From an article I read today:

"Studies show that Western urban children grow up so closed off in man-made environments that their brains never form a deep or complex connection to the natural world. While studying children from the U.S., researchers have suggested a developmental timeline for what is called “folkbiological reasoning.” These studies posit that it is not until children are around 7 years old that they stop projecting human qualities onto animals.... Compared to Yucatec Maya communities in Mexico, however, Western urban children appear to be developmentally delayed in this regard. Children who grow up constantly interacting with the natural world are much less likely to anthropomorphize other living things into late childhood.

"Given that people living in [Western industrialized] societies don’t routinely encounter or interact with animals other than humans or pets, it’s not surprising that they end up with a rather cartoonish understanding of the natural world. “Indeed,” the report concluded, “studying the cognitive development of folkbiology in urban children would seem the equivalent of studying ‘normal’ physical growth in malnourished children.”

from Pacific Standard

Here's to my 20 acres.

Ok, so B's uncle works part time as a school bus driver. This morning he posted this on Facebook. Had us rolling on the floor!

"Today was the last day of school in Montgomery County before the Christmas break, so I wore a Santa Claus hat while driving the school bus. The elementary kids see me every day, but today about half of them said, “Good morning Santa,” when they boarded the bus.

"One very active little first grade girl named Mary usually has trouble sitting quietly in her seat, but today she sat quietly all the way to school. She kept staring, smiling and waving at me through the rear view mirror. We arrived at the elementary school a few minutes before the school doors were opened. As we waited, Mary slipped down the aisle and climbed into my lap. Then she said 'I’ve been a very good girl and I want a Barbie doll for Christmas.'

"As she climbed out of my lap, I noticed a line of children had formed in the aisle of the bus. The next child was a kindergarten girl who wanted a little puppy for Christmas. Then a first grade boy asked, “did you bring my football last year?” When I asked if he enjoyed the football, he said, “it was great but I want something I can ride this year.” One little girl wanted to pet my reindeer. I told her to meet me in her living room on Christmas Eve and she could pet Donner. Two girls wanted kittens.

"One older boy asked, why I was driving a school bus if I was Santa. I explained I had to build up my endurance because I had a really long drive in a few days. One boy asked why my beard wasn’t very long. I explained beards can grow quickly for some people.

"When the school doors opened, we had to close down Santa’s greeting station. Several children who didn’t get to talk to me wanted to touch my arm or give me a hug before exiting the bus. I think I had more fun than the kids. I didn’t realize a Santa Claus hat was so special, almost magical."

Disclaimer: I'm making this list for my own benefit to help me teach, and I've directly copied or paraphrased many sections from different articles and books I've read. I take no credit for the writing. Some of it's mine; some of it's not. List of sources below.

15. Shoulder to Shoulder, Face to Face
Girls’ friendships are built around who they are. Relationships focus on each other. They get together to be together—what they are doing doesn’t matter so much. Shared activities are just an excuse to get together. Girls talk to each other—about everything. They tell each other secrets.

Boys’ friendships are built around activities. They get together to do activities together, because they share a common interest. Who they are matters much less than what they are doing. Girls’ friendships are face to face; boys’ friendships are shoulder to shoulder.

Because of their innate biological differences, boys and girls relate to teachers differently. Girls tend to see the teacher as an ally, as someone there to help them learn. They are comfortable asking for help from teachers, one on one, or in groups. They are comfortable being “friends” with the teacher. Boys, on the other hand, find it “geeky” to ask for help. Usually they will only ask for help as a last resort, and sometimes not even then, preferring failing the assignment over getting assistance. Being “friends” with the teacher is the epitome of uncool for boys. More typically, they will avoid eye contact with the teacher, not raise their hands or participate too much, and goof off.

To accommodate these differences, if you are working with a girl, work with her face to face. Smile and look her in the eye. She wants to know you’re her friend, you’re interested in her, and you genuinely care about her, both as a student and as a person. In contrast, when working with a boy, sit down together side by side. Put the books in front of you, so you are working together shoulder to shoulder. Don’t smile (or at least not as much). Don’t work with a boy eye to eye or hold an eye to eye stare unless you’re disciplining him.


