Smart boys, bad grades?

It sounds to me like not much progress at all has been, over at least the last several decades, in how to "treat" (i.e. fix) these underachievers. In fact, I seem to remember people asking "why are there more boy underachievers than girls?", and it was as if the boys themselves were being held to blame and made to feel bad for this. One newer practice is to diagnose them with ADD or ADHD, a diagnosis which is no doubt made in error sometimes. BTD, Bad Teacher Disorder, is also probably a valid diagnosis in some cases.

All kidding aside though,if you look at "A, A, A, F, F, A, A, A", most feminist-inclined educators (which is most of them) are going to say, "what's so bad about that, I wish my daughter would get mainly A's; why should we devote more resources to boys when my daughter is getting "C, C-, B, C, B-, D, C". In other words, they will pick on the example given in the article and reason that, "he has a good overall GPA, even thought he failed a couple courses. Why does this father want his son to get ALL A's?"

I do think a particularly good point by the authors, is that boys don't tend to want to do repetive work, i.e. drudgery of homework assignments. They want to gain the new knowledge, then move on to the next thing. That coincides with my own experience in grade school, and I myself was considered an "underachiever". I even knew of a case, where a friend of mine has a son who was very bright, but the school had not realized this at the time, so they were going to hold him back due to his bad grades..again, because of boring and repetitive assignments which he would not turn in. Then later what happened was, they gave him a battery of tests, and he did so well that they put him in a special curriculum for gifted students! (Funny how he then started doing the assigments, since they were more challenging than the former ones).

-ax