Do you think some of this is instinct and some of it is learned?
I was a PE teacher today. The teacher had them playing a pretty cool game that required cooperation and problem solving. It was “Crossing the river.” Think, “The floor is lava!”
There were 4 mats stretched across the center of the gym. Each mat had 1 scooter on it and a long rope that would reach from the mats to the far end of the other side.
The kids were broken up into 4 teams. I guess the other day the teacher assigned teams because for the most part it was 2 teams of girls and 2 teams of boys.
Next I gave them these round rubber plastic discs, 2 sizes, roughly the size of a small and a medium pizza. There was 1 disc per person. The first person in the team started by dropping discs in front of themselves and jumping to the next disc, then dropping another disc, which was passed from the back to the front (DO NOT THROW THE DISCS!!) eventually the whole line was out in the middle of the “river” slowly advancing by passing the last disc to the front.
The kicker is, in order to do this at some point people found themselves having to share one of these small discs with another person until the last disc got passed up to the front.
Then they get to the mat, and had to figure out how to cross the river on this scooter boat and THEN get the boat back to the island for the next person without going back in the river. Can’t walk on the water! If you fell off at any point your whole team had to start over. They got super creative with the rope. One class I was very, VERY impressed with because one team tried to just shove it back over without the rope, and it landed in enemy territory….and the enemy passed it on. They didn’t have to, but they did. Kudos.
Who ever got all their people to the other side of the gym “wins.”
Invariably the girls made it first because they cooperated. The boys just got lost in shoving each other off the pads and fighting and all that bullshit (DO NOT THROW THE DISCS!!”) which meant their team kept having to start over.
Finally the teams got exasperated enough with starting over to start cooperating, but they never were as good as the girls. With the girls, at one point,one of the girls was losing her balance on the pad and in desperation she just LEAPT into the air…and one of her team mates caught her! I never laughed so hard.
So, why were the boys so ready to fight and the girls so ready to cooperate? Nature or nurture?
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Figure that one out and you will own the Keys to the Kingdom
Both nature and nurture. Some boys are more cooperative and problem-solving oriented than others, especially if they are friends.
But boys also definitely enjoy fighting and pranking each other, and are more prone to horse around, while girls seem to be much less prone to those things, and more prone to go along with instructions. There are exceptions, of course. I think it’s complex and there are several factors, and that they’re in several sub-categories of both nature and nurture.
The first thing i thought of when you said you were giving them all discs was DISK WAR! TRON – DEADLY DISCS! What? Don’t throw the discs?!?!?!
But then, more even that most kids I knew, I tend to relate to physical activities that are battle oriented (or at least, practical problem solving and simulations of imaginary simulations), and am disinterested and chafe at most other games.
But your exercise does actually sound really fun and interesting! I love that it gives the players a situation, a task, multiple tools and developing situations, and although there are some rules limiting what they can do, they can come up with creative solutions.
I blame the teacher & her predisposition towards all things female.
Probably, a little of both nature and nurture. What grade was it?
All elementary grades. K – 5.
The littlest boys (K and 1st) were more prone to helping each other, which I found interesting, but they still wrestled about, and fought and yelled at each other much more than the girls.
I would guess by age 10 testosterone is starting to creep up in some of the boys, so I thought maybe that’s part of it. But, I see very young boys, 4 and 5 years old, who already are wrestling and seemingly more aggressive than girls.
My friends who have boys swear there is a difference between boys and girls. They feel the school system often isn’t sympathetic to it.
How, exactly, do they expect the school system to be “sympathetic” to the boys? In what way?
^^Thrtr have been books written about it. They say boys can’t sit still as long, they need to burn off energy, and some school have reduced recess time and PE. Other things too, but I’m not very familiar. I know recently I was talking about learning to read, and from what I tend before boys are more likely to be slower to read and right compared to girls, but they catch write up eventually. The point was now that reading is being taught younger, it might be more difficult for the boys that can’t do it yet, just a developmental thing. I remember a teacher trying to teach me to read in kindergarten, I couldn’t do it, and had no interest. I was very young though.
They have plenty of opportunities for running amuck. Recess 3 (sometimes 4) times a day. PE.
If anyone is complaining about not giving The kids enough time for excercise is making excuses for failing to train their child to respect the teachers and other adults, and the rules. They’re trying to blame the fact that their kid gets in trouble so much on the school system.
I have to look.at that on my computer tomorrow. It smacks of excuses to me. I also question some of the statistics as well as the conclusions. However if it’s actually PBS I have to give it some respect.
Boys are 30 percent more likely than girls to flunk or drop out of school;
When it comes to grades and homework, girls outperform boys in elementary, secondary, high school, college, and even graduate school;
Boys are four to five times more likely than girls to be diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD);
Women outnumber men in higher education with 56 percent of bachelor’s degrees and 55 percent of graduate degrees going to women.
Well, if all of that is true, I still don’t see how it is the school’s fault. If anything, I would take it to mean girls are simply smarter than boys. Those parents who are “concerned,” need to help their boys, make sure they understand, make sure they do their homework.
If anyone wants a school geared especially for boys, they need to enroll them in an all boy’s school, or home school them.
Anytime you start tailoring a school to a specific group, someone is getting left out.
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