16. Working in Groups
Breaking classes into small groups in a common teaching practice. But it works a lot better for girls than for boys. A major reason for this is the differences in how the sexes relate to teachers discussed above.

Girls usually do, to some extent, care about their grades and want to please the teacher. They also aren’t handicapped by the “being friends with the teacher is geeky” attitude that boys are. So if small group of girls gets stuck, at least one will go to the teacher for help.

Boys, on the other hand, will not. It can be hard to keep boys on the task at hand. Because being disruptive is cool, many of them would rather disrupt the activity than do it. And if a group of boys gets stuck, you can almost guarantee none of them will go to the teacher for help. Even the boys who might ask for help privately will hesitate to do it when in a group—they know it will lower their status in the eyes of the other boys. If boys get stuck, instead of asking for help, they are far more likely to get rowdy and start disrupting the other groups.


17. Compartmentalized Brains
Left brain, verbal; right brain, spatial. Right?

Scientists used to believe the left and right sides of the brain had different specialized functions. The left brain was specialized for verbal ability; the right brain was specialized for spatial ability.
And yet people have recognized for a long time that men tend to compartmentalize while women can multitask like crazy.

Once again, it turns out the scientists who came up with the “left brain, verbal; right brain, spatial” conclusions studied men, not women. Recently, scientific evidence has shed more light on how male vs. female brains actually work. And there is a difference. It turns out men do—literally— have compartmentalized brains, while for women, everything is connected.

Men who suffer a stroke that affects their left brain lose, on average, 20% of their verbal IQ. Men who suffer a stroke that affects their right brain lose almost no verbal ability whatsoever. In men, the verbal IQ is clearly compartmentalized to the left hemisphere of the brain. “Left brain, verbal; right brain, spatial” is true for men. Women who suffer a stroke, however, lose on average 10% of their verbal IQ—no matter which side of the brain the stroke affected. “Women use both hemispheres of their brains for language. Men don’t.”

Other studies have analyzed brain tissue itself, in both animals and humans. It turns out that male and female brain tissue is “intrinsically different.” Male brains contain an abundance of proteins, coded specifically by the Y chromosome, that are not found in female brains. Similarly, women’s brains contain material coded by the X chromosome that are absent from men’s brains. These differences in brain tissue and function are genetically programmed.

“I can only do one thing at a time!” men will say, while women simultaneously cook dinner, watch the kids, keep an eye on the laundry, let the dog out, let the dog back in, and talk on the phone. After a big fight in the morning, a man leaves for the day and focuses on his work as if nothing had happened; meanwhile, his wife is absent-minded all day, has a horrible day in which nothing goes right, and is still brooding over the problem in the relationship when her husband arrives home that evening. God created us differently. He genetically designed men’s brains to compartmentalize. He genetically designed women’s brains to multitask. And He designed us differently for a reason. We’re specially, differently designed for different, special things.


