Posted on 01/18/2008 9:36:56 PM PST by forkinsocket
Susan Vincent reached into the cage and pulled out a small yellow bird, saying, This is Kiwi. He loved us, but he was lonely. It is a lovely spring day in Spanish Harlem on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and Vincent, a former childrens clothing designer turned award-winning high-school science teacher, is explaining some facts about the facts of life. We had to get Kiwi a mate. It was a perfect way for the girls to learn something about nature, about birds, aboutshe smiles, holding little Kiwi upabout the birds and the bees.
It was, as they say in the field, a teachable moment. And for Vincent it was much more teachable because all of her 10th-grade students were girls. There was no giggling and whispering, no holding back, she recalls. The girls gathered round and we talked about the mating habits of birds and they asked good questions and learned a lot. Boys would have been a big distraction.
It seems so logical. Separate boys and girls so they can get their work done. It was clear to me and my classmates 40 years ago, as we gazed out the window during English class in our all-boys high school (a Catholic seminary) and watched the teenage kids from town making out on a stone wall; at least it was clear to Father Ignatius, who would threaten a bastinado with salt rubbed in the wounds if we didnt focus on the sentence that needed diagramming.
We can concentrate a lot better without boys, is a comment I heard dozens of times in the course of researching this story. Boys seem less sure of the benefits. Yeah, its okay, says a student at the private all-boys Roxbury Latin School, outside of Boston (see sidebar).
(Excerpt) Read more at hoover.org ...
Not to nitpick, but it is in Boston proper, in the West Roxbury section (where I grew up), it's just not downtown.
If I had gone to a single-sex school, I would have been a Rhodes Scholar.
Great article. Thanks for posting it.
Roxbury Latin sounds like the kind of school every parents wants their kid to be apart of. Single sex classrooms makes a lot of sense.
Yup, won’t be long till the liberals pile on the lawsuits. Their madness knows no end.
Public Education Ping
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i homeschool my 2 boys and we belong to a very small co-op... 4 families, 12 students total... 3 age-levels... my oldest (11, almost 12) is in a group with 3 other boys, aged 12-14... i think it’s great for him at this age... he does have one co-ed class, which is Latin—6 students total... all the other courses: Writing, History, Literature and Logic—all the subjects that promote discussion—are boys only...
i homeschool my 2 boys and we belong to a very small co-op... 4 families, 12 students total... 3 age-levels... my oldest (11, almost 12) is in a group with 3 other boys, aged 12-14... i think it’s great for him at this age... he does have one co-ed class, which is Latin—6 students total... all the other courses: Writing, History, Literature and Logic—all the subjects that promote discussion—are boys only...
i homeschool my 2 boys and we belong to a very small co-op... 4 families, 12 students total... 3 age-levels... my oldest (11, almost 12) is in a group with 3 other boys, aged 12-14... i think it’s great for him at this age... he does have one co-ed class, which is Latin—6 students total... all the other courses: Writing, History, Literature and Logic—all the subjects that promote discussion—are boys only...
i’m sure the girls already knew about sex.
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