Michael Gurian writes about the Disappearing Act that males seem to be pulling in higher education, and touches on the fact that the modern classroom doesn’t really suit most young males:

Now, however, the boys who don’t fit the classrooms are glaringly clear. Many families are barely involved in their children’s education. Girls outperform boys in nearly every academic area. Many of the old principles of education are diminished. In a classroom of 30 kids, about five boys will begin to fail in the first few years of pre-school and elementary school. By fifth grade, they will be diagnosed as learning disabled, ADD/ADHD, behaviorally disordered or “unmotivated.” They will no longer do their homework (though they may say they are doing it), they will disrupt class or withdraw from it, they will find a few islands of competence (like video games or computers) and overemphasize those.

Boys have a lot of Huck Finn in them — they don’t, on average, learn as well as girls by sitting still, concentrating, multitasking, listening to words. For 20 years, I have been taking brain research into homes and classrooms to show teachers, parents and others how differently boys and girls learn. Once a person sees a PET or SPECT scan of a boy’s brain and a girl’s brain, showing the different ways these brains learn, they understand. As one teacher put it to me, “Wow, no wonder we’re having so many problems with boys.”

I’ve insisted for some time now that the way we teach isn’t a good fit for everyone, though I’d never thought to break it down along gender lines. There are some people who are simply not wired to learn by sitting in a classroom and listening to lectures. That’s one of the arguments I’ve used to support the idea of a voucher program that would let these young people enter a school that more adequately meets their needs.

I fared reasonably well in the traditional classroom (my problems in college tended to stem more from getting bored with the pace of classes, not from any preference “hands-on” learning), but I could easily have named five or ten students that I knew were fairly intelligent but who were falling behind because the teaching wasn’t what they needed.

It’s always nice to see that being acknowledged by someone who probably knows a little more about the psychology of learning than I do.

( þ Instapundit )

I’ve been wanting to make some changes to the blog for a while. Adding the Theme Switcher helped quite a bit, but the styles I added weren’t mine, so I still had the bug. I decided to go with a three-column layout this time, and I think I like it, all but the place-holder “MINI” logo in the upper left. (My quotes are also shifted too far to the right, I think, but I’m too sleepy to fix that right now.)

I’ve still got some tweaking to do, but for the most part, I think that this layout’s completed enough to become the primary one for a while.