Job Discussion Forums

[wulfrun]

what proportion of boys/girls works best in the classroom?

50-50? more girls than boys?

seems clear to me that it's good to have a roughly 50-50 mix, but im interested in discussing the reasons why, and hearing about any research in this. and anybody plain disagrees, that'd be interesting to hear.

last semester i was teaching spoken/listening english to four classes of university students. three of them had a rough 50-50 mix, but one had two girls and 28 boys. that class felt tangibly more difficult, like it didnt gel together as well as the others. all that testosterone, competitiveness, ha ha.

[Jetgirly]

I'm a young female teacher. When I teach adults, I have always had the most success with classes that are predominantly men but also have a few female students. Right off the bat I align myself with the women, and we can play "us against them". Men want to impress the young foreign teacher, and if they can show off to their female colleagues (it's always been Business English for me) it's an added bonus. All-male classes work well too, but I don't have the women to play off the way I do when there are a few mixed in. I've taught a VERY small number of classes that were predominantly female; the classes have all been successful but we lost that competitive vibe.

For the past two years I've been teaching K-12 (three semesters in Canada, one in Mexico) and I don't think it makes much of a difference in that environment. It seems that administrators do their best to achieve as close to a 50/50 balance as possible, but when you're teaching teenagers hormones are going to be all over the place from day to day regardless of the actual number of girls and boys in the class. I did teach one ESL seminar that had five Asian boys, two Middle Eastern boys and one Central Asian girl who came midway through the term. I felt bad for the girl as she was very much the odd one out, but if anything I think she just ended up learning more English (yay!) and less Urdu and Korean.

In the future, I would really like to teach at the public school for pregnant and parenting teen girls. I'm neutral on teaching all girls, but I think that the type of people who would be drawn to working at that school would be pretty cool. Ummm... that sounded really egotistical but I didn't mean it that way. Plus, I figure that preachy types would be working at the similar school within the Catholic system, rather than the public one. In the pictures I've seen of this school the girls are mainly from families that have been in Canada for several generations, so I'm not sure what the demand for ESL teachers would be.

[rusmeister]

I like attacking the use of the word "gender" in reference to human sexuality. It's an extremely recent innovation, is primarily the result of ignorance, and carries a suggestion that sex (male or female) is a social construct rather than objective reality. This hasn't stopped it from achieving widespread usage over the last 20-25 years.
I'll stick with the old-fashioned word "sex".

[wulfrun]

[denise]

Well, going back to one of my early classes as an undergrad, sex=male or female, while gender=masculine or feminine.

At my last job, male students and female students, with rare noteworthy exceptions, didn't work together, speak to each other, look at each other, sit together or even sit on the same side of the room, enter through the same door or corridor, etc., so I was absolutely delighted to have an all-male class last semester in which I could do whole-class activities, like debates, presentations, etc., without having to modify all the fun out of them! Generally, though, I don't really care what the ratio is, as long as they get along and work with each other. If it's 50/50 or 90/10, you can still find ways to work with it, set up competitions, etc.

d

[MELEE]

As denise pointed out--you should post this in country specific forums. What is "best" in Japan, is not "best" in the Middle East, nor anywhere else.

[wulfrun]