Posted on 01/22/2006 4:45:41 PM PST by Lorianne
Spend a few minutes on the phone with Danny Frankhuizen and you come away thinking, "What a nice boy." He's thoughtful, articulate, bright. He has a good relationship with his mom, goes to church every Sunday, loves the rock band Phish and spends hours each day practicing his guitar. But once he's inside his large public Salt Lake City high school, everything seems to go wrong. He's 16, but he can't stay organized. He finishes his homework and then can't find it in his backpack. He loses focus in class, and his teachers, with 40 kids to wrangle, aren't much help. "If I miss a concept, they tell me, 'Figure it out yourself'," says Danny. Last year Danny's grades dropped from B's to D's and F's. The sophomore, who once dreamed of Stanford, is pulling his grades up but worries that "I won't even get accepted at community college."
By almost every benchmark, boys across the nation and in every demographic group are falling behind. 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. High-school boys are losing ground to girls on standardized writing tests. The number of boys who said they didn't like school rose 71 percent between 1980 and 2001, according to a University of Michigan study. Nowhere is the shift more evident than on college campuses. Thirty years ago men represented 58 percent of the undergraduate student body. Now they're a minority at 44 percent. This widening achievement gap, says Margaret Spellings, U.S. secretary of Education, "has profound implications for the economy, society, families and democracy."
(Excerpt) Read more at msnbc.msn.com ...
No father.
Interesting ping.
Gosh, maybe it's because girls are taught to say, Girls rule, boys drule. and maybe it's because boys are now the lowest form of life in our culture. I hate the latest trends. They are evil for our girls AND our boys.
Uhmm, could he cut down his guitar time and maybe, just maybe channel that energy into his studies? Nah, that can't be the answer.
I agree.
Jeff
the never ending failure of liberal policies..
Exactly. I was a teacher from the late '60s to the mid '80s. It was obvious to me back then how devastating the lack of a father is to a boy. No matter how well meaning and lovingly strict a mother is, it's just not the same as having a father around.
"SUCCESS = emasculated, Oprahfied, effeminate, neurotic, self-loathing, liberal"
If boys are "falling behind" in that area -- THEN GOOD.
Yah I recall one particular history lesson where the gym teacher ( also history teacher ) who occasionally read the history book but mainly made it all up as he went told us that Midway didn't have an airfield. We pointed out that it did and that the land based planes held off the nips long enough and just barely till the carrier based craft were able to join the fray.
He rarely enjoyed "teaching" us about history because it always made him look bad. And like you I was bored.
That comment proves you don't understand the problem.
For boys now, music is a true meritocracy and challenge. You either rock, or suck.
Academics, and work-life in general, is stacked against them. They want to be challenged, but they need a hope of prevailing.
In school, as in work, the greater a man prevails, the more he will be punished.
Keep playing the guitar....
Never having been a boy, myself, I can't speak to what schooling was like for them when I was a kid (graduated high school in 1984). But I have 4 boys, and another one due any minute, and they don't go to school.
My 11-year-old is hyperactive. We don't worry about it. If he can't sit down, he runs around the block a few times, and then he can focus for a while. (His latest 5K time was under 25 minutes.) When he needs more exercise, he gets it. He's doing algebra and loves it. My 9-year-old could add, subtract, multiply, and divide when he was 5, but just learned to write legibly this year. No problem (except when he tried to read lists he'd made :-).
I'm sure we'll have various things come up with the other boys, as well. The main point is that they're allowed to emphasize their strengths, and aren't in competition with girls to please a woman teacher all the time.
Here is the problem:
Growing boys need sex....Its a well knownfact
We need government run "Monica" centers for our youth ....
That will allow them to focus and be more productive
Jeff
Well there you go. Phish sucks.
Buy the kid an Ozzy anthology.
Who diagnosed his disorder? Pediatric treatment with drugs has gone up about 700% in the last decade if I recall the gist of articles posted here on FR correctly. IMO, it ain't the kids, it's what they are being put through and how they are handled.
Unreal--there is the classic leftist socio-biological totalitarianism that leads straight to the Killing Fields....
-----We had to put him on foculin.-----Would it be better phrased, we decided to put him on foculin? Boys today are as rambunctious as boys of yesterday but back then there was discipline in the classroom and more physical activities at school and at home to use up the energy medication is now supressing. Boredom is overcome with an interesting subject on which to concentrate that wandering mind. Find what interests these boys and incorporate it into learning what is being taught. Fiying,planes,cars, and lots of patience. Good luck.
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