Australia: Gender games at play in classroom

Article here. Excerpt:

'Boys will be boys. Girls are easier to teach. Boys can't pay attention. Girls listen. We might like to think that access to education has nothing to do with gender any more but these perceptions linger.

Like it or not, there are some accepted differences about educating boys and girls and these become apparent as early as kindergarten.

Researchers from the Queensland University of Technology Centre for Learning Innovation have found significant gender differences in the quality of the teacher-child relationship present in the first year of school.

They found that teachers - even in the earliest years of school - generally found girls to be more compliant and to display more positive behaviour and approaches to learning than boys.
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A simple answer is not to separate boys and girls, says Lingard, even though research has shown that boys tend to behave better in a classes where girls are present and that girls do better in same-sex schools.

"It seems single-sex schools are good for girls and co-educational schools are good for boys," he says. Obviously these two wants can never marry up - and so you have some comprehensive high schools with many more boys than girls.
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Being seen to work too hard brought negative consequences as male peers "policed what was deemed acceptable". Boys also still tended to do "boy subjects" such as maths and science, even if they were not doing well in them.

Having only boys in a classroom can exacerbate the very worst aspects of masculinity, the professor said.'