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New York, 11:57 PM
Tue Nov 24
62 posts in the last 24 hours
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On a lighter note, my son WANTS a 2:1 ratio for girls because he knows that he will get more dates. he is a planner, that one. #genderincollegeadmissions
11/11/09
My brother is smarter than me.
Always has been, always will be.
And it's not because he's a dude and it's not because he got more love, funding, hugs or kisses. It's because some magical mist of parental DNA came together and produced someone with off-the-charts intelligence, the will to work hard for his grades and (most importantly if you ask me) someone who loves to learn.
He's smarter, he works harder and he still didn't get into Northwestern. I spent my early years in Special Education and got into Northwestern. Never really understood that. But now we both attend large public universities and we're happy, so life is good. #genderincollegeadmissions
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So I thought I'd throw in some love for mine. #genderincollegeadmissions
11/11/09
But I can tell you that two years, particularly in the last 15 years, can make a huge difference in college admissions. I used to use 5 years of history as a way to predict outcomes. Now I use maybe 2 years of history with a lot of to-the-minute info to help predict outcomes for kids. #genderincollegeadmissions
11/11/09
Then when college time came, I had a 3.8 GPA and didn't get into the school I wanted that he had been wait-listed at with a 2.8 three years earlier. Now we go to the same university and he's a 6th year senior and we're in classes together. I'm still better at being responsible, though. #genderincollegeadmissions
11/11/09
Of all the adults that I knew as a child/teen, the men were invariably making quite a bit more than the women, regardless of their level of education. I know that there are many other factors influencing the relative success of the genders in academic environments, but I also really feel that this is one people aren't looking at. We tell children that they can all succeed, and they can all be whatever they want when they grow up, but then they look at the world around them and see - white men, being generally successful regardless; white/asian women and asian men, being successful with higher education; pretty much everybody else struggling to get the higher education and get the resulting success that supposedly comes with it. While I do think diversity on campus is the best situation, I don't see how this trend of imbalance can be resolved without addressing the disparity in final outcomes after education for different groups of people. #genderincollegeadmissions
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On minority men in college: It's up to the parents and the rest of the community to influence them. In Asian culture, parents (and the community at large) often have a "go to college or else" attitude. #genderincollegeadmissions
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That was my experience exactly. #genderincollegeadmissions
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For those of you who keep talking about "whining," affirmative action today is used to improve diversity, not make reparations. If colleges were attempting to make up for wrongs in the past, then Jews and Asians wouldn't experience such reverse discrimination at elite schools.
Note, men still have it tougher in admissions at some colleges...especially MIT and Caltech. I know it's easy to have a knee-jerk reaction to say, "Well, a girl scored slightly higher than the boy...why does he deserve to get in? She worked for it."
If you replaced girl with white kid and boy with black kid...would y'all be saying the same things? #genderincollegeadmissions
11/11/09
If a formerly all-white college had slowly become made up of more non-whites than whites, and students were actually avoiding it because of its ethnic make-up, no, I don't think anyone would be saying the same things. Perhaps they'd be wondering why the university's reputation would be based on its ethnic make-up, or suggest that any previously implemented affirmative action rules in favor of non-whites be dropped. #genderincollegeadmissions
11/11/09
Also, I don't know about MIT, but my understanding is that Caltech very clearly has NO affirmative action type policies, either for minorities, or for women. #genderincollegeadmissions
11/11/09
"Nothing is more freighted with meaning for our own destiny than the revolution of the Negro American...In far too many ways American Negroes have been another nation: deprived of freedom, crippled by hatred, the doors of opportunity closed to hope...But freedom is not enough. You do not wipe away the scars of centuries by saying: Now you are free to go where you want, and do as you desire, and choose the leaders you please. You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, 'you are free to compete with all the others,' and still justly believe that you have been completely fair...This is the next and the more profound stage of the battle for civil rights. We seek not just freedom but opportunity. We seek not just legal equity but human ability, not just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and equality as a result...To this end equal opportunity is essential, but not enough, not enough." #genderincollegeadmissions
11/11/09
And Jews and Asians do NOT experience "reverse discrimination" at elite colleges. The numbers simply do not bear that out. #genderincollegeadmissions
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[www.asianamericanalliance.com] #genderincollegeadmissions
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- Girls who struggle in school at an early age are often pressured to improve academically. Boys who struggle are often told to redirect their efforts into sports. ALL of the boys in my program last year believed they didn't need to know how to read and write because they were going to become pro athletes. One of the boys in my program this year believes that he is going to become an NHL player. He is fifteen and he has NEVER played hockey. Not even once.
