Boys Don't Try? Rethinking Masculinity in Schools

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Secondary Year 6 leavers - Covid-safe transition activities and ideas It's been a chaotic year but Year 6 children still deserve the best ending to their primary journey As an English teacher and a feminist, I like to think that I’m quite attuned to the ways in which language reveals certain social assumptions. I’ve spent hours patiently discussing the problems with language like “That’s so gay” and questioning the nature of ‘banter’ with frustrated students who didn’t see the problem. Yet, just in this blog, I’ve used phrases like “challenging boys” and described a low set without mentioning the gender divide, assuming the unequal gender divide of bottom sets to be implicit. As a new HOD, I have tried to ensure that we teach some non-stereotypical texts, but unlike Pinkett, I don’t currently make an effort to use homonormative pronouns in the classroom. I can imagine the way that my classes might respond to his example “Why might a man write his boyfriend a sonnet?” and have been somewhat unwilling to disrupt learning in this way. Although I regularly have the kind of “Why do we assume his love is a woman?” conversations about literature, I definitely haven’t yet normalised the ‘no song and dance’ approach that Pinkett advocates.

Each chapter hammers home another area of our failure. We’re forced to dwell on the failure, re-live the stories and problems, and then we are treated to a well-explained and carefully written summary of research in the area, before getting solutions. These are not ground-breaking – they are simple and straightforward – but each is something we are (mostly) not doing well at the moment. Chapter 5: Expectations– Unsurprisingly, I’ve now decided I need to buy a physical copy of this book. I also need to read up on Mary Myatt’s work highlighting changing the language from “ability” to “attainment”. I found the whole mixed ability over setting section really interesting. As highlighted earlier, I would love to find out about secondaries that are making this work as I use this mixed ability approach in my primary class. (If you know of any secondaries that use a mixed ability approach – please let me know!)Boys (and girls) have more respect for teachers who know their stuff. Being an expert in your subject (or subjects) is a must. Pinkett’s Damascene moment came a few years into his teaching career while discussing a poem with a female colleague. She said the way he interpreted it was down to the fact that, as a man, he thought about sex the whole time. “It was acceptable sexism, because it was directed at a man not a woman,” says Pinkett. “And it made me realise that, though girls and women undoubtedly come off worse as a result of sexist assumptions, boys and men are damaged by them, too.”

Hi Hannah, thanks for your comment and for sharing the video. I think Laurie A. Couture’s new book sounds really interesting. The language is alarming for parents and teachers of boys. We hear of “a crisis in masculinity” in schools and about how “failing boys” are not reaching their academic potential. Stephanie Keenan is head of English at Ruislip High School. She blogs here and tweets @HeadofEnglish There’s a danger of treating boys differently and patronising them, says Roberts. “So, for example, you’ve got a boy you think doesn’t like reading, so you decide to pander to his love of football and give him a book about that to read. But in narrowing your expectations, you’re narrowing his. It’s the same with, for example, teaching boys about Shakespeare by concentrating on the sword fights or the fighting: it’s like we’re hoodwinking them into learning, and it doesn’t work. What we need is a big shift in ethos: too many teachers believe boys can do less, they don’t think boys can succeed as well as girls at school. I don’t think it’s about watering it down: it’s about having high expectations for boys as well as for girls.” Chapters on violence, sexism in schools, peer pressure and relationships offer evidence-based and practical information for schools wishing to lift the schooling outcomes and behaviours of boys. The topics are grounded in real-life scenarios, which also help to give the views credibility and a sense of familiarity for teachers.

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If we can encourage boys to really value formal education, help them see it for themselves, it goes a long way to helping them to meaningfully engage and embrace it.” A “good student” is seen as a compliant one, with boys more frequently sanctioned and girls spending more time on homework. In the UK, as in other western countries, this problem is stark and has dire consequences. Boys are more likely to be expelled from school, less likely to go to university and not as likely as girls to find employment between the ages of 22 and 29. Most disturbingly, men are also three times more likely than women to commit suicide and comprise 96 per cent of the UK prison population. Research School Network: Boys Don’t Try – Rethinking Masculinity in Schools The Engagement Myth 7 June, 2019 Sandringham Research School is no longer active. We are continuing to support schools in the region through the wider Research School Network.

Research shows that boys are very competitive, care about the result of a competition more than girls, and they strive to be part of the “high ability” club. Roberts argues this hyper-competitive spirit breeds a self-destructive behaviour in boys that results in them “downing” the textbooks to protect their self-esteem: “If I haven’t tried, I haven’t really failed,” is the thinking behind this. Plan time into your week to develop and strengthen your subject knowledge. It’s far more valuable than filling in spreadsheets and writing to-do lists! Competition is questioned through the fear it can also engender: “If I don’t try, then I can’t fail,”“If I write nothing, then I’ve written nothing wrong.” Positive climate: Try a variety of teaching methods with active involvement from students and move away from punitive discipline into a more positive school climate. Often boys will opt out of doing work because in the status-driven world of toxic masculinity it’s easier to not try and fail, than it is to try and risk failure.

Refusing to produce what you deem to be an adequate amount of work in a given time frame is an act of defiance and should be treated as such. In Boys Don’t Try? Matt Pinkett and Mark Roberts directly link boys’ relative educational underachievement to mistaken attempts to aspire to an “outdated, but nonetheless widespread idea” about what it means to be a “real man” and “a brand of masculinity that leaves many boys floundering” - and make no mistake, it is a brand, sold hard yet often unthinkingly, with very real casualties. The message is clear: we have a lot of work to do. Setting by ability is more counterproductive than productive. The implication is that it should be avoided wherever possible. (For more on this, see NACE Trustee Liz Allen CBE’s review of Reassessing ‘Ability’ Grouping: Improving Practice for Equity and Attainment.)

This book opens with stark facts about the gender gap – not only in school, but in society: 96 per cent of our prison population is male.As aresult of this attainment gap, schools up and down the country have invested time and money in training aimed at raising boys’ attainment. Indeed, Ihave sat through anumber of well-intentioned staff INSET sessions during my many years as ateacher, where Ihave been told that boys and girls learn differently, that boys thrive in acompetitive environment and that Ishould consider ways to make my subject more ​ ‘boy-friendly’. However, simply looking around my classroom at the wonderfully different characters Ihad in front of me suggested these solutions were not really solutions at all: boys are not all the same. We are forced to reflect on our own practice to see just how much we are doing that might be just as damaging.