Gender

Okay, I understand the debate about the differences between men and women and how it applies to education, but like any debate there are generalizations. One statement that Flynn, in the piece Composing as a Woman, made really stuck out to me: “The mental process that are involved in considering the abstract and the impersonal have been labeled ‘thinking’ and are attributed primarily to men, while those that deal with the personal and interpersonal fall under the rubric of ‘emotions’ and are largely relegated to women” (Flynn 575). This really stuck out to me because although I am a man, I am not a very logical thinker, on the contrary, I am a very emotional thinker and will gladly admit it and I do not view women as being “emotional thinkers”.

A classic example I have of this is a prompt I’ve used in the past to get my students to engage in persuasive writing. For my ninth grade students, I would pose the prompt: “Girls are smarter than boys.” I got this idea from a female literacy coach who helps new teachers get a handle on the curriculum when I first began my career as a teacher. The responses were interesting. Typically I found that the arguments from the females were much more logical, whereas the boys’ arguments were emotional, repetitive and egotistical. I would then show each class some examples from the boys and the girls, and the boys got quite a wakeup call. Now, I do not know if feminist scholars would disapprove of this practice, but I used this exercise hoping that the boys could improve their writing by seeing a better example set by their female peers.

From my experience in public education for the past eight years, I’ve noticed that females do considerably better than males. Women fought hard for their rights and appear to have the upper-hand in some ways, but there are still differences. For example, it has been my experience that men express the emotion of anger with aggression; for example, slamming their fists on the desk of a boardroom and this is deemed acceptable; whereas, some women assert the emotion of anger with tears. For example, one time I had a student pulled outside of the classroom and I was reprimanding her for not doing her homework and doing terribly in the class, when she started crying. I asked her, “Why are you crying? Did I hurt your feelings?” She then responded, “No, I am crying because I am angry”. So men and women display emotions differently, I guess.

Perhaps the appropriate approach to take, as Flynn suggests: “We must alert our women students to the dangers of emasculation and provide them with a critical perspective. But we must also encourage them to become self-consciously aware of what their experience in the world has been and how this experience is related to the politics of gender. Then we must encourage our women students to write from the power of that experience” (583). I agree with this statement, and would hope that teachers would not insist that female students not write from such a perspective.