A teacher I know from a local co–ed school describes the boys in her class as dynamic, energetic, funny. “The girls,” she says, “seem to be playing at school.”
I’ve seen in my own classroom at UCLA what she describes. The male students are pitching, coaxing, laughing, joking. The female students are largely quiet, polite, surprising me with top scores on the first test of the material.
Among educators this caution, this courtesy, will become known as the girl pause. If a teacher asks a question, a boy blurts out an answer. A girl pauses: Do I know this? Meanwhile the class has moved on.
The girl pause is not, I think, a bad thing in itself. If it means courtesy, not cowardice. If it springs from respect for others, not fear of risk…
Girls have the advantage in grade school. From ages five to ten they have better social acumen, fine motor skills, verbal ability. They are curious and engaged, exactly the sort of student that teachers like to teach.
Ask a nine–year–old girl how electricity works and she’ll pause and think a moment.
“Maybe the sun is attracted to… or fire is somehow captured… anyway power gets in the wires and that’s sort of where it starts.”
It is always inventive. Offered with an optimistic doesn’t–hurt–to–try shrug. Very different from the same girl at thirteen.
“I don’t know.”
What do you think happens?
“I don’t know.”
In the few years since this girl was curious and engaged, society intervened. Somehow she learned that she had no business offering answers. Because she’s unaware that creative hypotheses, like the ones she’d offered at age nine, are the basis of much of human knowledge, she just repeats, “I don’t know.”
To become the engineer who explains electricity or the surgeon or the scientist who uses it, she needs to be encouraged, challenged, directed to explore. She needs at the very least to be heard in the classroom even if she paused to collect her thoughts. This was not likely to happen in the co–ed schools I read about in The Research.
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