Through reading the chapters, I came across one particular section I thought would be productive to comment on. On page 87 in Chapter 3, It talks about gender and how women have been suffering from discrimination for years. These days women have a brighter future because we are being admitted in to the top colleges all over the world and we are top of our profession in certain careers we were not allowed to pursue many years ago. These days, I do agree, we need to focus on students as a whole, not as their individual races or ethnic backgrounds, along with gender or poverty level. I do believe that it would be more difficult to teach a poor child versus a higher class privileged child, but it would be all in the attempt at which you want to make sure they gain from having been in your class. I believe that if you are going to set out to be a teacher you can not have this idea in your head that you will walk in on your first day and your students will get straight A's and pay attention with all of their being to everything that you teach. It is a wonderful fantasy but a highly unlikely reality.
There are many ways to discriminate boys against girls. Usually girls tend to be more verbal in school for the social aspect, and yet usually boys like to be bullies or troublemakers. Everyone has a stereotype as they enter a classroom, you can usually pick out the class clown versus the head cheer leader, or the bad boy trouble maker versus the quarterback. We walk in with our plates already made and it is the teachers responsibility to know how to look past that and just be there to mold these people into honest, smart individuals. You look at these boys and these girls and science has all of these theories about how different everyone is. It is true, to an extent. People are their own individual selves, on the inside. On the outside, however, people are all alike and we need to learn to get past the exterior to teach and mold the interior.
I did a bit of research on this topic and this is what I found...
There are strong similarities between sexism and racism. Both teach role relationships that leave one group in a subordinate position. Both are primarily expressed through institutional arrangements of privilege for some and oppression for others. Both are forms of violence: individual and collective, psychological and physical. Previously discussed, we described how African Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans, among others, are harmed by low expectations; being female also leads to subtle forms of tracking—even by female teachers (Ginorio & Huston, 2001).
In 1992, the American Association of University Women (AAUW) issued an important report, How Schools Shortchange Girls. In part, it said:
The absence of attention to girls in the current educational debate suggests that girls and boys have identical educational experiences in schools. Nothing could be further from the truth. Whether one looks at achievement scores, curriculum design, self-esteem levels, or staffing patterns, it is clear that sex and gender make a difference in the nation’s public elementary and secondary schools. There is clear evidence that the educational system is not meeting girls’ needs. Girls and boys enter school roughly equal in measured ability. In some measures of school readiness, such as fine motor control, girls are ahead of boys. Twelve years later, girls have fallen behind their male classmates in key areas such as higher-level mathematics and measures of self-esteem.
The AAUW issued important follow-up reports in 1998 and 2008, keeping track of progress and limits in school reform. There has been a near revolution for majority group (European American) girls since the 1992 publication of How Schools Shortchange Girls.
http://www.education.com/reference/article/gender-roles-schools/
Gender Roles and Schools
by D. E. Campbell
Source: Pearson Allyn Bacon Prentice Hall
Topics: School and Academics, Gender Differences, Self-Esteem
