To get boys to perform you have to have a direct simple connection between the action and the payoff (not necessarily money).

The easiest way to improve their reading and writing skills would be to give them a task and then forbid them to speak, forcing all their communication into a written mode and slowly scale up the requirements toward formality.

The problem is that English is too freeform and boys have no problem testing its limits.

I think it is important for the children to see how good writing skills interact with “real life”. When you practice writing at school and you know that all you are going to get is some score, you are not interested in most cases. If you are writing for some kind of audience, it is a great motivation.

As I learn more and more about cognitive science (a side hobby of mine, I’m a bit of a Steven Pinker groupie), I’m impressed by how differently humans think and learn *in concert* as well as individually. When people talk together in groups, they tend to literally think differently, come up with different ideas and associations.

Again, I don’t know if the moderated group blog & school blog network I described might help or hurt elementary education. I’m definitely not an expert there. But I suspect it might capitalize on both individual learning, one-on-one teacher interaction, and peer group visibility and interaction.

Just a thought.

- Amy Gahran

What’s interesting, of course, is that only a few decades ago the same eductional styles today called “traditionally favoring girls” was considered too masculine for girls. Boys who today are assumed to be unable to sit still for school were then assumed to be the only ones with the discipline for school. What has changed is that we’re teaching boys to be more independent (which is good, in some ways, and not so good, in others) and authority-challenging, like the commenter above. What’s not-so-good about this is that, of course, in addition to creating readers and math-literate persons schools also have to produce citizens, and while the blind submission to authority is not exactly the desired outcome, neither is a person with absolutely no sense of his interconnections and responsibilities with his fellow citizens. So the anti-authoritarians don’t vote, don’t go on to college (last year college students were 60% female), and get shut out of a growing number of fields (college professors, again something considered a “man’s job” just a few decades ago, are overwhelmingly female today, though men are still the ones with most of the tenure).

Group blogging would, I think, make learning less of an individual pursuit and more of a public, group on — and that plays well into male identities defined as “public”, as “part of the gang”, and might well help produce a sense of collective responsibility, in much the way that team sports do when given great coaching.

I’m torn on this one. God knows I’ve had enough bad things to say about US education not encouraging enough independent, critical thought and training minds to please others at their own expense. No argument there.

That said, schools exist to impart skills as well. And that’s very important. Students do need to learn how to write, and write well. They do need to learn how to get along with others, have respect for different views and others’ work and expression. I’ve found that people who don’t master these skills often end up very frustrated at their own inability to communicate well.

Yes, it’s a double-edged sword. But what isn’t? Ultimately with any tool it all comes down to the people who are using it, I think.

- Amy Gahran

I suspect that insistence that boys supress their independence and priorities (including learning priorities) may be a main source of problems. I was a boy who hated school but did very well. I secretly placed very tight limits on how far I would go to appease the teacher (for example, I never raised my hand to answer a question; I would resubmit an assignment the teacher hated because I genuinely felt it was my best work regardless of his opinion). I reserved my best efforts for what *I* felt was important.

When you talk about “working with the teacher” and grooming “assigments” for the *group* blog, I worry that you’re already setting things up for failure. For the better bloggers, blogging isn’t just (or at all) about popularity: it’s also about having a voice. Give the students enough freedom that they at least *believe* their work is their own initiative. Pleasing the teacher is often a disincentive to work. (Though some special teachers do pull this off, often through counterintuitive means, such as frequent criticism that’s harsh but fair.)

Incidentally, I think this problem of external priorities may apply to girls too – I often wonder if, having been trained to look to others for direction (which is what I found school did, and it’s Wrong), they find themselves somewhat lost when they end school and find it missing.)