Single Sex Education

I started to read this article and began to think about single sex classrooms and single sex schools, I tried to think about whether I agreed or disagreed with the idea, and could not draw a strong conclusion. The article mentions many valid points of having single sex classrooms as being very beneficial. I do not agree with single sex schools, but think that single sex classrooms within a co-ed school could have its many benefits. For one, I undoubtedly agree with the idea that males and females learn very differently. "Sax threw himself into studying neurological differences between males and females, eventually focusing on how to protect boys from a syndrome he calls “failure to launch,” which Sax often characterizes as caring more about getting a Kilimanjaro in Halo 3 than performing well in high school or taking a girl on a date. Among his early proposals was that boys should start kindergarten at age 6, a year later than girls, in order to ease the “sense of scholastic incompetence” that so many boys feel early on because they tend to develop later. Several friends quickly convinced Sax that American families would never go for this. So Sax started thinking it might be better for boys and girls to be in different classrooms" I think this arguement could be solved easily by having boys and girls in seperate classrooms, but in the same school. This way, they are still integrated at times during free periods, electives, lunch, and other school involved activities. However, they will not have the distractions from one another, and teachers can accomodate to the way in which the certain sex excells.

For boys, he said: “You need to get them up and moving. That’s based on the nervous system, that’s based on eyes, that’s based upon volume and the use of volume with the boys.” Chadwell, like Sax, says that differences in eyesight, hearing and the nervous system all should influence how you instruct boys. “You need to engage boys’ energy, use it, rather than trying to say, No, no, no. So instead of having boys raise their hands, you’re going to have boys literally stand up. You’re going to do physical representation of number lines. Relay races. Ball tosses during discussion.” For the girls, Chadwell prescribes a focus on “the connections girls have (a) with the content, (b) with each other and (c) with the teacher. If you try to stop girls from talking to one another, that’s not successful. So you do a lot of meeting in circles, where every girl can share something from her own life that relates to the content in class.” This other quote is a good example of how having seperate classrooms with the sex's seperated could be helpful. I think there are ways in which you can get different chlidren engaged, I think however that every teacher should integrate all different types of learning into their teaching on a day to day basis. I think that it may be possible that boys and girls learn differently but I think that using those various forms of learning among boys and girls in a typical co-ed classroom.

One of the first things he noticed was that three boys were getting suspended for every girl, “and for the most ridiculous things in the world — a boy would burp, or he’d pass gas, or a girl would say, ‘He hit me.’ ” Nationwide, boys are nearly twice as likely as girls to be suspended, and more likely to drop out of high school than girls (65 percent of boys complete high school in four years; 72 percent of girls do). Boys make up two-thirds of special-education students. They are 1.5 times more likely to be held back a grade and 2.5 times more likely to be given diagnoses of A.D.H.D. So Wright met with his fourth-grade teachers and recalls telling them, “O.K., here’s what we’re going to do: how about you take all the boys and you take all the girls?” Wright says that in 2001, after Marshall’s first year in a single-sex format, the percentage of boys meeting the state’s academic standards rose from 10 percent to 35 percent in math and 10 percent to 53 percent in reading and writing. While I could see where this could be true, I do not understand how seperating boys and girls would keep either sex from rebelling. After all is that not a part of growing up is rebelling? I think that there are many complications to this statement, and that maybe it may be something to have further research into. However, if we start segregating again wont that take our goal of diversity into a whole new direction? If we begin to seperate boys and girls into seperate schools more often then what is the difference between seperating whites, blacks, latinos, etc. into different schools just because maybe they "learn differently."