- From a young age, girls are taught to be polite, do as they're told, etc. For a learning-disabled student, this has benefits in the long run as they are more likely to sit quietly in class, pay attention when the teacher is talking, accept the help they are offered and at least attempt their classwork.
- There is a serious cycle with low-achieving boys and video games. They can't do their homework, so they retreat to their rooms to play video games, and they become so hooked on video games that they refuse to leave their rooms to do homework later. They also stay up too late and get less sleep, and I personally believe that the amount of gaming these guys do damages their developing eyes (most of my male students have tracking issues and/or dyslexia). After a while their parents just want to end the struggle and put a TV in the kids' rooms. ALL of the boys I have taught in this program have TVs in their bedrooms. NONE of the girls have had TVs in their rooms. Girls, on the other hand, use social networking sites where they're doing a lot of reading and writing. The "cool" games on social networking sites often teach skills like responsibility (manage a farm! look after a pet!) and money management (open a restaurant and turn a profit!). The girls I've taught have also had interests outside sports and video games: some are in band, one apprentices at a hair salon, lots are into drawing and painting.
The simple fact of the matter is that the boys I teach DON'T belong in university. Not because of who they are, but 70% because of how their parents raised them and 30% because of choices they have made as adolescences (I do believe in holding them partially accountable at this age). The movement needs to happen at the home level and the effects will be felt in a generation. Parents of boys need to access the resources that are already available, the importance of academics needs to be stressed in all elements of daily life, and teachers need to have more freedom to speak openly with parents about the home-school partnership. I don't know a single teacher who isn't working their ass off to accommodate the needs of their male students, but I only know a handful of parents of struggling male students who are still making an effort (most gave up in the fourth grade and turned the XBox onto perma-on). #genderincollegeadmissions
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I'd also like to add for boys of color, there's a lot of social stigma attached to doing well academically. Many say it's selling out or "acting white."
So much of their social standing revolves around showing no fear or weakness. That means you can't get an answer wrong in class, so why try? Better to say that you don't just care rather than risk the discomfort of making a mistake and having to be corrected.
Learning is hard work for most people and doesn't come easy. A lot of my 9th grade boys came in with a 5th grade reading level, few study skills, no patience with themselves when learning new things, and a negative self-image when it comes to school.
It takes parents and teachers a lot of time and energy to help these kids rebuild that image, and unfortunately, most of the parents I worked with didn't have either the time (working 2-3 jobs to support the family) or the will to help get their kids on the right path. #genderincollegeadmissions
11/11/09
This mirrors a study that was done a few years ago regarding gender and achievement. Basically, the researchers ended up thinking that IQ and achievement have the same average across genders, but that the men have "fatter tails". Statistically, this means that there are more genius IQ males (statistically true) and more mentally retarded males (used in the definitional sense, and also true). Males dominate abstract mathematical thought fields (not a simple issue, btw) but they also have like 10 times the prison population and far more developmental disorders.
I have no idea where I was going with this, but I find it all very interesting. #genderincollegeadmissions
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Just an interesting aside: All of the students in my program are given laptops with wireless internet access. All of my students have wireless internet at home. I maintain a website with multiple features, including a clickable calendar where any day an assignment is due is bolded, you can click on that date and it will describe the assignment and link to online instructions, exemplars, etc. You can also view by week or month to get a bigger picture of what is coming up and when. The website also has games that support our curricular outcomes (Exponent Battleship! Figurative Language Who Wants to be a Millionaire!), scanned copies of completed work/worksheets from higher-achieving students, PDFs of every chapter of every Grade 9 textbook (legal!), copies of PowerPoints shown in class, videos of teacher demonstrations/explanations, etc. In addition to this online resource, I phone and/or email home to every family each time a major assignment is assigned, when its due date approaches and when it is overdue. (This is why there's only space for ten in my program!). Furthermore, right from the start we establish with the parents that we don't want a learning-disabled student to struggle with something for six hours when a classmate could finish in five minutes- the expectation is that the students will work for twenty or thirty minutes, a few times each week, and submit the amount they were able to complete (keeping in mind all assignments are already modified based on their individual abilities). Even with all of these supports... NOTHING. EVER. GETS. DONE. #genderincollegeadmissions
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The interesting thing is the salarial gender gap in Brazil is as wide as the American. #genderincollegeadmissions
11/11/09
Hmm ... Yeah- that's pretty much how it works outside of college as well.
