and daughters alike—to take notice.

Why did you decide to write this book?

I was covering education for about seven years at “Newsweek,” and it wasn’t until I was [spending time] in schools for a couple of years that I started to notice boys were disproportionately represented at the bottom of the class. I went to the data and found it backed up what I saw. I know from my experience as a reporter that that’s an extraordinary reversal. So, I decided to write about what is causing boys to underachieve—and what can we do about it.

You state that boys get expelled at five times the rate of girls in preschool. How do things go wrong at


such an early age?

Preschools have changed a great deal in the last 10 to 15 years. There’s been an increasing emphasis on academics and that’s been great for some kids, and it has some advantages. But one of the disadvantages is that it’s created a much more narrow curriculum where there’s fewer opportunities for free play, physical movement, etc.—and that’s particularly bad for boys. When you look at the work I cited by [developmental psychologist] Warren Eaton, you see that boys and girls move around about the same, but the outliers—the ones that move around the most— are invariably boys. I think that when you curtail opportunities for physical movement, I think you really crush a small minority of boys.

What are the other points of disengagement throughout a boy’s academic career?

In kindergarten and first grade when the curriculum depends on accurately holding a pencil, crayon or paintbrush, you are assuming a whole set of fine motor skills that a lot of kids don’t have and a lot of them are going to be boys. They just tend to develop them a little later. Around third grade students go from a point of learning to read to reading to learn and you often see that boys fall out there. A big dropping out point is ninth grade, and that’s because you have pronounced disengagement in middle school when the two things that hang boys up are handwriting and organization. You can’t succeed academically unless you’re organized. Yet when you talk to people who work with kids, they tell you disorganized people are disproportionately boys.

Why are boys lagging behind girls so much in literacy?

One of the reasons boys fall out around reading is that they’re often given books that they perceive to be girly. Boys prefer reading and writing that tend to be funnier and more irreverent. Their writing also tends to be more directed at other kids in the class and not necessarily at the teacher, whereas girls tend to write more for their teacher. Teachers often take [the former] as an affront, and I think we need to look at that.

etc. etc.

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This one is about boys and fantasy violence

Are We Trying to Tame Our Wild Boys?

Examining whether we've gone too far in the quest to quell violence on the playground

by Peg Tyre

Where the Wild Things Are (both the book and the recently released movie) is about a boy who was sent to his room for being, well, wild. The film, which was No. 1 at the box office its opening weekend, has reignited the debate over how parents and schools react to typical boy behaviors. Some parenting experts have even suggested that the book and the movie offer guidance on disciplining kids without squelching their spirits completely.

Back in 1963, when the book was written, it was a time when boys could play Cops and Robbers and shout "Pow! Pow!" without the threat of school expulsion. It's very different today. Recently, first-grader Zachary Christie, 6, of Newark, DE, was suspended and sentenced to 45 days in reform school—um, I mean, an alternative program—for bringing his camping knife, spoon and fork contraption to school to eat lunch with. (He has since returned to school without having to attend the alternative/reform school.)

All of this begs the question of whether our society is trying to "tame" the normal, if rambunctious, impulses of little boys who like to play a bit rough and who sometimes get angry.

Don't get me wrong, anyone who has spent any time in a school as a parent, as a teacher—heck, even as a reporter stopping by to do a human-interest story about a holiday canned food drive—understands that classroom management is the key to running any school. Schools have to be places where all kids, boisterous or shy, can learn. They also have to be safe. Let me state unequivocally that weapons have no place in schools.

And anyone who reads a newspaper, surfs the Web or owns a television set knows that the nightmare of school shootings—incomprehensible tragedies at places like Columbine to Virginia Tech—are rare, but they happen.

But in many schools, zero tolerance for violence policies (which are good) have morphed into zero tolerance for aggression policies, and now, zero tolerance for anything that might even be perceived as aggressive. There are no contact sports on the playgrounds in Cheyenne, WY, and no running on the playground in Broward Country, FL. In one elementary school in Beaverton, OR, Tag has been outlawed.

But it gets worse. Many schools have even banned fantasy violence. According to the Washington Post, an 8-year-old boy in New Jersey was held by police for five hours and forced to make two court appearances for using an L-shaped piece of paper in a game of Cops and Robbers at recess. In Arkansas, another 8-year-old boy was punished for pointing a cooked chicken strip at another student and saying "Pow! Pow!"

When children—and let's face it, most of the kids who do this kind of thing are boys—are given creative writing assignments and come up with tales that involve dueling, swashbuckling, fisticuffs and—wait for it—decapitation, they are told their imaginations are "not appropriate," and the teacher picks up the telephone to the parents. Across our nation, boys are lagging behind girls in writing and lagging behind boys from 15 years ago. Ever wonder if there is a connection?

A couple of months ago, I was giving a workshop to a group of teachers in New Mexico about how to re-engage boys who are mentally checked-out of school—and if you look at the national statistics, there's an awful lot of them. An art teacher raised her hand and told me about a middle school boy who had created an intricate sculpture out of found objects—bolts, washers, wires and bits of a broken dryer dumped in an abandon lot near his house. "As a work of art, it was amazing," the teacher reported. The problem? The boy made a sculpture of a machine gun. The teacher recognized that he was far and away the most promising young artist in her class. Yet the culture of her school—and their zero tolerance toward anything that might be connected with aggression—made her opt not to display his sculpture on Parent's Night.

But it turns out, perfectly normal children, especially boys, tend to think, fantasize and play a great deal around violence. They sometimes think about guns. They sometimes write about sword-fighting. They think that toting a spork is cool. Are they going to grow up and become Virginia Tech shooters? Psychologists say no. But misguided policies and overzealous school administrators have a different view.

Zachary Christie shouldn't have brought anything with a blade into school. The principal should have taken it away and called his mother. Maybe asked him and her to take a day off to figure out how that blade ended up in a classroom. But making him into an outlaw? Time to rethink what we're really afraid of.

Peg Tyre is the author of The Trouble With Boys: A Surprising Report Card on Our Sons, Their Problems at School and What Parents and Educators Must Do. She can be reached at www.pegtyre.com.

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