Group Discussion-Gender

This article was about gender awareness basically. How does one address gender issues? It is not good enough to be gender neutral because at times we need to be aware of gender. The author really is passionate about sex equality especially in relation to the way girls have been treated through time unfairly. I at times did not agree with the author but I don’t really know why. It almost rubbed me the wrong way that she was making these huge generalizations but I didn’t really know where her material was coming from. In her notes, she said she benefitted from conversations with all these people but they were all girls. I wish that she would have had some male opinions to throw in there to make it less biased. Everything she said made sense but I know tons of girls who are totally opposite of what she was describing. I also know guys who are not vocal and assertive. I think girls are becoming more confident in talking out and expressing their opinions.  In short, I think she does have a good point in saying that we cannot be completely gender blind because that doesn’t get rid of the innate problems of the differences between boys and girls. We do need to be gender aware to a point where that we create equality in the classroom. I as a teacher want to be completely 100 percent equal to all my students not looking at them differently based on race, gender, class, grade in my class, or past actions. I was really surprised when she said that even when teachers think they are being fair they are only showing the girls about 34 percent of the attention. I wonder how reliable that is. How do you even test that? As a teacher, even when the boys are upset with the way that I am addressing the girls (as in too much in their opinions), how do I maintain good classroom conduct that changes because the boys are upset? Do I deal with an learning environment that doesn’t stimulate learning for anybody because the conduct is so bad and go about being fair or do I keep oppressing girls to have a good learning environment?