Gender Frustations

“He’s just a boy.” How many times have I heard that in the past decade? This reasoning coming from parents who are using “being a boy” as an excuse for their child’s inappropriate behaviour, lack of attention, inability to stay still, impulsiveness and the list goes on. When I ask the parent what does “he’s just a boy” mean? They usually say, “Well you know how boys are?” That’s the justification I get. Well, I do know how boys are. I teach boys and girls. So I know how they both learn and function in a classroom. What I would like to know is since when does being a certain gender justify the above mentioned all of which affect a child’s learning. How can a parent look at me and say, “Is he really impulsive or is he just being a typical boy?” The first time I heard this at a parent teacher interview I was truly shocked and left speechless. I think I might have even conceded with the parent in the end, as I was only a new teacher starting out and which I am ashamed to admit I had my “traditional views” of acceptable behaviour from boys. Since then, when I am asked the same question I have grown brave enough to say, “Well compared to the other 15 boys I teach, your son’s constant demand for attention exceeds the rest.” Harsh, I know but it frustrates me when parents cannot see past their child’s gender to realize there may truly be a learning issue especially when it is coming from the professional who knows best how a child learns and what interferes with that learning. I think about a sister and brother that I taught from the same family. The sister was older so I had taught her first. She had major attention issues. She was constantly distracted and could not focus for very long. Although she had these issues she did not have any hyperactivity or impulsiveness with it. Her parents were extremely concerned about her learning. The following year, I had her younger brother who presented with the same issues; however he was extremely active and impulsive as well. Their explanation, “Well, he’s just a boy.” How fair was that to their son? His attention was impeding his learning and it was not of a concern because he was just your “typical active boy.” That just broke my heart.
In my teaching career I have learned that although gender may play some small part in why a child is not achieving the way they should be, it is far from everything. My “traditional views” of how boys learn, have been formed from my own previous experiences as a child (where I had two brothers both whom did not succeed well in a school setting and I did) and from media which has been constantly repeating that girls are better at academics than boys. Stack (2006) views the media as “critical in the (re)production of policy as discourse, in that it becomes both the medium and the message for what policy is read to mean. It takes on particular dominant readings in specific contexts...” Since I have become a more experienced teacher, my “traditional views” have changed. I no longer adopt the media’s view that girls succeed better than boys in school as the whole and absolute truth. Since Boaler’s research shows a narrow difference of how boys were more successful in mathematics assessments than girls I was interested to go back and see the CRTs results of my class last year. When I went back to look at the results of our Grade 3 standardized testing for last year. It shows that the girls in my previous class scored just as well, if not better in some areas then the boys did. (These are children who are from the same socioeconomic background.) So I am left to wonder why it is when students get to high school there are some gender issues in mathematics. Is it the way it’s taught? Or perceived? Is it media related? I am still struggling to find answers to these questions.
It is my job to engage all my students in learning, regardless of the gender? I will continue to find ways to make this happen by developing more engaging tasks for the different learners in my classroom, not based on the different genders.