Sources:
Shelley Taylor. Behavioral Responses to Stress in Females: Tend-and-Befriend, Not Fight-or-Flight. Psychological Review, 2000, Vol 107, No. 3. http://taylorlab.psych.ucla.edu/2000_Biobehavioral%20responses%20to%20stress%20in%20females_tend-and-befriend.pdf
Leonard Sax. Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Men. Basic Books, 2009.
University of Copenhagen. “Girls Have Superior Sense of Taste to Boys.” ScienceDaily, 18 Dec. 2008. Web.
Yerkes National Primate Research Center, Emory University. “Yerkes Researchers Find Sex Differences in Monkey Toy Preferences Similar to Humans.” April 10, 2008.
Leonard Sax. "Six degrees of separation: What teachers need to know about the emerging science of sex differences." Educational Horizons, Spring 2006, 84:190-212.
Leonard Sax. "The Promise and the Peril of Single-Sex PUBLIC Education." Education Week, March 2, 2005.
Leonard Sax. “The Boy Problem: Many Boys Think School is Stupid and Reading Stinks.” School Library Journal, 09/01/2007.
Leonard Sax. Girls on the Edge. Basic Books, 2010.
Leonard Sax. Why Gender Matters. Doubleday, 2005.
David Chadwell. “Gender Differences in how Boys and Girls ‘See’ the World.” http://www.chadwellconsulting.com/GD%20SEEING.htm
David Chadwell. “Gender Differences in how Boys and Girls ‘Engage’ the World.”
http://www.chadwellconsulting.com/GD%20Engaging.htm
David Chadwell. “Gender Differences in how Boys and Girls ‘Hear’ the World.”
http://www.chadwellconsulting.com/GD%20Hearing.htm
David Chadwell. “Engaging the Differences Between Boys and Girls.” Middle Matters » March 2007, Vol. 15, No. 4
Shaunti Feldhahn. For Women Only: What You Need to Know About the Inner Lives of Men. Multnomah Books, 2004.
Shaunti Feldhahn. For Young Women Only. Multnomah Books, 2006.

Disclaimer: I'm making this list for my own benefit to help me teach, and I've directly copied or paraphrased many sections from different articles and books I've read. I take no credit for the writing. Some of it's mine; some of it's not. List of sources below.

11. Stress: Good for Boys, Bad for Girls
A stressful situation activates adrenaline, which activates the fight or flight response. Right?

Only if you’re male. In 1915, Walter Cannon studied the hormonal response to stress in animals: increased heart rate, adrenaline surge, increased awareness of surroundings, readiness to act. He accurately coined the phrase “fight or flight” to describe it. But Cannon only studied male animals. And the scientists who followed in his footsteps almost universally did the same. Apparently, it never occurred to them that females might be different.

Almost 100 years later, we finally have similar studies on female subjects. And guess what? It turns out males and females are different. While in male animals and humans, stress and danger activates the sympathetic nervous system, producing sharpened senses, readiness to act, and a hormonal “thrill,” in females stress and danger produces the opposite effect. In females, stress and danger activates the parasympathetic nervous system, controlled not by adrenaline but by acetylcholine. Rather than the “thrill” that adrenaline generates in males, acetylcholine produces an “unpleasant, nauseating feeling.” The result of this hormonal response is that females exposed to stress, threat, or confrontation often have trouble thinking, find their responses slower, have trouble expressing themselves, are less aware of their surroundings, may experience nausea, and often feel dizzy or “yucky.” Some experience an urge to go to restroom. While adrenaline and "fight or flight" do appear to play some role in females, studies now show the female response is more driven by acetylcholine and oxytocin.

In the classroom, this adrenaline/acetylcholine difference translates to differences in learning: exposure to stress actually “enhances the growth of neural connections in the male hippocampus.” However, the hormonal response to stress in girls and women “inhibits growth of connections in the female hippocampus.” In somewhat pressured or confrontational learning environments, most boys will be energized, excited, and learning well. However, few girls will respond well in that sort of classroom or experience. This explains the long-recognized testing phenomenon in which highly intelligent, straight-A girls often score lower than expected on high-pressure exams—while boys whose academics are less than exceptional will often score much better than their work would lead you to believe. I’ve observed this phenomenon in my own teaching—boys who seriously struggle in my AP class will invariably pull out a passing score on the exam itself, while girls of similar ability who are struggling will usually fail the high-pressure exam.

Teachers can use the stress factor in Bible class. Because of the skewed gender distribution of an elementary Bible class (6 boys and 1 girl), I catered to boys’ learning styles, ending the quarter with a series of “Bible Olympics” games. There were different timed competitions with scores on the whiteboard and “medals” for the winners. (Being female, I still felt bad for the losers, but I overheard one of them, completely unabashed, telling his parent afterward, “We’ve got to get first place next time!”) The boys loved it. However, at the end of one particularly competitive, excited class, I found the little girl hiding under the table!

