WIBU to print off this article and give it to the teacher.

[Imalldonethanks]

DD (8) came home from school at the end of last term talking about the differences in male and female brains (not relating to their weight or structure!). Her teacher had declared she has a 'male' brain because she is logical and rational.
This sort of talk boils my blood.
My next child is in her class this year and I don't want her to listen to this sort of crap.

I get on reasonably well with this teacher, but there are very few opportunities to chat.

So WIBU to print off an article from The New Scientist debunking that theory and send it in with a note saying 'thought you might find this interesting'?

I have this morning ask 3 friends who are Coloured if they want to be called Black or POC and all 3 have said Coloured, they were all WTF about the Person of Colour bit.... They think someone is having a joke at my expense on the POC bit as have never heard it used...

I too have concerns about how these categories are measured. I've thought about this for a while, and based on some real life events I have come to the following conclusions:

1. Women are meant to be the classic gossips, more interested in social interaction than logic, planning etc. Except. Men gossip all the time: online Economics forums, over coffee, who's shagging who, across the classroom. Even when you think about men in hunter/gatherer societies, men are figuring out other men (if they are a threat, what their hidden motives are) and figuring out women (are they sexually available etc). Men are highly skilled at reading social cues. Yet women are stuck with labels like 'intuitive', 'social'.

1. Logic - as others have noted, logic and spatial awareness problems are often presented in ways that trigger connections with men. If I see a test as something that I'm likely to fail because of my sex, I subconsciously give it less attention (this is certainly proven in maths). Women are using logic everyday - perhaps we aren't measuring it in the right way. The earliest computer programmers were women but now women are told they don't have the gene for that.

1. Emotion. The emotional, heart-on-sleeve, soppy sex is, of course...Hey, what if men were actually as bad as women? Or more so. There is good evidence men cope less well with loss of a loved one. Empathy is encouraged in women, yet most of the 19/20th century authors, poets, composers and painters were men.

The more these differences are analysed, the more they break down. When you scratch the surface, these so-called differences used to justify sex ratio biases always back to money. Whatever the men are doing gets more pay/prestige.

I have this morning ask 3 friends who are Coloured if they want to be called Black or POC and all 3 have said Coloured, they were all WTF about the Person of Colour bit.... They think someone is having a joke at my expense on the POC bit as have never heard it used.

I'm sure you did an informal poll of 'all your black friends' this morning.

There is a strong gender effect with prevalence higher for boys than girls in all of these studies, for example, 8% boys, 6% girls in the Tomblin et al. (1997) sample, and this gender discrepancy has been consistently found in other research (Conti-Ramsden and Botting, 1999; Dockrell and Lindsay, 2000) and in the national statistics collected through the School Census of all children in state-funded schools in England, by the DfE
journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/feduc.2016.00002/full
It is a bit annoying reading these threads which seem to suggest that males are the same as females in terms of brain structure and development when studies and 17 years personal experience would suggest otherwise. As stated above boys are more likely to have a speech and/or language impairment or delay.

The point people are making is that knowing that I am female tells you fuck all about my brain, my aptitudes and my abilities. To tell a small child wildly inaccurate and offensive things as fact is simply wrong. Teachers should respond to the actual abilities and aptitudes of the children they teach, not make assumptions and generalisations about them based on their sex. It does a massive disservice to all children.

It is a bit annoying reading these threads which seem to suggest that males are the same as females in terms of brain structure and development when studies and 17 years personal experience would suggest otherwise. As stated above boys are more likely to have a speech and/or language impairment or delay.

More likely. But that tells you nothing about an individual boy.

More likely, hmm. And this is definitely due to specific and consistent brain differences between boys and girls, independent (as much as can be accounted for) of childhood environment/upbringing? And the difference is apparently 8% of boys with a language impairment as opposed to 6% of girls? So when faced with a girl about which you know nothing, how will this information inform how you interact with her?

So when faced with a girl about which you know nothing, Before doing anything you take a full case history which runs to many pages from the parent/giver and then do a battery of formal/informal tests plus observations.
Each child is treated as an individual not as a boy or a girl.
apparently It's not apparently It's a fact.

So, how does this discrepancy affect your interactions with each individual child? Once you've taken the history and done the tests? How is it helpful to you when dealing with children?

How is it helpful to you when dealing with children? It's not.
But I'm highlighting general differences between males and females.
We don't know enough about how humans acquire language never mind to categorically state that male and female brains are exactly the same.

