Separate but equal: single gender classrooms

Thanks CJane and saab for sharing your single sex schooling experiences. It's so hard for me to imagine what it might be like.

Interesting that little Jane wishes she could have it....

One of the articles I read (maybe the one I linked) talked about exactly that, saab: that teachers respond very differently to boys than they do to girls, and how that frustrated many girls.

Yes the pendulum has swung to the other extreme. Now all the ruckus is about boys being cheated.

It's no secret that girls are outpacing boys education-wise, but I think men are still getting paid more than women.

Noooooooo.

I don't think my all girls school was a good idea - it set me back decades. Sin! Sin! Don't enjoy sex even in marriage (Sr. Mary Anthony). Boys as strangers.

I just can imagine a new combo of mix with separate classes being good for some, including some boys. (I realizing I'm from the ice age, so many changes, a lot of them great.)

I'm also just about to change my mind - I like men and women being able to discuss, argue, and to be friends who can do that, and buy the idea that the earlier that starts the better.

So, do I get to change sides?

Edit: this was after saab's post, a bunch of new posts while I was typing...


This raises a question that I think I knew the answer to at some point (based on the research at the time anyway) but if so, I've forgotten...

Is segregation better for one gender than the other?

As in, does it benefit girls more than it benefits boys?

That would have a bearing on whether it's something that would be good for Mo, as opposed to a more general judgment.

I do know that the pendulum is swinging, though -- education was set up in such a way that it benefited boys more than girls for a long time, then there has been a lot of effort to correct that, and now there are ways that boys are disadvantaged. So if segregation was good for girls in the 90's, maybe it's better for boys now?

But there's also that "if" -- I was in education grad school in the 90's and was never convinced that it was a really good idea. I thought it had its uses, but not to the point where I thought it should be done in general.

(I completely take Osso's point about segregated classrooms NOT being a new thing. Engineer makes that point too.)

The reasons for segregation keep shifting, though.

Consider your side changed!

I didn't mean you thought your school was grand, just that you didn't object to single gender classrooms.

Maybe because the girls that went to single gender wanted to?

I personally am not sure how I would have done - I mean I did well in school any way. And my daughter does now too.

It may be that certain children do better in the single gender and others doesn't matter or the opposite - I mean we are all different so learning styles and likes are different.

And yeah I'd probably hate being in an all girls school - I was the one that got moved to the front of my math class in school, because I was talking too much to the boys on either side of me. I was bored - and still getting As, but the boys ended up getting distracted and their grades were falling - so I got stuck next to the "pregnant" girl in the front of the class - not much to talk about to her the teacher figured.

I had really no choice, that's the school my parents sent me to and I had no objection, even when I was in high school. Lunch however, was highly anticipated every day where we spent times with the guys and we had plenty of time after school to hang out, but I liked having only girls in class, because I was somewhat shy and never would have spoken up with boys around.

Well, this'll strike most of you as odd, but as an only child whose parents moved quite a bit, I only knew a few other children outside of school. There was Micky, the snot nosed girl across the street in Ohio - we played together once, that I remember; we would have been three. There was Dabney downstairs from us the summer we spent in DC; we rode trycicles together in what might have been a complex in Alexandria. There were my cousins, two girls. There was one friend in a building in NYC, a girl, and a second girl I liked but our mothers quelched the friendship. Her name was Pooky. She was jewish, which might have been the problem for one or another of the mothers, either way. I've no idea, liked Pooky and mother.

In grammar school in Santa Monica, my best friend was Monica Olivares, but I was only there for 1st, 2nd, smidge of 4th grades. She was sharp and played jacks like a whiz. I liked some of the guys. One invited me to his birthday party. I guess my sensors were hetero even at six, but I never played in any recess or neighborhood with guys.

To clarify -
Los Angeles, Ohio, Los Angeles, Washington, Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles.

Moved to the chicago area. Whole different world. The immediate neighbors were girls and some of us are still in mild email contact. But it was that set of years that got me on any kind of even keel. A grammar school with competent nuns with much humor. Re the boys, lust appeared, but also brain engagement. It turns out that my memories of those years when boys were real, after we abruptly moved and I didn't know anyone and went to a girls' school, set me up for a life of thinking boys are ok.


So, what? I'm not clear that separating boys and girls in middle school (we didn't have that, it was 8 + 4) is a great idea.

True re being open to single gender classrooms, but I'd want boys nearby. Thus my interest in a kind of mix, and not that I prefer it. I met the few boys I knew also working at a local hospital at sixteen.

I suppose I should explain. There was a clique existing long before they got to my high school, I was new, but they didn't hate me. It's true I didn't have the right shoes or socks to go with our uniforms, but I didn't undergo shunning. I can well imagine that and have sympathy for those who did.

I had no choice what high school I went to.