For maximum potential in the classroom, keep in mind that moderate stress improves boys’ learning, but inhibits girls’. Girls absorb and synthesize information much better in a relaxed environment. For boys, moderate stress in the classroom can mean contests, timed events, competitions, and activities involving confrontation.


12. Don’t Do That, It’s Dangerous
As you might guess based on the above discussion of stress and its effect on the male body, boys are chemically programmed to take risks. Perhaps God made them this way because boys and men need to be willing to take risks to live and provide—to hunt, to ford a river, to fell trees, to tame animals, to build a fire, to build a house, to go new places, to win a war, to start a business, to achieve victory, to conquer the urban jungle. But some boys, without a fully-developed brain and lack of real-world experience, are prone to take it too far. Dangerous, risky activities trigger the male hormonal response of adrenaline, with sharpened senses, energized body, and a chemical “thrill.” They ENJOY it; it feels good. Facing simulated collisions and dangers in one study, boys reported feeling “exhilarated.” (Girls, on the other hand, reported feeling “fearful.”)

A parent or teacher who tells a boy, “Don’t do ______; it’s dangerous” has missed the point. The boy KNOWS it’s dangerous; that’s WHY he’s doing it. In fact, telling him it’s dangerous may make him want to try it even more; it can counter-productive. Remember the 1990s “This is your brain” commercial? It shows an egg to represent your brain. Then it shows it frying in a pan with the monologue, “This is your brain on drugs.” Any rational person would get the message. But boys—particularly teenage boys—are not rational people. Their frontal lobes (part of the brain that deals with rational decision-making) are not fully developed. Neither are other critical parts of their brains. To a thrill-seeking boy, that egg-frying thing looks pretty fun. “Whoa! Awesome! Let me try that!” The government’s campaign against drug-use, it turns out, was a total failure. Follow-up studies showed teenagers who saw government commercials were actually more likely to use drugs than teenagers who had not.

This biological chemistry explains why many boys will spend their last dollar on a violent video game in which enemies are shooting at them, while most girls won’t. It also explains one reason that boys will intentionally engage in risky behavior. So how do you keep boys from engaging in risky behavior that goes too far? By laying down the law.

13. Confrontation: Laying Down the Law
Threat and confrontation have some similarities to risks. They can energize a boy and produce results. In-your-face confrontation can work extremely well with boys (typically does not work well at all with girls). Boys respond best to short, direct instruction, so that’s one reason laying down the law can be effective. It usually does not work as well, however, when the person laying down the law is viewed by “inferior” by the boy—for example, his little sister. Someone who holds a position of authority, however—a teacher, a parent—is much more likely to have success with this method. In fact, by laying down the law, a teacher will often command more respect and authority. For serious problems, lay down the law, with real, serious consequences.

A teacher told this story. “I really yelled at one of my students one day. I was so frustrated with him, because Sam was a smart boy, but he just wasn’t doing the work. He never did the homework. So one day I just lost it. I really let him have it. I yelled at him, in class, in front of the other students. I didn’t mean to, but I did. Right afterward, I was worried he’d never speak to me again. I expected to get an angry call from the parents. But the next day, Sam turned in his homework perfect and on time, for the first time ever. He even asked me whether I would like to look at his collection of baseball cards. Those baseball cards are his most prized possession. He’d never shown them to me before.

“Three weeks later, the parents finally did call. I was so nervous! I was sure they were going to be angry with me for screaming at their son. But they weren’t. They were calling to thank me. They wanted to know what magic I had used to get Sam so energized about his schoolwork.”

While angrily dressing down a boy publicly in front of his peers may not always be the right approach, confrontation and laying down the law can produce very positive results with boys. I had a similar experience with a little boy in Bible class. He refused to comply with a class activity, and when he wouldn’t get up to be taken to his grandmother, we had a confrontation. I thought he’d hate me. Instead, now he hugs me every time he sees me and asks if he can sit with me during church.