Sorry, not much empathy in this corner. #genderincollegeadmissions
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...there are no words. I seriously thought she was either on crack, drunk, or joking and would come out and say later "JKZ GUISE, JKZ!". But she didn't.
Here's our W ST department's response to the original article (I can't find the original one, it's buried in the Journal's website):
[www.edmontonjournal.com] #genderincollegeadmissions
11/11/09
Also, encouraging students to date off campus doesn't always work-- who else is around to date a college freshman or sophomore? You're considered too young for most of the young professionals in the area, and too old for the highschoolers. Everyone else your age is either at your college, another college with the same problems, or not on the college track, which is not dating material for a lot of people.
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It's also awesome you had a relaxed guest policy; my school did too. But many schools friends went to did not-- to the point where at one school, i needed to sign in and sign out, and could only be in the dorm for two hours, and could not spend the night if I had wanted to, since I was the guest of a male. (I don't know if it was a coed dorm with same sex floor, or what, I wasn't interested in spending the night, so I didn't look into it."
So, again-- your school sounds awesome, your floor mates sound awful, and it's great you were located somewhere where the straight gals could still manage to find male partners. But your experience isn't a universal. #genderincollegeadmissions
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I'm sure these men wouldn't otherwise even dream of sexual assault, but there was just soooo much fresh pussy roaming around. I guess women should just ixnay on the higher education. Poor boys can't help themselves!
/bitter sarcasm
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With your rationalization, I would hate to think what would happen if the general population began to skew dramatically female. Then I guess we'd have to think about aborting more female fetuses for the greater good, since all the surplus of women would be creating a baaaaaad environment for men, making them unable to thrive and also to not rape women.
11/11/09
Why shouldn't colleges and universities spend time looking to attract people that they are missing in their student populations? College is about learning from people with different experiences. One of the arguments for affirmative action is that diversity helps education. That has been proven to be true. Students benefit greatly from having to work with and learn from people different than themselves. Diversity aids education. If educators have argued for so long that having women in higher education makes higher education better (and it has), the opposite is also true. Having a strong male population in higher education makes for a better overall educational experience. Losing that perspective is bad for education.
As a college administrator, I have seen the way that this imbalance has affected misogyny and created a different kind of rape culture. Yeah, there are other kinds of misogyny on other campuses with different situations and the rape culture plays out in a different form there, but gender imbalance has created a new beast in dating culture. Is it wrong for me to point that out? No. Am I giving men who rape a pass? No. I'm talking about the creation of a new kind of culture which has exacerbated aspects of rape culture in a different way. Seriously, knee-jerk responses are not helpful. Saying I want to abort female fetuses because I believe that we as a culture need to look at the reasons why men aren't choosing college? Sort of like comparing Obama to Hitler. #genderincollegeadmissions
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One example is that multiple people have posted something like this "Gee, i wonder why it took so long to get women equal into these colleges, but as soon as a small disparity happens in favor of women, everyone jumps?!"
This is either willful doublethink or just dumb. It took forever to get women into college because nobody gave a shit about equality for hundreds of years. Once society got on the bandwagon of "hey, gender equality is probably a good thing", then it happened pretty quickly. And now that we're striving that goal, when people see it in the other direction, they'll try to correct it.
And what's the insinuation? That because a patriarchal society denied something of women for a long time, that any potential male problems should be ignored for an equally long time? #genderincollegeadmissions
11/11/09
I don't know the answer to this. I don't even know if it's a relevant question, since the gender disparity doesn't have the same root causes as the race disparity addressed by Affirmative Action. But I do think that admitting more men is a knee-jerk reaction that salves the consciences of college admissions boards without addressing the real reasons why they are recieving fewer qualified male applicants, and whether it even matters. #genderincollegeadmissions