I wanted to go to St. Scholastica in Chicago. We moved. That was single gender with good rep (what do I know). I was askeerd of ETHS. I probably would have liked it.
http://www.eths.k12.il.us/main.aspx

As an aside, my aunt who had left Boston sans high school degree, because the whole rest of her family was moving west plus health stuff, graduated from University High in west l.a., I think in 1918.
I might be a different person if I went there in the fifties.

Adds to that, I don't think it was my mother that quelched it - and it's less likely re religion as the woman whose shoe closet I inhabited in play time was jewish. I think they didn't like Pooky's mother since she was weird, did weavings and stuff.

Please excuse digression. Remains an interesting thread.

I certainly didn't mind having the girls around, but yeah there were definite advantages to unisex education.

I wonder how you explain all of this to an eleven year old.

"No girls in your classes."
"Why, do they have cooties?"
"Ha, ha, no, it is to provide a better learning environment."
"Why do we learn better without girls? Do they stop us from learning?"
"No, it just seems like students thrive in a unisex environment."
"Do we stop them from learning? Suzzie and I worked on a project last year and we got an A."
"Ummm.... no, ...."

Giving this more thought from a middle school prospective, it seems to me that a key question would be "Do students benefit more from learning to work in a team where people with different strengths can cooperate for a better result with less effort or from being forced into roles that are more of a stretch to achieve personal growth?" Putting boys and girls in the same room allows you to mix and match skill sets. I imagine a room of just boys or girls would not have the breadth of experience that a mixed group would. Is that bad, good or just interesting?

It's true I always liked hearing what some boys had to say, in elementary school, and, as previously noted, I missed that until university, when I had a big learning curve.

I wish Mo thought girls had cooties. He loves girls. He always has.

And girls love boys who love girls. He has never wanted for female admirers.

I think I'd just explain it as that's the way this school does it.

There are only two alternative middle schools so we don't have a lot of choice in the matter. One is co-ed, the other is co-ed but with gender specific classrooms.

Hi boomerang.

I have mixed feelings about segregated classrooms. There are definitely pros & cons to both sides of the coin.

I've taught long enough to remember the the push for co-ed schools in my state (in Oz). At that time there were quite a few single sex schools (& I know you're referring to single sex classes in a co-ed school setting), but the argument was that it was socially beneficial for both sexes not to be segregated. Which was true, especially for the boys. Some of the single sex boys schools I taught in as a young teacher were quite horrendous. Quite violent places. Very challenging for women teachers until they established themselves, I can tell you! Co-ed schools were seen as a more "civilized" environment for both sexes & that was definitely true .... but to a certain extent it was boys who were "civilized" by the influence of the girls .... sometimes at the expense of the girls' learning.

There was quite a bit of research at the time but feminists like Dale Spender, who argued that girls received a raw deal , in terms of teachers' attention, who tended to interact a lot more with the more assertive & demanding boys. Often as a class management necessity. I tend to think that girls are a lot more assertive these days & can stand up for themselves in class much better. But there is still the distraction (to both sexes) by what I call adolescent "rioting hormones". And those hormones can be a very powerful distractor in the classroom! The opposite sex can be a lot more interesting than English grammar.

In support of some segregated classes (though not necessarily for segregated schools, or all classes) I guess the best argument that I can see, is that girls are developmentally ahead of boys during their schooling. A lot of what is seen as boys' "disruptive behaviour" in class is simply that they are emotionally & socially less mature than the girls are, at the same age. (Which can be a pretty good argument for "vertically streamed" classes, based not on age, but on the capabilities & interest in particular subject areas .)

So (finally!) I like the idea of some segregation during early & middle adolescence, especially. From a learning perspective, there's certainly a lot to be said for that. However, I suspect girls would benefit more from it at that age than boys would.
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If I judged it on principle alone, I'd be against it. I dislike the smell of seperate-but-equal facilities as much as you do. But then, I remember that when I studied physics, half of the women in my semester just happened to come from the one girls-only highschool that was left in the state of Bavaria. The consensus among its graduates was that girls in regular highschools were afraid of embracing their inner nerd for fear of making themselves unattractive to boys. The absence of boys in the classroom removed this concern, leaving the girls free to pursue their true academic interests.

With this empirical information in mind, I am cautiously supportive of all-girls classes.

Yes, there's definitely that, too, Thomas.
But considerably less so these days I think.

Listening. That must have been quite rambunctious.

Interesting, msolga and Thomas. Maybe they do this for the benefit of the girls. But it's a school for kids that aren't getting much out of traditional public schools (but it is a public school) so I would imagine they have more boys than girls.

I know they don't divide the classes by age. All of the middle schoolers are together and all of the high schoolers are together, just separated by gender. There are only about 150 kids in the entire school, the majority of them in high school. The student to staff ratio is, I think, 7:1. They'll be admitting 19 sixth graders next year.