14. Induction: Good for Girls, Not for Boys
“How would you feel if someone did that to you?” Psychologists call this method of discipline, which comes naturally to women, “induction.” It works great with most girls. “How would you feel if someone pushed you?” Girls can easily imagine the feeling they would have if someone pushed them. But it rarely works with boys, particularly under age 10. In boys of this age, the amygdala - the part of the brain where emotions occur - has few connections to the language region of the brain. Thus boys have difficulty verbally answering questions that involve emotion; the pathways in their brains connecting those two regions simply aren’t there. They literally cannot put it into words. So attempts to explain why we don’t push, shove, hit, kick, etc. to little boys are rarely, if ever, successful. A 7-year-old boy asked “How would you feel if someone hit you?” cannot process the emotion verbally, and so usually reinterprets the question as “What would you DO if someone hit you?” And you will likely get a very different answer than the one you wanted: “I’d hit him back! Then I’d kick him! And then I’d sit on him!”

Before learning about the neurological differences between boys and girls, I had this exact experience in Bible class during a lesson on repentance and forgiveness. The 7-year-old simply could not grasp the feelings of the other person, or wrap his head around not retaliating physically. At the time, I assumed this was because he was an undisciplined, unchurched little boy. Now I realize I was trying to explain things in a way that, though it made perfect sense to me and the one little girl in class, his brain simply could not process.

Once boys reach adolescence, you can start using induction, but with a difference. Instead of asking “How would you feel if…,” ask “What would you do if…” For example, if an 11- or 12-year-old boy purposely decapitated his sister’s doll, don’t say, “What you did made me and your sister feel sad.” Don’t say, “How would you feel if she decapitated your G.I. Joes?” Instead, say, “What would you do if your sister took all your G.I. Joes and put them down the garbage disposal?” A follow up question might be, “If your sister did that, what do you think would be a good punishment for her?” At this point he should start to understand the situation and the justice of the punishment you meet out.


Sources:
Shelley Taylor. Behavioral Responses to Stress in Females: Tend-and-Befriend, Not Fight-or-Flight. Psychological Review, 2000, Vol 107, No. 3. http://taylorlab.psych.ucla.edu/2000_Biobehavioral%20responses%20to%20stress%20in%20females_tend-and-befriend.pdf
Leonard Sax. Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Men. Basic Books, 2009.
University of Copenhagen. “Girls Have Superior Sense of Taste to Boys.” ScienceDaily, 18 Dec. 2008. Web.
Yerkes National Primate Research Center, Emory University. “Yerkes Researchers Find Sex Differences in Monkey Toy Preferences Similar to Humans.” April 10, 2008.
Leonard Sax. "Six degrees of separation: What teachers need to know about the emerging science of sex differences." Educational Horizons, Spring 2006, 84:190-212.
Leonard Sax. "The Promise and the Peril of Single-Sex PUBLIC Education." Education Week, March 2, 2005.
Leonard Sax. “The Boy Problem: Many Boys Think School is Stupid and Reading Stinks.” School Library Journal, 09/01/2007.
Leonard Sax. Girls on the Edge. Basic Books, 2010.
Leonard Sax. Why Gender Matters. Doubleday, 2005.
David Chadwell. “Gender Differences in how Boys and Girls ‘See’ the World.” http://www.chadwellconsulting.com/GD%20SEEING.htm
David Chadwell. “Gender Differences in how Boys and Girls ‘Engage’ the World.”
http://www.chadwellconsulting.com/GD%20Engaging.htm
David Chadwell. “Gender Differences in how Boys and Girls ‘Hear’ the World.”
http://www.chadwellconsulting.com/GD%20Hearing.htm
David Chadwell. “Engaging the Differences Between Boys and Girls.” Middle Matters » March 2007, Vol. 15, No. 4
Shaunti Feldhahn. For Women Only: What You Need to Know About the Inner Lives of Men. Multnomah Books, 2004.
Shaunti Feldhahn. For Young Women Only. Multnomah Books, 2006.

Disclaimer: I'm making this list for my own benefit to help me teach, and I've directly copied or paraphrased many sections from different articles and books I've read. I take no credit for the writing. Some of it's mine; some of it's not. List of sources below.


