Talking point

Teaching Boys and Girls Seperately
By Elizabeth Weil

"...Japanese researchers who found girls’ drawings typically depict still lifes of people, pets or flowers, using 10 or more crayons, favoring warm colors like red, green, beige and brown; boys, on the other hand, draw action, using 6 or fewer colors, mostly cool hues like gray, blue, silver and black. This apparent difference, which Sax argues is hard-wired, causes teachers to praise girls’ artwork and make boys feel that they’re drawing incorrectly."
I see this a lot when I work with children. Most girls tend to draw visual and real things. They use as many colors as they can to portray a flower or a butterfly. Many girls like to draw what we deem to be "girly things". The boys usually use darker colors such as black, blue or red. And they will draw action heroes and many action scenes. Most boys with the influence of video games wi draw comic books or action scenes with some small form of dialogue. Many boys will not draw anything colorful unless they are asked to. Boys and girls have a different imagination and creative energy. 

"Separating schoolboys from schoolgirls has long been a staple of private and parochial education. But the idea is now gaining traction in American public schools, in response to both the desire of parents to have more choice in their children’s public education and the separate education crises girls and boys have been widely reported to experience. The girls’ crisis was cited in the 1990s, when the American Association of University Women published “Shortchanging Girls, Shortchanging America,” which described how girls’ self-esteem plummets during puberty and how girls are subtly discouraged from careers in math and science. More recently, in what Sara Mead, an education expert at the New America Foundation, calls a “man bites dog” sensation, public and parental concerns have shifted to boys. Boys are currently behind their sisters in high-school and college graduation rates. School, the boy-crisis argument goes, is shaped by females to match the abilities of girls (or, as Sax puts it, is taught “by soft-spoken women who bore” boys)."
In my town and the surrounding towns the only schools that have a separation between boys and girls are the private schools. I think that today there is still division between boys and girls. Although most of it can be seen as stereotypical it is there. In fact in RIC's own honors program there is more girls than boys. My honors history class has only four boys while the rest of us are all girls. I think that this is enforced by expectations. Girls are expected to be school orientated while boys are geared my to sports and hands on activities. 

"Wylie says she believes she is a better teacher, and her students are better students, because they’re in a desexualized — or at least less-sexualized — environment. “Sure,” she says, “when they take pictures, they often present their backsides first. But I think I’m giving girls a better education than I could have if there were guys in the room. I’m freer. I’m more able to be bold in my statements. When I teach poetry and I talk about the sex in poetry I don’t need to be worried about the boy in the room who is going to chuckle over the thing he did with the girl last week and embarrass her. Which happened more than once in my last coed environment.”
I understand the when kids are separated by sex in classrooms there is a more comfortable air. The student is more at ease and finds comforts within his or her peers. But there are still advantages to being in a coed environment. I mean must of us turned out alright, right?