What is the point in highlighting small differences, which may be due to socialisation to a lesser or greater extent? It will be interesting to scientists who are specialists in the field of brain scanning or neurological development, who are looking at how various conditions manifest. Why is it important that primary school teachers, for example, are aware of these small average differences? Or other professionals? All too often these things are used to perpetuate harmful stereotypes and to justify treating girls as lesser to boys.

@Imalldonethanks - someone's already mentioned Lise Elliott upthread, but I'd like to second the recommendation. If you can lay hands on a library copy of "Pink Brain, Blue Brain" (it's out of print, sadly) it's a great book. Elliott's specialisation is plasticity of brain development especially in infancy and early childhood. In a nutshell, her argument is this.

1. Insofar as any sex-related differences in cognition have been measured, e.g. age at which a child first gets to a vocabulary of 20 words, age at which they can count to ten reliably, these differences have tiny d-values (the d-value is a measure of the extent to which the bell curves for the two populations overlap - I'm oversimplifying a bit here). So, it might be the case that boys on average reach the twenty word mark a little later than girls, but armed only with the information that child X got to twenty words at, say, average plus two weeks, you'd maybe have a 48% chance they were female and a 52% chance they were male (made up figures - but the point is that it's not something you'd bet a tenner on).

2. What we know from a lot of psychological studies is that boys and girls are treated very differently by adults from early infancy onwards (Cordelia Fine, also mentioned upthread, has a section on this). Elliott mentions, for instance, a test where crawling babies are put in a room full of ramps of different steepness, wearing in neutral baby grows. First placed with care workers who don't know their sex - this shows that there's no sex difference in ramp-crawling ability. Then they're put back in the room with their mothers. The mothers of the boys correctly estimate their sons' abilities (on the whole) while the mothers of girls are more protective, and intervene to stop their daughters climbing ramps perfectly well within their ability.

3. The brain is plastic throughout life, but incredibly so in the first five years or so - it responds massively to environmental stimulus.

Her conclusion is that where differences have been measured, they're tiny. And furthermore, given that we know adults treat children of different sexes differently, and that the brain is incredibly plastic, there is no way to design an experiment which could ever answer the nature/nurture question.

I'd be hopping mad at the teacher, but I salute your very diplomatic approach which seems to have paid dividends. These sorts of throwaway comments can screw up a child. We know that girls by age seven already think they are worse at maths on average, even though there's minimal differences in test scores. A teacher making that sort of comment can be the straw that breaks the camel's back and takes a child who could have been interested in STEM and turns them off, aged seven or eight.

which may be due to socialisation to a lesser or greater extent? A predictable response.

Many children I used to work with were in special schools and units for children with specific speech and language disorders. They were children who had average and above average intelligence but the part of their brains which controls language acquisition was impaired. They were mainly boys. This was nothing to do with socialisation at all.

www.moorhouseschool.co.uk/

What has that got to do with general populations of neuorotypical children? How did you definitively establish that nothing about these children's existence since birth contributed to their impairment? How did you rule out a specific brain injury caused in utero or at birth?

How did you rule out a specific brain injury caused in utero or at birth? Because a birth history is established at parental interview. SALT is part of the NHS and more access to the medical profession.

derxa

So you're saying that boys are more prone to speech disorders?

What's that got to do with how you treat children who don't have speech disorders?

...or for that matter, those who do?

Lol. I did ask my friends and they are coloured.
Mind you I also asked my father and I can't even print the word he said..
So I will continue to call people coloured, as in my mind calling someone black has been taboo for so long it would feel like swearing at my mother.
We all have things we do that make wonder, is that ok to say, and sometimes we have to go with what we are comfortable with.

What's that got to do with how you treat children who don't have speech disorders? Nothing (by the way they are not speech disorders).
Back to the OP. Did the teacher say 'male brain'? Perhaps not. Because the OP hasn't returned and if they do I'll eat my hat.

Derxa

"Nothing (by the way they are not speech disorders)."

You called them speech and language disorders.

children with specific speech and language disorders.

I thought you meant speech plus language. Not 'speech and language' as a specific term.

Apols.

Hi Dextra I'm here.
Hope your hat is seasoned nicely.

The thread had moved on from my initial question and as I've updated what has happened (I spoke briefly to the teacher about the discussions it had raised and she accepted my offer of some light reading material ) I hadn't had much else to add.

The teacher definitely said 'male brain'.

The teacher didn't deny it when I mentioned it.

Back to the OP. Did the teacher say 'male brain'? Perhaps not. Because the OP hasn't returned and if they do I'll eat my hat.

The OP did return - post at 16:38 yesterday - she'd had what sounds like an amicable and constructive conversation with the teacher. The implication of that post is that the teacher did say 'male brain'.