7. Taste and Smell
Most women know they can smell better than men. (And we’re not talking showers and soap here!) I heard of a representative for a gas company who explained how women usually smell gas leaks long before their husbands do. The wives keep complaining that they smell gas, so finally the husbands call the gas company to come check and tell the wives they’re nuts and everything’s ok. It always turns out the wives AREN’T nuts—there IS a gas leak; the husbands just can’t smell it.

The Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia has documented that under certain circumstances, a woman’s sense of smell is at least 100,000 times more sensitive than a man’s. A woman may find a particular room absolutely nauseating, while a man may not smell anything objectionable at all. This is true of children as well: boys’ sense of smell is not strong as girls. It’s also true of taste: girls’ sense of taste is stronger than boys. Usually an unpleasant taste must be pretty strong for it to bother a boy. This probably partly explains why boys will create “disgusting” mixtures of foods or drink and proceed to ingest them without seeming the least bit bothered by tastes that would make a girl vomit. (Lesson for parents: feed your boys healthy food that’s good for them—it doesn’t actually taste that bad to them.)

There is one similarity between the genders in this area: taste and smell are strongly linked to memory in both boys and girls. This is because as you chew, you force air carrying the scent of the food up through your nasal passages and past your odor receptors. Scents detected by odor receptors travel straight to the olfactory cortex—next door to the amygdala, the part of the brain that produces emotions, and the hippocampus, the part of the brain that plays an important role in both short term and long term memory. The physical proximity of these components creates strong links between them: between taste, smell, emotion, and memory.

There are documented instances of adults tasting or smelling something from their distant past-- something they may not have tasted or smelled in years, or even thought about—and suddenly the emotions of childhood and the scenes they saw when they tasted or smelled it years ago wash over them with incredible vividness. It’s called the “Proust effect,” after the French writer who described this phenomenon. You can try it for yourself: sniff something associated with your childhood, maybe a long-loved stuffed animal, an old-fashioned eraser like the kind you used in elementary school, the perfume your mother or grandmother used to wear, a special food or treat you ate in childhood. Places hold scent extremely well—try visiting a building associated with your past, like your old school, the house you grew up in, or places your family used to vacation. For many adults, a sniff from a childhood vacation brings back an instant sense of happiness and peace and enjoyment.

So how can teachers take advantage of this? Use taste and smell to teach the Bible. Using these senses will help create lasting memories that cement the lesson in the students’ minds—and may bring the lesson right back the next time they smell/taste the same thing. Bring frankincense oil when you teach about the birth of Christ; bring a can of sardines when you teach about Jonah in the belly of the fish, bring incense—and burn it—while you teach about the alter of incense, Nadab and Abihu, Uzziah, etc.. Bring “bitter herbs” for the kids to taste when you teach about the Passover (I’ve used oregano or other strong herbs from my garden). The boys, with a weaker sense of taste, often like the bitter herbs and ask for more! (The girls usually do not.) Bring unleavened bread, too. Bring honey if the story mentions it. Let them taste it. If you are using a scent, try to have it present during as much of the story and class time as possible; this will associate the scent more strongly with the Bible story, creating stronger memories.

Taste and smell are strongly linked to memory; involving these senses in your teaching will help them internalize the lessons and remember them much better. Of course, teachers should be aware that they may need to use more intense tastes/smells for boys than for girls. What smells way too strong for a female teacher… may be just about right for the boys.


8. Temperature: Six Degrees of Separation
Ergonomics specialists have studied ideal ambient temperatures for learning and problem solving for different genders. The result? The ideal ambient temperature is about 69º F for boys, and about 75º F for girls: six degrees of separation. A classroom in which a (female) teacher is chilly may be just about right for the boys.

So what happens when you turn up the temperature? “If you turn up the heat, the boys go to sleep,” says the headmaster of one of the most prestigious private boys’ schools in the U.S. “Not literally asleep, but they might as well be. If it’s too warm in the classroom, the boys get sluggish and their eyelids get heavy. If you keep it just a little chilly, the boys learn better.” If a female teacher keeps a classroom at a temperature comfortable for her, she may be inadvertently putting her boys to sleep. Which may partly explain boys’ poorer performance in school.


