By Elizabeth Weil By: Ruby Lazo
1. “Researchers found girls’ drawings typically depict still life’s 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.”
I think we should begin analyzing research more in depth. This quote is trying to prove that there are fundamental academic differences between boy and girls. However, I feel that a lot of this research directly connects with our society and how we hold different expectations for girls and boys, and through those expectations we nurture them differently. While we give girls pink note books and crayons we give boys blue, red and black cars and action figures. Although there might be a direct biological difference between learning styles I believe that a lot of it has been influenced by us.
2. “What kind of message does it give when you tell a group of kids that boys and girls need to be separated because they don’t even see or hear alike?"
I especially liked this quote. Separating children based upon a 50 year old study that states adult men and women see and hear different is completely shameful. Why would we want to separate children because of their seemingly insignificant differences?
3. “There are just too many exceptions to the rule”.
I very much agree with this quote. Gender is much more complicated than we make it out to be. Not everyone is going to neatly fit into a boy or girl category and a lot of us definitely do not fit neatly into our gender roles (masculine or feminine). There are many kids that fall somewhere between the socially constructed boxes that are biological sex, gender identity and gender expression. So what will then happen to those kids?
While reading this article, I found myself offended by some of the things that were said and written. For example: how the students were depicted in Michelle Gay’s fourth grade classroom during a “tide science experiment”. We live in a society where we should just stop separating each other by our differences; biological or not. We should be able learn how to interact and accept others differences weather they are spiritual, cultural or biological. One of the most powerful things about learning is to be able to see and learn things through multiple perspectives.
I read your quotes and overall thoughts, and by look of it. This article seemed really offensive. Since we had the option to do this article and the "Race, Class and Gender" article, I chose to do that one. I just think that the topic of single sex school is not as important as the other topic. However, I did schemed through this article, and I did realize that they said offensive stuff towards girls. For example, they said that some girls would rather be married than work in a meaningless job. I found this very offensive.
ReplyDeleteNice post, Ruby. I agree with on the issue that we should be continuing to move towards integration as opposed to finding different categories within which to segregate.
ReplyDeleteI couldn't help but notice that the setting for the school discussed in this reading is the state of Alabama.
Based on our country's history, Alabama seems like a terrible place for school administrators to be making decisions to segregate children regardless of what factors they are using for this segregation. I think that teaching students separately is a part of that state's legacy that they shouldn't be very proud of.