Ontario school fail

[curgoth]

Dear Ontario school;

There is a lot wrong with this, and only a little bit right.

Using comics to get kids interested in reading is good.
Giving grade 7 boys Frank Miller to work with is not so good.
Giving girls midwifery instead of the goddamned Batman is frustrating and insulting on a number of levels.
Why do we need to give boys and girls different things to read at all?

Comments

[the-nita.livejournal.com]

Because for reasons I have yet to grok personally, there is a semi-universal belief that "boys don't like to read" (Yes, I'm self-selecting, but I just don't know that many men who DON'T like to read, and the boys (as in actual juveniles) I know, also like books.

Once you swallow "boys don't like to read", the rest of the blind idiot sexism is much easier to get down.

[mightydoll.livejournal.com]

Midwives Apprentice is a comic book now? When I read it, it was still a novel. - My point being, that not only did they give these girls a comic about obstetrics, it was a sequential art re-telling of a novel...and those rarely turn out nearly as cool....

[sylvarthorne.livejournal.com]

I'm going to preface this with saying there's absolutely nothing wrong with comics; I just never got into them when I was younger because I read them too fast and wanted something that would keep my interest for longer.

I think one major problem is why we feel we have to trick kids into reading in the first place. Who's failing at teaching the children to love books? The school system? Parents? Both? *Some* of my generation - and some younger - turned out to love reading. What did we get that others didn't?

[jackspryte.livejournal.com]

What a bunch of fail.

AAArrrggghhh....what simplistic gender normative garbage!

Why not divide print motivation along other lines like class or race or...you get my pont I hope.

[zingerella.livejournal.com]

I don't even have time to go into this. Just GRRRRR! ZING SMASH!

More later when I have a brain and more than two seconds to call my own. That may be MUCH later, at this point.

[selfishidol.livejournal.com]

And I thought I felt sick before I read this ...

[dairymilk.livejournal.com]

I can't articulate anything well at all due to excessive studying but this article frustrated me from the get go with the premise:

The article talks about addressing the gender gap in elementary girls, you know the time when girls learn a little faster than boys at language? I adore the level of concern for the boys and their temporary setback. On the plus side, they did attempt to encourage girls to build things.

On a personal level, I would have failed in this school, and been very hard on the teachers! I had something like that in the private school I went to for a year - the boys got to play cool sports and talk about ear's getting chopped off and read comics, and the girls got to play whiffle ball and TALK incessantly. Not everyone fits the gender stereotype and going out of their way to make things "cool" for the boys and not for the girls is just.....frusrating.

Also, there is some great research out there on how to do this RIGHT, at some ages apparently separation can benefit both genders but not like this. Why don't you just put them back in home ec and shop class and call it done.

Take 2

[zingerella.livejournal.com]

Lunch is now over, but I'll try reposting, this time without markup errors:


You know, it's almost as if there haven't been over twenty years of research into the notion that kids learn things differently, in different ways, at different rates, and have different innate abilities, with which they approach learning. Or that educators can alter their teaching strategies to accommodate a number of different needs in the same classroom.

It's almost as if girls haven't thrived despite the relative paucity of girl-focussed books in elementary and middle school curricula (a paucity that is slowly being redressed).

It's almost as if publishers and teachers and librarians haven't been working for years to expand the availability of reading material that will appeal to different students.

It's almost as if it's totally okay to have students reading violent, misogynist material, as long as those student are boys.

What is this? 1940?

[henchminion.livejournal.com]

I quite enjoyed The Midwife's Apprentice. In middle school I would have liked to read it and the comics.

[misslynx.livejournal.com]

In the comic you linked to, I originally misread their instructions to him as "Write a story with a female character who is not a prostitute, and leave her alive," which is even more appropriate, really.