9. Competition
Most boys are competitive. (For that matter, most men are competitive: who makes the most money? Who has the prettiest wife? Whose sports team won this week? Who made the winning play messing around with a ball last Saturday? Who drives the nicest car? Who holds more power in the company?) God gave men and boys this drive to compete and win, and teachers can use it to their advantage to help male students learn. Competition is a GREAT motivator. Usually competitive boys respond well to any challenge as long as

• There are clear winners and clear losers.
• The outcome is in doubt. Everything depends on how hard you play. (It’s not just, “Tommy is the smartest and he always wins, so why bother trying?”)

As long as you satisfy both these requirements, most boys will be on board. But if one is missing (the smartest kid always wins, or “everyone’s a winner, there are no losers”), boys will lose interest. So keep clear winners and losers, and mix it up so that the outcome is in doubt.

Play games! Have races! Be sure every activity has a Bible-centered focus, where the point is to learn about God’s word, but let it involve some sort of competition. If one or two students are clearly smarter than the others or have more Bible knowledge, individual games may not be the best choice; the outcome is not in doubt because the students assume the smart ones will win, and the boys with less Bible knowledge will disengage and lose interest. For these situations, try team games. Draw names to randomize the teams, or purposely put stronger, weaker, and middling students together on a team. Race to put Bible time periods in order, or to complete a poster.

Have relays where they write the books of the Bible in order on the board. The teams can line up at one end of the room, race to the other end, write the next book in sequence, run back, and tag the next teammate. (You’ll probably want to help with spelling, or tell them spelling doesn’t count.) If you only have one set materials so only one team can race at a time, bring a stop watch (or use the stopwatch on your cell phone) and let one team time while the other races. (This keeps BOTH teams involved and occupied.) Have “Bible Olympics” with different events worth different points, and hand out “medals” at the end.

You can use teams for competition but still test them individually by having two teams line up and each team put one boy forward to answer a question. The first person to give the correct answer earns his team a point. (“Who gave Joseph a coat of many colors?” “JACOB!!!” “Good, Brandon, your team gets a point!”) This method is a great motivator for boys, because even if Brandon isn’t the smartest student, he won’t want to let his teammates down. He’ll be motivated to learn the material, knowing he can help his team win. Tell them in advance of the Bible story that you’ll be playing a game about it later in class, so they better pay attention so they can win! That will attract most boys’ attention and motivation immediately.

“But what about their self-esteem? If one team loses, won’t it hurt their self-esteem?” Self-esteem is a complicated thing, and from a scientific perspective, most of what pop culture tells us about it is just plain wrong, especially as it relates to boys. For boys, life is about the thrill of victory and agony of defeat. The agony of defeat is part of the thrill, and almost never stops them from coming back for another try (as long as they were not humiliated or disrespected in the process). Boys (and some men) have a greatly exaggerated opinion of their own physical and mental prowess. (Just spend some time around teenage boys to find this out…) As long as it’s about how hard you play and the outcome is in doubt, competition is terribly exciting, and you’ll hear the losers walk off bragging about their (imaginary) prowess and how they’ll trounce the winners next time.


10. Emotion
Harvard University used sophisticated MRI imaging to examine how emotion is processed in the brains of children, ages 7-17. In young children, negative emotional activity seems to be localized in primitive areas deep in the brain, specifically in the amygdala. That may be one reason why it makes little sense to ask a 7-year-old to tell you why she is feeling sad or distressed. The part of the brain that does the talking, up in the cerebral cortex, has few direct connections to the part of the brain where the emotion is occurring, down in the amygdala.

During a girl’s adolescence, a larger fraction of the brain activity associated with negative emotion moves up to the cerebral cortex. That’s the division of the brain associated with our higher cognitive functions, such as reflection, reasoning, and language. So a seventeen-year-old girl is able to explain why she is feeling sad, in great detail and without much difficulty (if she wants to).

