Re: Reading and Writing

From: edequity@phoenix.edc.org
Date: Thu Feb 10 2000 - 17:20:33 EST


I would have to disagree about the issue of reading remediation for boys
or any underachieving student. I don't know the history or reading
remediation, but it is long, probably goes back to at least the 50s, but
maybe longer, and the funds available for such programs are
so well established as not to even get any special notice. In fact an
equity issue of a decade ago was that there is all this money for reading
remediation (affects boys) but none for numeracy remediation. Neither
issue is unimportant.

I agree that some boys dismiss reading as "sissy." Because little boys
have so few males in their daily lives (mom as primary parenting influence
for young children, other caregivers are overwhelmingly female, elementry
teachers are over 90% female) many young boys have almost no routine male
contact during the day. If we could get more males into the ranks of
early childhood education and elementry teaching, this might reverse
itself. Other countries that have no tradtion of all female elementry
faculties do not have the same reading problems with boys.
***************************************************************************
Barbara Tavares
University of Hawaii
808/956-6194
<btavares@hawaii.edu>



This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri Apr 12 2002 - 15:15:29 EDT