HOW WE BROKE OUR BOYS

America has a “boy” problem. Boys and young men are being negated and neglected in America and they are understandably frustrated.  In fact, they might be angry and not even know why they are angry.  The trend of gender-fluidity completely ignores that there are differences in the sexes.  Your gender, is what you identify as.  Your sex is your biological assignment at birth.  To pretend they are the same is ignorant.

I taught Montessori preschool in my mid-20s.  I was studying child development at a local college.  I was blessed to be given this opportunity at such an amazing school. I learned about kids of course but what I learned even more, was how different little boys and little girls were; it smacked me in the face it was so obvious. It was so STARKLY clear to me what boys could and could not do at 3 to 5 years old. Fortunately for the boys this was a Montessori PLUS school on 2 acres of grass and trees and mud... they really got to be BOYS!  On hot days we would fill a huge galvanized tub with water.  The kids could each take pails of water and do their own thing OR they could band together and do something collectively with the whole tub.  They usually opted for the latter, dumped the big tub in the dirt and wallowed in the mud.  It was glorious. 

After that teaching experience I became a strong believer in all-boys’ schools and all-girls’ schools.  They can be on the same campus and have shared recesses, lunchtimes and social functions – but in the classroom no. Boys are simply set up to fail in the American school system.  I believe it is an experiment worth trying in a public charter school.

What is true is that the myelination of the nervous system in little boys completes itself years later than in little girls.  Think of myelin as the insulation of an electrical wire.  Boys have “bare wires” or poorly insulated wires that are sparking, arcing and shorting out in their bodies because they do not have full insulation yet.  This is a COMPLETE over simplification of the nervous system – but illustrative.  Think about that though – when we say, “Little boys can’t control their impulses,” we are being 100% accurate – they literally CAN’T.  Imagine a 6 year-old boy who is sitting there “shorting-out” being told to overcome his own electrical system that is going haywire.  It is impossible and he isn’t a “bad boy” – he is just a boy.

Boys develop gross motor skills before girls – running, jumping, balancing, etc.  This is what they are good at. Girls develop fine motor skills first, beading, drawing, writing, linguistics (the tongue is a “fine motor”).  

Boys’ first auditory excellence comes in LOUD, gross (large) noises.  Such as mimicking sirens, bombs blowing up, crashes.  These “sounds” are not often okay at school ever.  So he can’t even use the tools he has. The sad thing for boys is the ONLY place they get to do what they are GOOD at is recess and recess is maybe 15-20% of the school day…  they are set up from day one.

Ever wonder why boys have such horrible penmanship?  It is a fine motor skill and the possibility for it doesn’t develop in boys until about age 9 – the very time most public schools used to stop penmanship drills and lessons.  I don’t even know if they teach penmanship anymore.  But if boys were required to practice loops, and draw the regular shapes of letters into middle school – we might be able to read their writing! Boys develop spacial relationship excellence sooner than little girls – they can judge the speed of an approaching baseball better, they can play a video game where they have to imagine a world from a video that shows only part of it.  What they are GOOD at are the extra-curricular things, not modern classroom things.

The corpus callosum – the thing that joins the two halves of the brain – in boys is larger.  I have also heard talks where they discussed the in-utero “chemical/hormonal” bathing the boy brains undergo that makes the corpus callosum in boys more challenging for nerve impulses to cross. The corpus callosum is what divides the thought processes too – we do certain things using our right brain and other things using our left. To switch sides the impulses must cross that corpus callosum. It is thought that the corpus callosum in girls being smaller/more easily crossed allows the female brain to “multitask” better.  In women, our brains allow us to bop back and forth between hemispheres of the brain – we women can listen to 5 conversations at a cocktail party, learn who is pregnant, who got a promotion and who is moving to Botswana.  Our husband learned that “Joe turned 50” because that is what the party was for.  A man will tend to be more bore sighted and focused on THE task and do it very, very well without distraction; he stays in one hemisphere while he works.  He has to give up that task to then use the other hemisphere of his brain; little boys don’t “bop”.  Don’t try to talk about feelings while he is focused – it doesn’t work and we women get upset because he doesn’t do what we can do.  This is profoundly true in developing boys and girls. 

In an all boys’ school that little boy would be surrounded by other little boys who were developmentally at his level.  Lessons could be designed for him to succeed.  He would not be chastised or punished for not being able to do things the same way as a little girl.

In closing, little girls learn to drive their brains earlier than boys do because their developing brain is closer to being a road worthy car.  Little boys are driving on 3 wheels with a transmission that shifts itself from forward to reverse to overdrive at will.  Oh they catch up of course but not until the US School system as left them behind and made them feel badly about themselves because they couldn’t keep a three-wheeled car that was stuck in reverse on the road.  I think I would be frustrated and angry too.