But that change occurs only in girls. In boys, the locus of brain activity associated with negative emotion remains in the amygdala; there is no shift associated with maturation. Asking a 17-year-old boy why he’s feeling glum may prove no more productive than asking a 6-year-old boy the same question. For both of them, the part of the brain where the emotion is occurring has few connections to the part of the brain that produces language. Likewise, asking a teenage boy to write an essay about his feelings is not likely to produce results. He will probably write what he thinks you want to hear, because there’s no genuine connection between what he’s feeling and what he’s writing. Emotions—both positive and negative—are simply processed differently in girls’ brains than in boys’.

If a boy is upset, likely he'll have a hard time telling you why--and likely he won't WANT to tell you why. Mothers, being female, have plenty of emotion going on in the cerebral cortex, and generally like to talk about things when they are upset. So they often try to “help” by trying to get their sons to talk. This usually backfires and the puzzled mothers are rebuffed.

Instead, give the boy space and time. Most males tend to withdraw when they experience negative emotions. And they rarely enjoy being pushed to talk about it before they’re ready. Because their negative emotion is occurring in the amygdala, with few connections to cerebral cortex, it takes time for them to figure out how to put it into words. As one man said, “Men don’t want to be told [or asked] how they are feeling! And honestly, sometimes we don’t even know how we are feeling, so it’s better to let us process it for a while.”

A clue: if he is angry, there’s a good chance he’s feeling disrespected in some way. And men and boys are likely to feel disrespected by very different things than women do. For more details on the “disrespect barometer” and the different ways males and females experience and process disrespect, check out For Women Only and For Young Women Only by Shaunti Feldhahn.

So asking boys “How would you feel if you were Daniel?” (or Samuel or David or Jonah or Peter) will most likely be decidedly unproductive. Instead, ask “What would you DO if you were Daniel?” (or Samuel or David or Jonah or Peter). This is a much more boy-friendly question. Notice how it focuses on action, which is very boy-oriented, rather than emotion, which boys are not wired to express verbally. There will be much better class discussion, and the boys will learn a lot more, if the teacher frames the questions in boy-friendly terms. Incidentally, by thinking about what they would DO if they were Daniel, they probably will gain some insight into empathy and emotion. They just aren’t wired to express it easily.

And that's ok. It's how God made them.


Sources:
Leonard Sax. Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Men. Basic Books, 2009.
University of Copenhagen. “Girls Have Superior Sense of Taste to Boys.” ScienceDaily, 18 Dec. 2008. Web.
Yerkes National Primate Research Center, Emory University. “Yerkes Researchers Find Sex Differences in Monkey Toy Preferences Similar to Humans.” April 10, 2008.
Leonard Sax. "Six degrees of separation: What teachers need to know about the emerging science of sex differences." Educational Horizons, Spring 2006, 84:190-212.
Leonard Sax. "The Promise and the Peril of Single-Sex PUBLIC Education." Education Week, March 2, 2005.
Leonard Sax. “The Boy Problem: Many Boys Think School is Stupid and Reading Stinks.” School Library Journal, 09/01/2007.
Leonard Sax. Girls on the Edge. Basic Books, 2010.
Leonard Sax. Why Gender Matters. Doubleday, 2005.
David Chadwell. “Gender Differences in how Boys and Girls ‘See’ the World.” http://www.chadwellconsulting.com/GD%20SEEING.htm
David Chadwell. “Gender Differences in how Boys and Girls ‘Engage’ the World.”
http://www.chadwellconsulting.com/GD%20Engaging.htm
David Chadwell. “Gender Differences in how Boys and Girls ‘Hear’ the World.”
http://www.chadwellconsulting.com/GD%20Hearing.htm
David Chadwell. “Engaging the Differences Between Boys and Girls.” Middle Matters » March 2007, Vol. 15, No. 4
Shaunti Feldhahn. For Women Only: What You Need to Know About the Inner Lives of Men. Multnomah Books, 2004.
Shaunti Feldhahn. For Young Women Only. Multnomah Books, 2006.